Youtube

I ended up making youtube account so that I could post higher resolution videos.  This a link to the Youtube channel that I made that has all the videos from block two.  For the later posts I will post individual links to the videos.  There is a short discription below each video as well so be sure to read that. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnbW_GviwN2K3JIVeyB1Vow?feature=mhee

Week Two

Week two is going great. There is still not too, too much work being assigned but enough to keep me busy. I’m happy I have some extra time because it gives me a chance to get some personal projects done.

This week we talked about character animation. Posing a character in such a way that it is easy to understand quickly and easily. One of the most stressed things that our teacher, whose name is Dave West by the way, is that you should be able to see a silhouette of the character and understand what is going on. There is a picture below as an example.

He had us pose a simple character in 6 different positions and also gave us 6 different emotions that we would have to make the character act out. Now the character doesn’t have any facial features so we can only sure the body and its parts; legs, arms, hands, fingers, head, etc.

Here are a few shots that I did. The silhouette is on the left and the shaded on the right. See if you can guess what it is... anger, and a gymnast.



 

Car Stunts

As the large project for week one we had to make a car do some stunts.  Weave between some cones, jump some busses, go on two wheels, and last intereact with an extra cone in any way you want (I did a dounut around it).  Heres the final product.  (Im trying to figure out why im not able to post full size videos here, I'll try to get them up as soon as I figure it out =)

 



Block Two - Animation

I’m back from winter break, the longest break I get in my year here at The DAVE School. It was great to see family and friends but now it’s time to get back to work.
I’m almost done with the first week already and have learned quite a bit in animation. We have had three mini-assignments and one larger. That makes four assignments and the weekly quiz (every Friday). Even though we have had so many assignments I don’t feel as stressed as I did in Block One. Now maybe this is because I’m used to the work schedule, but I really think it’s just that animation, as of now, seems to be a little easier then modeling.
I’ve always had things like this come to me pretty easy, modeling, animation, computers etc., ever since I was little so I’m lucky in that way but it also gives me the chance to help my classmates which only enforces what I’m learning. Anyways.
This is 3D animation, but a lot of the things we are learning are based on 2D animation. The reason I’m telling you is because the first few projects look simple but in reality they are quiet difficult. We had to do, (1) The Ball Bounce, make a ball bounce and have a squash and stretch effect (2) The Bounce Room, make two balls bounce into a room with the physics that they might have in real life (3) Logo Animation, Animate a logo in a conservative perspective (slow and easy on the eyes) and finally (4) Story, Tell a story using only a cube, sphere, and cone. These objects cannot be textured (have to be a single color) and can only be squashed and stretched.
Below I have the animations that I made, along with a rendered animation that I made for the Ball Bounce. Speaking of that, when we hand these projects in we are actually handing in something called a playblast and without going into detail it’s basically a very simple, rough video of the animation, where as something like the rendered out Ball Bounce I have is high in detail, lighting and texturing. These playblast take seconds where as a higher detailed animation would take upwards of hours.

 

Ball Bounce
Playblast - https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8iJSVnUM7KIWWlQcnpoS3lyeDQ/edit
Render - https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8iJSVnUM7KIR2N1QkZQNzRhc2c/edit

Bounce Room - https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8iJSVnUM7KISmVlRlNyRzVpdjA/edit

DAVE School Logo - https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8iJSVnUM7KIcks4Qkk0LWxZNEk/edit

Story - https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8iJSVnUM7KIYl9kWTRNczBwcXM/edit

Week Twelve Project Update

Well I’m almost there, just a little tweaking with the textures and lighting I think I’m going to call it for this model. And as you can see in the render there is a base along with the building that I made. This was the other half of the project that I just forgot to mention, not that it was a big deal because in my opinion it was fairly easy to make.





Week Eleven and into The Last Week

Well, heres last weeks final product.  It was a little more challenging then I had originally thought but I guess thats the way that most of the projects have been this year now that I think about it..

 

As for this week, the last project of the block, we have to make an enviorment.  There are something like fourteen of them that were assigned out to the class.  I'll actually post a picture with all of them so you can see the variety.  Im already done modeling and on to texturing so now im already ahead of schedual!

 

And heres the model and reference..

 

 



Week Eleven

The last project we had wasn't as difficult as I was expecting it to be which was nice, giving me some time to catch up on sleep, and it only made it better when I saw what we were modeling for this week. We will be modeling this little robot that apparently is very popular and I should know who it is... but to tell you the truth I have never seen it before. There has to be at least 100 reference pictures of this little thing. Anyways, I’m looking forward to working on this model... Now we can build this however we want using whatever software we want but I’m going to stick with Maya and model it in SubD. I don’t remember talking about SubD. But essentially what it is, is a real-time sub-divion effect on polygons. It’s kind of hard to explain but there will be pictures that I can use to explain it with later. Oh and I’ve already gotten pretty far, it’s probably because it's my favorite type of modeling though!