I just ... blue myself.

School update for those that are interested.

Last month I was in a class called "Character Design and Creation." As the name would imply, we are just in charge of ... designing and creating a character. This character could be based on whatever we want, so long as it hadn't already been created in some 3d form. Like a video game, or movie or whatever.

So I chose one of my comedic heroes, Mr. David Cross. Known to many as Tobias Fünke. If you aren't familiar with him, let me introduce you.

Well, here's my attempt at creating him in 3d. Sorry for the poor quality of the video.

Have a good week folks.

Show and Tell

Well, as promised I have some school work to share with y'all, and as per usual with school work I managed to find a way to incorporate Flash into things.

Over the last month I've been in a "Shading and Lighting" class. Basically, we were to create a scene from scratch, doing all the texturing and lighting ourselves. We could borrow the 3D objects from a stockpile they had available at school, but usually some modification was required.

The recommendation was to pick a scene that you had images for, so as you would have a reference to try and match. For my project, I picked Andy Dufresne's cell from The Shawshank Redemption. Not only did it seem like a decent challenge, but it gave me a good excuse for watching Shawshank about 20 times in a row.

Here's the result:

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In order to make this, I applied a series of 2d textures, images in other words, to the geometry, as well computer generated patterns, or "procedurals." Just to give you a better idea of the work that was involved, I put together a little Flash presentation to show you the process from start to finish.

Feel free to click anywhere in the Flash app to advance the image, although it will move on automatically if you don't do anything (after pressing start of course). I recommend clicking the Full Size link below to really see what's going on.

(Click here for full size version. Flash Player required)

Have a good weekend everybody.

This should at least get me a job with Dire Straits

For those of you keeping up, the beginning of May marks the end of my first 3D class, and thus ends my introduction to Maya. I believe y'all were promised an animation...

Well I thought I'd take you through the steps, from concept to final cut. This is the same pipeline major animation studios use, and since I'm now familiar, I'm expecting to start interviewing pretty much any time now.

For this particular project, each group was tasked with making a 6 second animation. Each member would contribute 2 props and 6 seconds of character animation for one character in the scene. My group, named Monkeys Out of Nowhere (Thanks Andy!) had five people, thus our animation has five characters.

The concept our group came up with was a western motif involving a gun fight between two poker players. My character was the bartender. To start with, we each made a storyboard that showed the timing, camera work, and overall action. Basically, it's a comic strip, so not surprisingly, this was the most straightforward part for yours truly.

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Once everybody had their storyboards finished, I created an "animatic". This is basically just a real rough animation using simple geometry and coffin-esque shapes for characters. Each group member would use this as a basic blueprint for animation, ensuring that nobody would walk their character through a wall or something. Just to give you the overall gist; two cowboys are playing poker. One gets up, shoots the other through a window. The sheriff busts in with a shotgun, and blasts the shooter over the bar. There's also a piano player, who runs away. Ready? Aaaaaand action!

Now that we had the basic blueprint, animation could begin. Everybody saved a personal copy of the animatic, brought in their rigged character (which I believe I shared with you in another post) and started animating. After each person was finished animating, everybody would share their animation for use by the rest of the group. Also, some environment detail was added (thanks JR) so that things didn't look quite so bland.

When creating the final scene, each group member was in control of their own camera work. The idea would be to "film" with an emphasis on your character, meaning that we would be producing 5 different videos. Here's my initial cut after animating and importing in the other characters.

Once that was finished, all that was left was texturing, lighting, and rendering (finalizing). We were limited to flat colors for our textures, so don't expect anything fancy. Of course if you have been expecting fancy - you've probably jumped ship to another blog by now. So now that you've suffered through the entire explanation of how I made it, here's my final animation.

Pretty nifty eh? Well, I think so anyway. In addition to that, we also had to do some individual work. For mine, I chose to do another 6 second animation. No lighting or coloring, this was just focusing on basic animation.

That's it for this month in Full Sail. Next month I'll be in a more advanced modeling course - so hopefully I'll be sharing some 3D models of ninjas, pirate monkeys, or maybe a T-Rex Who knows.

Oh in case you were wondering if this is how it's done in the real world, check out this and this. Admittedly, we skipped the voice talent part.

I bet His copy is pirated

We're well into this month of classes, and I've gotten to the point where I can begin making animations. Awesome. Simply Awesome. I'm shooting for something like this before next month is over.

Last week we created our characters, then "rigged" them. This essentially means we added a skeleton to the polygon mesh that we'll use to move them about. Dancing jigs, playing frumble... whatever I want them to do, I can make them do it. I'm essentially playing God at this point. My 500-ish polygon creations are at my whim.

Which I guess isn't like God. Cuz of the whole free will thing.

Anyway, here are some screen shots of my character and the rigging underneath. For this class we're just using "puppet" characters, because we haven't learned how to make the "skin" stretch with the movements yet.

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If you create the skeleton correctly, then a lot of the movements are taken care of for you. By pushing up on the foot, for example, the leg bends appropriately. If I lift the character off the ground, gravity takes his toes downward, as if I had picked up a doll cloth action figure.

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Of course with anything you're learning for the first time, there were a few bumps in the road. If I made the joints at the wrong angle or in the wrong order, I would really come out with some ... interesting results.

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I imagine that everybody who has tried learning Maya ran into this problem early on. It's just a matter of practice. The class I'm currently in is only a month long, so I'm cramming a lot of learning into a pretty quick span.

Still, it could be worse. I might have only had one day to create a fully functional person.

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