Week2 - Ambitious or Dumb...

Another fun week :) we are starting to make some progress after the slow start.  I also went to the Gallery girls event and attempted a crazy 3D animation assignment!

In Hard Surface 1 we actually worked on a slightly tricky model.  The concept itself is quite simple but getting that clean topology and even spacing wasn't as easy as I first thought.  There were enough pauses in class while we were modeling that I went a little further and modeled the neck ridges and cap :)

In Texturing and Shading 2 we are continuing to use Bitmap 2 Material and Vray to replicate the Substance Painter workflow... (I assume I haven't used it much myself) But Robby keeps saying how Substance does this much better.  This week we tackled adding procedural grunge to architectural materials.  I tried to put a little bit of a story in it too, and since I made that muddy texture last week I thought I would use it as a floor base this week :)

I have also started blocking in one of the props I want to use for my Texturing and Shading final.  The plan is to model, the above Bolter, a table, carry case and maybe a helmet too but I only have till week 5 to get it all done so we will see if I reduce the scope.  All the props are from the Warhammer 40,000 universe from the Imperial and Space Marine armies.  I figured the Warhammer style is exaggerated enough to be really enjoyable to work on but at the same time has the capacity to show off hyper real and grungy textures, since we will not be learning hand painted or stylized texturing in this class.

Drawing has been fun this week, I think its finally starting to click for me.  There is still a long way to go but I feel like I have caught back up with my quality from term 2 so hopefully i will be overtaking that soon!

For Animation principles we added a tail to our bouncing ball to explore secondary action.
The animation can be downloaded here

So here it is my 'ambitious' animation project... its called Vine Animation and you can find it here: Google Drive Folder

The brief was to use history based animation to create a plant growing out of a plant pot.  That didn't sound too fun to me so I went with the cute knights fighting idea instead.  The original scope of my project included a vine golem instead of a second knight but I discovered that there was no way I could have pulled that off without missing some of my other assignments.  It also gave me a chance to practice hand painted texturing.  I am still struggling with it and I hope I can continue to get more practice!

Term6 - The Animation Term

Well this is the last term before our group all pick our tracks! That will be happening in week 5 or 6.  I am still pretty confident Games is the track for me, I just get such a kick out of creating environments or characters you get to play with when they are full rigged, textured, animated etc.  I know as a job I want to work in a more specialist field like Modeling and Texturing but I do like knowing how to take something from concept all the way to final working game/animation.  Modelling and Texturing is a tempting track but there are a few tracks in the Game course that I really don't want to miss!  Anyway this term started very lightly with a cancellation in week 1 but now we are in full swing.  Most of the homework this term can be taken very lightly (like easier than Term 1 lightly) but as always we all have the choice to go waaaaaay to far with each assignment too :p  I am trying to go a little further with some of the animation assignments to try out new: modeling, texturing, particle effects, etc. techniques and it makes animating bouncing balls a little more interesting, since we seem to be doing it a looooooot!

Animation and VFX homework for week 1, both a simple bounce animation and then a scene which has some emotion and camera work.  Both my animations can be found in my GoogleDrive Folder

Hard Surface 1 has been pretty light so far but we are learning some cool things like menu sets and UI/tool customization.

This term for Texturing and Shading 2 since the course has changed tutor we will be learning Substance Painter and Bitmap 2 Material instead of Mari.  Honestly at this intro level I don't think there will be a very big difference between the two since we will probably only be using the programs for 3D painting and material work rather than some of the more complex inbuilt systems.  Still I am really looking forward to learning a little more about Painter! I've owned it for a while but I don't think I've actually opened it yet :p  This week we had to replicate 5 environmental materials using Displacement mapping in Maya.  We also learned how to use Bitmap 2 Material to generate all our maps for Vray! It is a very cool program. I think a few weeks from now when we know a little more I will be able to take my texture work to a whole other level! :D

Gesture drawing is starting with a slow burn, we are mostly recapping some of the old stuff from figure drawing but that was so long ago now it really does need dusting off!  It looks like we will be doing some very cool stuff later though in terms of story telling!

History of animation started pretty slow too.  We had to copy a few pages from the old animation masters and then do a bouncing ball animation.  I was pretty tired of ball animation by this point so I decided to jazz it up a little and animated a baseball player practicing! Mostly so I could work out a good workflow in Photoshop for quick 2D animating.  I actually really enjoyed putting this together its the closest thing to real 2D animation I have done since I used to do flip-book style doodles in History class back in Year 9 at college. This animation is also in the Google Drive Folder.