Saturday, 17 June 2017

Finals!!

Phew! well I do still have Texturing and Shading going into week 11 so its not over just yet but I can take a breath finally!! This has been one of the hardest terms yet in pure hours but it has also been one of the most rewarding.  Seeing my 2D training improve my 3D stuff is so gratifying and getting a chance to play around a little with story and style has been really fun.

My first class to come to an end was gesture drawing.  We didn't do a long pose (3hr+) like we did for figure drawing instead we did a lot of small exercises.  This has been a pretty chill but fun class and it was really nice to get my hands dirty with charcoal again after all the digital work from the last few terms.

Hard surface was quite easy this week since I pushed to get ahead last week and free up time for VFX.  That's not to say the week came without any trials though! I wanted to put together a turntable animation just to get in the habit for it and figure out if there are were any easy mistakes I can avoid in the future.  As it happens I learned a lot! The first is that it takes soooooo many hours OMG I figured I could get it all done in a day with a few Gnomon computers but it took 3!  Because the material is pure white or wireframe Vray needs a very high quality setting to avoid any grainy noise so I know now to leave plenty of time for a turntable like this in the future.  I also learned to playblast my stuff before I render because I didn't notice but my turn has an ease out half way through the animation which really bugs me.  I was able to minimise it in after effects but still lesson learned!  I am really happy with this model, it was not easy and it represents a lot of hours and sleepless nights but I feel so good about the final result yay :) you can watch the turntable here (I used some music from Starcraft just to give it a cool feel but for a real demo reel piece I will obviously use royalty free or payed for music.)

On account of all the other finals this week and the godsend of Texturing and Shading being moved to week 11 I haven't made a lot of progress with my final.  I have fixed a few minor issues but now I have plenty of time to add my sculptural elements and rework any color/lighting/layout issues that are getting in the way of the bigger story. it looks like my texturing and shading final will get a blog post all to itself!


VFX final turned out sooooo well :D I couldn't be happier with the result! it's one of the best animations I've ever done, you can download it from here if you want to check it out.  So the result was good but getting there though, that was another story.  I lost simulation files repeatedly, had major trouble with batch renders and had to baby sit multiple computers while they each rendered frames one at a time.  The bottom line is that I wound up with something like 4 hours sleep over 3 days :*(  but I got it done :)

I opened Zbrush for the first time since term 2.  I was very rusty and it took a while to get back up to speed but I think this little guy turned out pretty cool for only a few hours work :)

I put together some of the props for my scene and uploaded it to sketchfab where you can look around the scene in 3D. I haven't uploaded anything there for a long time so it was a little funny to look back over my old models :p

All I want to do right now is sleep but I still have animation history homework to do for tomorrow (written Friday before VFX class)  I have no idea how well my animation history work will turn out, its a lot to do in a very short time frame while I am totally exhausted.  For you guys reading this though you can just scroll forward in time down the page to my hand in! time traveling blogging cool... lets take a look.


So I didn't see this coming but I totally rallied and put together an OK animation, check it out  here.  I think the timing needs work and there is plenty of smoothing I could add but overall I am happy with the result.


I haven't posted a lot of stuff for Motion Graphics this term since most of the homework has been exercises with little to no room to do anything creative.  I will link in my final piece though here.  There was so much rotoscoping for this project that it didn't leave me a whole lot of time to develop the UI design or effects.  I think the story works though and overall I don't dislike the finished result.

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