Week 8 - A tough one

Ramping up to finals! Week 8 is usually one of the hardest weeks out of the term, mostly because its not the last week so there is a little temptation to relax but if you do then week 9 will be impossible!  I tend to over work week 8 just in case something happens in week 9.  Everything appears to be progressing on schedule (except from a little surprise in History of Animation) and the end of term is in sight :)

 For VFX I decided to try out a video game proof of concept.  I am using some of the assets from my space station attack.  I am adding some extra props and redesigning the characters too now that I have a little more time to do so.  I tried out using Phoenix FD which is a dynamic simulator plug in for Maya that Gnomon has a license for.  It was really fun and quite easy to play with.  I can see that mastering it would take a long time but I have a cool looking effect for my in game grenade :)  I have all of the effects done for this shot so mostly its texture work and a little extra animation this week.

 I am progressing with texturing and shading 2 but since its the only class I have moving into week 11 I will have a little extra time just to work on this project.  I am hoping to nail down a some extra texture work, tighten up the lighting and maybe add a small camera move.

 I fixed some of the issues from last weeks walk cycle.  It was hard inking the final poses smoothly, I was also really tired but I managed to add the costume too check out the walk cycle here.  Next week we have to do a 'take' which is a character reaction... I didn't know we were going to have that assignment... that really throws a metaphorical spanner into my work schedule :*( hopefully I can figure something out.

Well I don't fully know how but I managed to finish the modeling portion of my Hard Surface project! woop.  If I can find a little time next week I would really like to build a simple rig and have a very small idling animation but there is so much still to do in other projects.  I still want to render a turntable and wireframe view but I will leave that until class.

Week7_Slow down where's the term going?!?

Only a couple weeks left of term now! every class has moved into Finals! which feels pretty intense as usual.  I am trying my best to scope my final few projects to ensure I can actually pull everything off by week 10.

Another piece of the final done! The legs were a little easier than the arms, definitely fewer parts but they were also less primitive which did make them a little trickier.  David is expecting us to hand in a finished model by next week!?!?! Just to make sure we are only working on corrections for the last week.... that wasn't exactly my scheduled plan... I don't know if its actually possible but I'll give it a try.

Another fun week for VFX.  My cute little knights show up again, this time in a more comical animation involving the very important defense of a single wall in the middle of nowhere :p check out the full animation here.

I also uploaded my animation history homework to that folder too, we are working on our first 2 week project.  This week I blocked in my walk cycle trying to get the timings and smoothness correct before I commit to drawing my own character 24 or so times for the final.

Texturing and shading is getting there.  Thankfully we missed a class meaning we are going into week 11.  Didn't think I would be so happy about that but it means I get a full 4 days to really work on nailing this piece :) I want to make a lot of changes so having extra time is always a plus!  The plan is to make some extra parts in Zbrush (since the displacement I was planning to do isn't working very well for the more hard surface parts I need). I only just got it into Maya from Substance so I need to tweak the settings a bit to get it all working. Since we just covered sub surface materials I can work on the wax seal too phew! there's quite a few little cosmetic changes I want to make too but I won't bother listing them here.

Another couple of weeks of Gesture Drawing homework.  We have moved onto clothed characters which brings with it a whole host of challenges, mostly stylistic, since it is near impossible to draw a clothed character in hyper real style with a 2-3 minute time limit. It's actually getting really fun recently because we are moving away from drawing purely from observation to drawing with story in mind.  Because of that shift the last few homeworks have been a little different. Last week we had to pick an artist and do some master copies to get a handle of their own style so we could draw in that style in class the following week.  I picked Jamie Hewlett, the artist who worked on The Gorillaz animations and 2D art.  The next week we did an exercise from a few terms ago which was copying frames from an animation or movie to work on composition.  I picked the Heart of the Swarm cinematic since it inspired my Hard Surface 1 final too.

Motion Graphics is ramping up also.  I have my footage all in after effects and I spend a loooooooot of hours rotoscoping out my actor.  The masking is a little rough at the moment but I will wait till I have the actual graphics in place before I clean up the masking just to see if I can get away with ignoring certain parts.  The file is a little big to upload now so I will probably just upload the final piece instead.

Week6 - It's starting to come together

zzz... too tired, hard to be articulate :p

Another tough week even with the Texturing and Shading class cancellation there was still so much to be working on.  I blame it on Hard Surface but the final is starting to look pretty cool so I guess if I survive this term the ends will justify the means. 

No animation this week just 5 gestures from our character.  I wound up with a little bit of extra time (otherwise designated for sleeping) to try out a cell shaded style of lighting.  Linking this to the work we have been doing in Gesture class really helped with grouping values and designing the shadow shapes.  I like the outcome and I might start to use this in the future (if appropriate) since it is actually quite a quick process.

I haven't been updating my gesture work for a while so here's some homework from the last few weeks.

Facial animation! I was pretty nervous about this one after my work from the NFTS I know how hard lip syncing and facial animation can be.  I didn't have enough time to really polish this and make enough blend shapes but I think it works. Check out the footage here

Hard surface is progressing on schedule.  This is my first full rez piece.  The plan is still to add a completed piece each week hopefully I can get the whole thing to this quality by week 10.  Getting the topology and flow to work is a real challenge but I am definitely learning a lot from working on this guy!

For Texturing and Shading I moved onto blocking out all the colors for my props.  I think I have a unified look going now.  I also designed an Ultramarine style banner for my scene with a few bunny themed graphics sneaking in. I get the feeling substance painter has the same issues as Zbrush in that its really easy to quickly get to the fine detail noodling part of the design too fast.  So I am trying to slow down and make sure all my colors/materials/composition etc work before I start playing with generators and smart masks.  Having said that I think it may be time to start working on the ware for my bolter now to set a precedent for the scene.

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Gnomon screening for the Ningyo, a short film project by a teacher at Gnomon.  It was a beautiful piece and an incredible amount of work for only 3 years in production!  It was very inspiring not just for me but for the whole audience, after the screening everyone was a buzz talking about their own work and big future ideas.  It was so fun to be a part of that energy! I am going to try to make it to more events at Gnomon even with the lack of free time :p

Maybe I am tired so this seems funnier to me right now but for last weeks rampaging space worm animation I was working up to the wire and I wound up taking over the entirety of the LAB 7 computers to render out my scene.  I managed to render out 500 frames in 15 minutes! Waaay cooler than leaving it to render over night on 1 computer! One of the many perks of being at Gnomon.

Week5 - So much modeling, so little sleep...

Wow this week was tough! I just about managed to hit all the homework outcomes I wanted but it wasn't easy.  It was mostly Hard Surface 1 that got me, I spent almost 3 full days on just this weeks homework but I really needed to.  I did have a lot of fun with VFX and Texture 2 though.

For texturing and shading we were mostly getting our models into and back from Substance Painter.  This workflow checks for bad topology, stretched UV's etc an in the process creates a really useful path between the Substance and Maya files.  Bottom line is all I have to do now is save my substance progress and it should update my Maya textures instantaneously!  The above pic is a grab from substance with a smart material preset applied to prove the UV's are OK.

I got some solid advice on how to improve my composition from last week.  I tweaked the lighting a bit too and I think its starting to really come together.  I expect it to change a little when I have real textures in with reflections etc but it probably wont change drastically from the above composition.

Substance painter is so much fun! You can go from nothing to about 80% textured in about 10 minutes!! the other 20% takes a lot of work though but its fun to get to a solid workable level that fast!

The other part of this weeks assignment was to texture something in Substance using the projection brush and then render it in Maya.  I textured the environment my final will be placed in and I think it looks OK but with the lighting as it is you probably will only see the environment in reflections :p but it had to be done at some point.

Animation homework was doing a jump cycle for our characters from last week. You can check it, and my VFX piece here.

That brings me to my VFX assignment for this week.  We covered cluster and sculpture deformers.  I used some clusters to build a rig for my giant carnivorous worm, who then began rampaging through a futuristic space station... like you do...

And here it is the block in for my Hard Surface final!  This is the reason I got like no sleep this week but I am really happy with the outcome.  The geometry is pretty trash but hopefully I will be replacing a piece of this mech every week from now till week 10. e.g next week I will be working on the arms.  I am sticking pretty close to the game model for the block in but for the high rez detailing I plan to be a little looser with the concept.

OK time to grab some sleep before I make a start on next week's assignments bye!

Week4 - Doughnuts and Bolters

Gearing up for Midterm, which doesn't mean a whole lot this term I guess.  For Hard Surface and Texturing and Shading it means that we are starting on the final but for most of the other classes we are just continuing on like normal.

For VFX this week we are working with constraints.  They are quite handy and the basis for a lot of rigging which we will get to in the distant future.  I am actually looking forward to really learning rigging, I know a little from past projects but I hope to learn a lot more.  I had a bit of fun with this project and designed an automated doughnut factory. You can check out the full animation here

 

Texturing and Shading was a two parter this week.  We opened Substance Painter for the first time and played around a little, which was fun.  The assignment however was just to finish off our final models.  That means UV's, optimization, composition, lighting, the works!  It was tough but i managed to get everything done.  I am working on the composition with a little help from one of my past teachers Devon.  I hope to really nail it down over the next week or so to make sure I get the most out of the whole piece.

 

There wasn't a whole lot of animation in this weeks animation assignment.  We had to design a character instead, one which we will be animating over the next few weeks.  That means keeping the design and accessories to a bare minimum since I will be drawing this character probably a few hundred times :p.  Here she is Zahra; once the eldest daughter of a famous Egyptian family she was shamed and banished after her younger sister outwitted her with an elaborate scheme. Having been forced to survive among the dangerous nomadic clans roaming the wilderness Zahra has risen through the ranks and now marches against the city of her birth with one malicious intent, revenge.  Aaaand next weeks assignment is to figure out how she jumps........ my initial reaction is she would probably get someone else to jump for her, but I guess if she actually had to jump it would be in an elegant way. Which I will, of course, be acting out myself to see what that looks like :p hope I don't bother the downstairs neighbors.

 For Texturing and Shading we had to pitch our final models.  I was initially going to go with a quad-copter drone but the more I thought about it the more dull it sounded.  So I decided to go with the Viking unit from Starcraft 2!! I want to essentially uprez this in game model into a cinematic quality model.  It has been done before though but I will be trying to put my own spin on how it would be detailed out at a high resolution.  The piece itself has a lot of parts and can switch between walker and flight mode.  I will be focusing on nailing the walker mode and if I have time (big if) I might try to rig it and make it transform between the two modes but I'm pretty sure the walker mode will be taking up the majority of my time.

I also wanted to start preparing for some of the later games classes I will be taking in the future.  Since Riot is up there on my dream job list I figured I should find some time to use my digital painting knowledge and really work on getting better at Riot's style of character texturing.  I don't think its something Gnomon focuses on or teaches specifically but I am getting some great help and advice on how to improve from past teachers and new friends.  My first step was to try a master copy, just in value this time before I get a grip on color.  I chose Zed from League of Legends because he doesn't show any skin and is mostly hard surface so a little bit easier than Ahri or Gnar etc.  I really got a lot out of this exercise but finding time with our workload is really tough so I hope I can keep finding time to working on stuff like this!

Week3 - Modeling Crazy!

Things are heating up again, Hard Surface modeling is getting a little more interesting and we are nearly ready to play in Substance Painter woop!

This weeks Hard Surface modeling assignment was to model a toaster.  The hardest part was cutting the grooves into a curved surface.  Up until now this class has pretty much been going over stuff I already knew but I really learned a lot from this week! I am looking forward to the next few assignments to further improve my modeling techniques.  I wound up modeling a second slightly more complicated toaster just to try out some of the techniques on a more complicated surface.

For Animation and VFX we used animation paths to both model and animate a roller coaster.  It sounds pretty simple but its one of those techniques that unless you get all the stages perfect the model or animation will wind up broken.  You can check out the animation here.

For texturing and shading we moved onto metal in our last stage of procedural nodes in Vray.  Next week we will be moving into Substance Painter to try out generating these effects outside of Maya.

I wound up making a procedural texture that implements, edge, ambient occlusion, projection and normal masking.  Each of which is assigned a different color in the above image.  I used this base in all the metals for this week. It took a little while to create but it sped up my workflow lots when it came to generating the metal textures.

Lastly I am finishing off the modeling portion of my texturing and shading final.  I have one more week to model 2 more props and then UV everything and frame it all in a nice composition.  I should be OK since this weeks assignment is just to work on the model for the final!  Working on this has been so much fun! I hope I can turn it into a really cool final piece!

Gesture is getting there.  I'm a little nervous since we move onto rendering next week.... I do struggle a little with that but maybe with my improved lay in rendering will be a little easier.  We will see.

Ugh I finally bit off waaaaay more than I could chew with this one! With all the other assignments this week and me getting a cold :( I wound up with very little sleep and a 58 second animation.  I think I achieved a good block in but honestly I totally over scoped this project and wasn't able to take any of the animation to a polished level.  Lesson learned!

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!