Final Animation 2020

With Covid-19 bringing unparalleled stress, complexity, and unexpected hardships to life, I was not able to fully animate and complete this Final project. However I did finish designing all of the models and will explain what I had intended to do. For this final animation I intended for it to start of very dim, preferably with a magenta-ish light. The animation would have the superior bigger and more powerful creature give power to the small insects, and have their bulbous tails light up different colors. It would start of with the insect on the left and go right, respectively. Each one would walk up to its superior and be granted its light source respectively. Ultimately lighting up the dark cave like surrounding by the end of the animation. That was what I had intended for my final animation to be choreographed and animated.  

EX 7: Character Rigging

 

I was unsure of how to tackle this assignment of character rigging but figured that I would start with downloading the low man character model that was provided. I played around with various poses by highlighting and rotating his joints. I ultimately wanted to display the low man model doing some sort of athletic action. therefore I made it look as if he was running and jumping a fence as if he was an Olympic runner. The one thing that I couldn't figure out for the life of me was how to change and rotate his elbows, hands, arms, etc. I feel like altering that would have definitely made the action more believable. 

EX 6: Basic Animation Exercise

 

For this exercise of creating a basic animation I decided to use the little simple scene that I had created last time. For this basic animation, I just had the sail boat object connected to a single line of motion and go straight, as if it was sailing through the water. I tried to add instances in the line in which the boat would bob up and down like actual water physics but it looked extremely awkward so I just went back to the straight line. Took screenshots as the boat sailed. 
 

EX 5: Cinematography

 

For this cinematography exercise, I decided to create somewhat of a scene consisting of a body of water, a little bridge/doc, and a simple sail boat. I created the water by stretching a plane object and assigning it the ocean shader material. I made the doc by turning cube objects into the planks, using cylinders as the base, and also using stretched and thinned out cylinders to connect the planks. The sailboat was made out of various objects stretched and enlarged to a fitting size and then merged together. I tried to incorporate a spotlight to point at the boat from the direction of the doc but I was having a lot of trouble getting that to work properly. 

Animation 1 2020 Midterm

Journey to be Lit (4 screen display)

Journey to be Lit (Front angle display)

Journey to be Lit (Back angle display)

Journey to be Lit (Dramatic front display)

Journey to be Lit (Dramatic back display)

Abstract:

My project animation follows three grounded fireflies as they make a journey to be lit by a mysterious divine like insect.

Midterm/Self Evaluation:

For this project, the animation I plan to create follows three land abiding fireflies in which cannot light up, go on a journey to be lit by this godlike insect. This concept of the story wasn't there form the start. The first model I had made for this class was an insect model of the grounded firefly and I enjoyed making it so I wanted to keep the theme of insect like figures going. When making the model for the other insect, I had wanted to make the insect very different form the first model in which I had created so I attempted to make it more humanoid. I also used more complex techniques such as the bend deformer, and alteration of various shapes to make it look extremely different and dignified from the basic firefly model. Overall for both of the models I had used primitive shapes for entirety of the shapes used.

This semester has been my first times learning anything about animation and 3d modeling so everything is so new to me. Being from an artistic background I feel like I am adjusting fairly easily to the process of modeling and shading. However I still feel that my models are too basic and "blocky," I want to aim to have my models be more fluid, smooth, and life like. I also am not too proud of my shading and texturing capabilities at the moment. For all of the coloring and shading, I have primarily used Blinn and Lambert, however I have just been using flat, basic colors. I want to get better at using textures and image files properly to bring life to my models rather than simply coloring them. Overall I am somewhat happy of the outcome of what I have so far for my animation project!

EX 4: Detailed Model

Sci-Fi Humanoid Insect Model (4 screen display)

Sci-Fi Humanoid Insect Model (Front)

Sci-Fi Humanoid Insect Model (Front)

Sci-Fi Humanoid Insect Model (Back)

When beginning to make this model, I went into it knowing that I wanted to make something insect "looking". First I started with the arms and shoulders. For the arms, I used the cone shape model and deformed and warped it to give it a curved look. And for the shoulders, I wanted to make them look broad, so I used the cylinder shaped model and extended it to give it the bulky look. For the rest of the model design, I used different forms and manipulations of the sphere shape model. Also for the shape pertruding out of the back , I used a cylinder shape and bent it using the deform tools. Finally, to give it a more "sci-fi" look, I decided to add the polyhedron shapes to the middle of the chest, as well as the middle of the shape coming out of the back. Overall, I am pretty satisfied with the model and am excited to texture and color it!

EX 3: Your own version of "Bouncing Ball"

For my own version of the "Bouncing Ball" exercise, I thought it would be cool to make a little moving obstacle course for the ball character. So instead of the ring, I decided to make this little beam structure with a moving obstacle for the ball character to overcome. I also added columns for the character to bounce on. I also played around with the bounce locations and frames.

The main problem that I had faced was adding the face image to the ball object. Every time I added the image file, the placement of the image on the ball was always incorrect. For example purposes I had rotated the ball character for the screenshots. But would like to get help as to how to troubleshoot this in class. Overall I feel like this came out as a pretty cool animation!