Final Project Progress Report 2

With 11 hours left until it is time to present final projects (8 hours until the time I would ideally have the animation rendered), progress on my own animation has been slow.  Both characters are for the most part animated, albeit with a few too many shortcuts taken.  Cameras have been added in such a way to hide those shortcuts from being visible as much as possible.

When trying to add a breath of fire coming from the staff (pictured above), the particle effect gets unruly and very quickly engulfs the entire screen with flame, although I am not sure if that problem would carry over to the actual render shots.  At any rate, adding particle effects to a dynamic object (such as this magic spell) is a much different beast than adding effects to a static polygon like the torches from the midterm.

Final Project Update 1

With roughly 18 hours left until the due date, work on my final project has officially begun!

So far I have duplicated LowMan, and differentiated them by giving them different textures (a shiny dark grey blinn for the warrior's armor and a deep blue lambert for the wizard's robes). Then, I gave the staff from my midterm to the wizard and parented it to his right hand.
I exported a sword (made as a personal for-fun project) from 3DSMAX for the warrior, and created a similar looking shield to match it, parented to the warrior's left and right hand, respectively.

Catching up on Previous Assignments

During the last class of the year [5/2/2016] I worked on a previous assignment, practicing animating with LowMan.  Due to computer problems at home I was not able to post to my blog until recently. Seen below are 3 screenshots of LowMan going from T-Pose, into a defensive stance, then striking.
I used direct kinematics to move him around.

Midterm Proposal

For the midterm, I decided I wanted to create a scene that included a wizard's staff that glows, showing off its magical potential.  Afterwards, add to the scene to make it more visually appealing in general.

The staff itself is rather simple, a gemstone-shaped object fitted into the top of a gnarled staff, with an iron cap on the bottom for safety reasons.  One of the biggest parts of this project was getting the gemstone to look adequate in terms of overall color balance, reflectivity, and translucence; as seen in the previous blog post.  Once that was satisfactory, and the basic surroundings were set up, I added a red point light to the center of the gem, key framed to quickly flash twice during the animation, and then went back to the gem's material to add incandescence at the appropriate times, seen below.

I added the iron cap after my initial presentation, which just consisted of creating a curve and revolving it, then spending some time to line it up with the staff, and finally trimming the once meandering tail of the staff to fit inside the newly made cap.

Now that the staff is for the most part completed, I wanted to add variety to the scene.  First, I added torch sconces, because one of my pet peeves is having a scene be lit unrealistically, and the torches allowed me to justify adding some orange lights.  I added a fire effect to the torches, as well as some wall braces, to complete the look.  Unfortunately this wasn't enough light on its own, so I did end up needing to add a dim spotlight to complete the lighting.
After the torches, I turned to add some pots because my scene was still lacking, but for some reason every time I was about to finish the pot, my video card crashed - this happened 3 times - so I decided to leave the scene as is and render.

Self evaluation: Overall, the lighting came out very well, which is what I am always the most concerned about.  The staff could use some more complexity, but adding to it would require a complete overhaul of its design, something to do for the final.  The camera used for the animation was a little shaky, so I need to spend more time in the future smoothing out its motion.  The scene is not very complex, but what is there I think fits together well.

Messing with shader options

Pictured above is a very quick "gem shaped" object that's been duplicated, on a plane which exists for testing reflections.  The gem on the right was textured by using a ramp shader preset 'glass' tinted red, and on the left is my attempt to recreate it using a phong. 

I much prefer the reflection created by the ramp shader, but I prefer the reflection within the phong as well as the overall color of it.

Textures and lighting for the bouncing ball

Quick post showing the bouncing ball tutorial with textures and lighting added to the scene. The hoop is a simple color texture, the floor pattern is achieved with a grid style texture with added noise in multiple dimensions, and the ball is an imported file drawn in paint.

February 22nd - Learning to edit CV's and Insert Isoparms

Today I created a simple ice cream cone (out of two cylinders) and then fiddled with the vertices and isoparms of a cylindrical cone until it became roughly the shape of a pile of soft serve ice cream.  It is still a little rough around the edges - I am in the process of figuring out how to add noise to a complex shape (if that is something that can be easily done without downloading other additions to Maya?) as well as trying to get bump mapping to show up on a render and also line up with the texture itself.