The Final Week is here! So instead of typing all about our final adventures of the term...I will share with you some of the projects I have been working on.
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What a whirlwind these weeks have been!
We've been working hard on our rolling objects and hoping to get things finished on time. Aside from hours of rendering, it has been nice to get back to other assignments such as my modelling and rigging homework. My floursack animation has been coming along nicely. He's starting to gain some personality as he preps for jumping off the high dive, and comes crashing down to the bottom of the pool. My rigging has been quite the challenge. I decided to work on a horse model over the last couple weeks. For those who aren't familiar to 3D, this is extremely ambitious for a beginner. I've had to build an entire skeleton, paint all the weights on, adjust joint weighting, make sure all the axis are in the right directions, everything is named as per naming conventions etc etc. I'm looking forward to week 14 to get this done and see the final product! I finally got back to my modelling! It's been interesting over the last couple weeks having our modelling teacher away temporarily, so even though we have homework, this gives us time to focus on our rolling project. So now that I have got rendering out of the way I got to finish modelling my Harmon Kardon speakers and my PS4. I'm pretty proud how they turned out, especially my PS4, even if it is super heavy in the polygon department. The final renders look beautiful! While I was modelling my speakers, Maya managed to corrupt my file and delete the four hours of work I had put in to modelling just the wires, and internal workings. My whole file destroyed :( The best surprise on Monday morning was finding a previous incremental save that had all of my work in it! Important lesson here to anyone using 3D software: Save lots, Save often and set up incremental saves. We had two of my favourite art models come in this week for life drawing! So nice to be able to see and draw Trevor and Steve again. They come up with some fantastic and original poses, really giving us a challenge in drawing them. Shelley had us try a new approach as well. Instead of focusing on gesture drawings and moving into details, we drew them with weight. I loved doing this as it showed how the muscles were in partnership with the bones and skin. It really makes you think, "what would my body do in that position?" "what muscles am I using?" "What position is my skeleton turning in?" etc. Some big things have been happening this week!
We are closing in on finishing our rolling objects project. Models are built, rigs are built and rolling, textures & shaders are done, match move complete! Now its onto Comp, light passes, shadow passes and lighting the scene. We are working hard on our life drawing, creating gestures at first, then adding more volume and detail. Animation is all about adding in personality and antics to my flour sack character. I'm currently rigging a horse. All the bones are in, IK handles ready to go, next up: painting weights! For my interior model, I have now textured my couch in mudbox. Now I need to finish modelling the Harmon Kardon Soundsticks, a PS4 and getting all the textures right. I've already started compositing on my final shot, I will be starting the other two scenes shortly. They shouldn't take as long as the first scene which is a camera pan. lastly, this week in particles we created our animated domino path, imported our Geo and also created a low res version as place holder. The final steps will be creating the fracture effects, have the dominos gradually increase in size, and to export it to Maya for final renders!! Now that week 10 is over, there's only 4 more weeks until end of semester!
This week we really focused on getting our final project in the works. We have started doing hand match moving the footage we shot, adding in block animation and placing in our HDRIs to start lighting. Our objects have really come into shape. Now with textures, shaders and rigs all finished we will be ready to put our objects in our scene and start final animations. Once we have all of this put together we will put our initial shots with camera pan into compositing, then we can start our still shots. Aside from our rolling things project, We covered what it is like to work in a large studio vs a small studio. We have moved forward with our life drawing, now adding in empirical perspective. In animation, we have continued on with our rolling project as well as I'm working hard on my flour sack animation. I'm now adding in subtle movements and antics. In rigging we have moved to organic shapes. I am currently rigging a horse, once done the legs should move, the neck will move up and down, head side to side etc. we worked on taking photos of textures that we can use in projects, continued UVing models and kept up the hard work on rolling things! Off to a rough start this week. For the first time, my time management has been WAYYYY off and I got behind on my work. By mid week I was able to catch up and get things done, including the next weeks homework for certain classes. I promise myself that will never happen again. I'd much rather be on top of things and be ahead with some time to kill then freaking out because I ran out of time to do something. Important lesson to all future students here: Plan your time accordingly and stick to your plan!! In animation, we have gone over the basic animation of my flour sack, making some timing changes and looking at where these motions should be taken for the final version. We used this awesome program called syncsketch where you can upload your videos, share them and add notes and doodles to them! Amazing for critiques or even use in dailies!! For next week we are blocking out our final objects. I will be doing a rough animation of my eye rolling down the hallway and giving it some personality towards the end. This animation will then be used in production class, so we can start our match move. Particles make up - I've started working on a dominos project. We are hoping to create a final project of dominos falling down all over the place, knocking into each other and breaking at impact. Lots of different expressions used here, and this was my first time modelling something simple in Houdini. Pretty cool once you figure out the math :) My eyeball rig was reviewed this week, it works really well. Had some quick clean ups to do like moving my pivot point, aligning my blendshapes and making everything animation friendly. After a few tweaks I have a perfectly clean file, enhanced rig and I'm ready to roll (pun intended). We also went over the slinky rig one more time, making sure I got all the principles down and understand what drives what and how to get it there. I've managed to get a functioning slinky! So excited that it works, now ready for evaluation. In lighting, we have reviewed my eyeball texture and shader one more time. We've made the veins pop out more, added meat to the back of the eye (looks pretty gross now) and lots of reflection to make it look wet. Final turn around will be posted later on to my portfolio. We also covered 3 point lighting and WHY it's not a good idea. Amazing that this is still used in many studios and people think that this is proper lighting. Always remember this: Lighting is simple. The information you need to light is all around you. Look at your environment and think...what kind of light would that be? You don't need 8-billion lights on one object to make it look right, you just need to understand light. Photography was re-shooting footage this week, making new HDRI's, un wrapping them and as well practicing the basics. Working on perfecting my couch model this week. Have lots of work still to do on detail and making my model look photo realistic. Once this is all done, it's going to be textured and made to look real purdy :) This week in compositing we worked on our keying assignment. Managed to make a pretty good matte of myself doing archery, added it into a video of a camcorder recording, plus colour corrected and added a pretty sweet forest background. pretty proud of this one. I will post it soon! Particles class was awesome this week! We worked on the dominos file. Making the model more detailed, adding bevelled edges, working on our programming. Delving deep into the "dops" network and tweaking things until we had a pretty nice domino. We then started working on how to fracture the domino, breaking into hundreds of pieces, using what is called a "Vopnop". We created our own python coding pathways and Yet another week down as we draw closer and closer to the end of this term. The work is starting to ramp up, the challenges are greater, but everything is still as fun as ever! In production, we have now perfected our Gannt charts and schedules, a great guide to follow for the final project. We have gone over everything we need to do and build for the final, and are hard at work getting things rolling. In our drawing class we learned empirical perspective. Most people would know this as "OHHHHH you're drawing with a stick for measuring things...and you squint a lot! riiiighhhht..." I've never been a big fan of empirical as I've never understood it properly. I'm more of a linear perspective kinda person. I'm finding this goes for a lot of artists, you are either one way or the other about perspective styles. Next week we will be doing life drawing, so for homework we've been asked to draw a portrait from a photograph. Animation we have concluded with the bouncing, jumping, squishing ball and have now moved on to animating a flour sack, leaping from a diving board. I'm really looking forward to this challenge. I need to model the environment as well as block out the animation with timing. Rigging we have taken our slinky rig up a notch. My teacher showed me 4 different ways to rig a slinky, It's now up to me to decide which way I want to do it and make it awesome. Stay tuned to see things work :) For lighting we have gone over our shaders and made our final textures just that much better. Still some notes to work one, making things look gooey and wet and creepy. For every good piece of artwork you need an emotional response, I'm looking forward to cries of "eww". This week we used our photography class to film our final project footage. Learning how to have a good slate, how to get all the measurements you need and getting your shot timed. Hopefully all will turn out well for this. Modelling we reviewed the room I modelled. Even though my teacher was impressed that I got it finished (he didn't think I would), there is still a lot of detail that needs to be modelled. So I will be working on making the models more photo real over the next couple weeks as well as adding textures and bump maps not just shaders. For compositing, we are taking one last crack at roto for the lady in red. It's almost there but her hair is still bubbling something fierce. We also worked on keying, learning to make multiple keys to make one clean key. Our assignment for next week will be to cleanly create a matte, and track it into another piece of footage with a background image as well. Finally in particles, we need to finish our butterfly files, as well as RBD fracture files. |
AuthorCurrent student at CG Masters. Archives
December 2014
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CG Masters Academy
In this blog I will be giving an account of my time at CG Masters. All the things I learn, activities I take part in and projects I am working on.