Final Project

Proposal:

The original proposal was to create an animation of a man walking onto a stage, picking up a guitar, playing it for a while, and then smashing it on the stage.  This proposal evolved as I began to create it.  For fun I began to make a top hat wearing head, and then decided to make that the main character, rather a more rock star looking one.  Similarly, the stage turned into a room of a house, which matches the character a bit better, and allowed me to use the lamp model from the class exercise.  Also, a benefit of using a room of a house was the brightness.  Usually stages are dark, and having a character wearing a black tuxedo in front of a dark background would not work well.

Production Log:

The first thing I made for this project, and for the class itself was the guitar.  The first class exercise was to create an object out of NURBS primitives.  Later on I modified the guitar to make it more realistic, and added some simple textures to it.  Soon after the guitar was done I created the amp.  As stated earlier in the blog I used several textures to achieve the right look for the outside of the amp (leather) and the knobs (phong with a bump map).  I later mapped an image of the Mesa Boogie logo to the from of the amp head. 

The character took several iterations in which I edited the structure itself to be more easily rigged.  I used the cloth texture on his tuxedo, as well as mapping the image of the shirt, tie, and buttons to the front.  I attempted to make the skin look more realistic by mapping a bump map to its transparency, but it ended up either being unnoticeable to too see-through.  The character was rigged by binding the entire skeleton to the skin at once, then using the "paint skin weights" tool to choose what body parts were affected by what joints and how.

The mic and monitors were modeled and textured to resemble the amplifier.  The outside of the monitors have the same texture as the amp.   The cover on the microphone has a bump map of a grid texture to resemble a real microphone.  The couch is fairly straightforward with a plain lambert surface.  The table has a phong surface with a wood texture.

Self Evaluation:

Although the project turned out fairly well, there were some problematic aspects of it for me.  Commuting to school for one, made it difficult to get enough lab time to add everything that I wanted to it.  But within the work itself, the main problem was the rigging.  I did an initial rig, but then edited later.  I used an older version of the rigged character in the final animation and it gave me some problems.  When I moved the skeleton, the body moved twice as much in the same manner.  I thought that replacing the character with the most recent version of it would correct the problem, but it did not, which resulted in a lot of difficulty animating the character.  In future projects, the most I would want to do differently would be to have more time to experiment with things in the lab.  I plan on spending more time after this class tweaking and improving this animation.

3December

I attended the Autodesk 3December event.  The event consisted of a showcase of student work, discussion panel with several alumni with a following Q&A session, and two presentations of Autodesk products.

There was plenty of interesting work by the students, including several games, as well as the "Conducting Robots" project.  The reel of student animations had some impressive work as well.

The most useful part of this event was the discussion panel/Q&A portion.  This was the most informative and had plenty of information pertinent to students transitioning from college into the animation industry.  The alumni offered plenty of routes to take when moving into the industry, elaborating on how you could go about doing something for a big network like NBC or simply doing freelance work on their own.  I found this particularly useful because it showed me what it could potentially be like for me if I choose to pursue a career in animation.  The other aspect of this portion of the event that was beneficial to me was the discussion on internships.  Before this I wasn't planning on pursuing an internship since it wasn't necessary for the major.  After hearing them talk about how helpful an internship is at getting you not only real experience, but potentially a job later on, I've decided to look for one for the coming summer.

The first presentation was about importing files from Maya into a program called Unity, which is geared more toward game development.  The presentation was fairly interesting, although extremely technical, even though I don't plan to go into the gaming industry.  The second presentation I was unable to stay for.

Midterm: Documentation

Abstract: My project was the modeling and rendering of a character and several other objects to be animated later for the final.

Production Log:

The main character is constructed from the primitive objects which were then manipulated into more complex shapes.  The skin and clothes (hat, sleeves, pants, and gloves) have a lambert texture on them.  To achieve the appearance of a shirt, tie, and buttons, I created an image in Photoshop, and mapped the image to the character's torso.  The monocle and shoes have phong texture, and the shoes and eyes have a blinn texture.  The eyes use a color gradient to achieve the appearance of pupils and irises.

I found that modeling the joints of the arms was particularly difficult.  Towards the end I realized that you can get a much smoother, neater joint by just putting a sphere in the middle of it and scaling it to the correct size.  Figuring out how to model the joints well will be important to do, since the character eventually will be animated, walking up stairs onto a stage, then playing the guitar and smashing it on the stage.

The amp and guitar were modeled similarly to the character, starting with primitive shapes.  The neck of the guitar has a lambert surface with a wood texture on it.  The body is a blinn surface.  The floor is a lambert wood surface and the wall is a plain lambert surface.  I added a spotlight with shadows to shine on the guitar and amp.  The amp has a 2d leather surface.

Self Evaluation:

Everything worked out fairly well for this stage of the project.  I was pretty happy the way the textures and surfaces came out, especially with the mapped image of the tux and the color gradients for the pupils of the eyes.  However, I may have to re-model the arms and legs to be animated more easily.  I would also like to add more detail to the hands, rather than just having spheres.  In the future, I will animate this as described earlier in the blog, and this will be done for the final poject.

Midterm: Screencap 3

Here is my character playing the guitar.

Midterm: Screencap 2

Here is the same scene with my character, a tuxedo-clad musician, included. 

This image shows the character in front of the guitar and amp, with the light coming from a different angle.

Midterm: Screencap 1

For my midterm I wasn't able to begin any animation yet, however I did complete some significant modelling that I will animate for the final.

Unfortunately, I lost the most recent file of my guitar amp model and had to redo some of the texturing.  Here it is again with my nearly finalized guitar design. 

Midterm Progress: Guitar Amp

Not completely shaded.  Shading for the outside portions done with the 2d Surface Leather.

Parker Guitar Stage 2

More accurate shape

Parker Guitar Model Stage 1

 Made from the primitive shapes only

The Devin Townsend Project

About Me

I am a senior (but not graduating this year) IMM major.  For the first three years I was a computer science major, but got sick of it and turned to this.  I am from Jackson, NJ where I work a mindless and repetitive, nearly minimum wage job.  My main interest outside of school is music.  I've been playing guitar for nearly a decade, and I also play bass occasionally and attempt to play drums.  I play guitar in a metal band with friends from my town.  When I'm not worrying about school, I'm doing something with them, either playing shows, practicing, or trying to get some legitimate recordings done.