Friday, February 18, 2011
Character model
First character model assignment in MAYA. After much procrastinating, which is my usual style of living, I decided to make a spider. But it was a spider...WITH A TWIST. It has a scorpion's tale. Anyway, here is the quick and dirty explanation of the process. We had to get two images of the object, one from the front and one from the side. I obviously did not handle a spider and get it to pose for me. I found pictures online. To model in maya, you need to place the two images on two planes by assigning the image to the material and then orient those two planes perpendicular to each other. So I did this, and luckily the general shape of a spider is pretty simple. A few cylinders for the legs, and spheres for the body. For the tusks, or whatever they are called on a spider, I used pyramids. I manipulated the vertices to get them curved, and to get the legs to look smoother, I moved the edges and extruded edges. For the tail, I just made a torus and deleted a few sections. For the trident tip, I used pyramids and a cylinder. I extruded faces on the pyramids to make arrow tips. Then I combined everything into one gigantic polygon. Then I keyframed the camera to move around the spider. Youtube is being stupid, so the upload will come later.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Collaboration: all the cool kids are doing it
For the all-city art competition, I began an epic journey with two of my Gallery 37 classmates Christian Grayson and Kristian Harris. It is a story of battles, danger, special effects, and suspense. This is that story.
We began with absolutely no idea what we would do. None at all. My only idea was to have an unknown secret agent planting a bomb that would implode rather than explode. We ended up deciding to make a video to be a trailer for a video game. My job would be to create the environment in Maya and compile sound effects, and the green screen live action would be done by Christian and Kristian. Christian did the special effects and Kristian put everything together in an After Effects composition.
My main purpose during this journey was to create an environment completely from scratch in Maya 2011. I was tasked with making a compelling level for the characters portrayed by Kristian and Christian. We brainstormed and decided on a city scene. In order to do that, I had to create a polygon in Maya that was the shape of a sphere. That sphere would eventually have a picture of the sky "assigned" to it. What that means is that when the image is rendered, instead of showing the inside of a ball, a sky would show. Next, I added a plane that would be intersected by the sphere for the ground. This is a little hard to visualize, so there's a screenshot of it.
When the camera is inside the sphere and positioned above the plane, if you render it with pictures or colors assigned to them, it looks like an environment. So in order to make it look like the city is a floating city, I assigned an ocean material. Now, it looks a little dim because there is no light inside the sphere. When I added a light and placed it inside the sphere, it looked like the image below.
So I also had to add a light, and change the render settings so that the objects would cast shadows. Once I created the buildings and the ground and the walls using the same process as for the sky and ocean, I had to add a new camera and animate it so that it moved through the environment. I saved the animation as a series of images, with each frame being an image. Then, I gave all of that to Christian and Kristian.
The others:
Kristian
"My contribution to the project was keying out the green screen footage. Keying is basically taking the color out of the green screen that way you can put any background behind your footage. Another thing i did was going through the footage that we collected. Then found and picked all of the usable parts, then go through that and pick the things we wanted to see in the final project. I did the animation of the health bar using photoshop. I also put the final composition together."
Christian
Within Blake, Kristian, and I video game trailer/teaser I created the final "showdown" between the two fighters and all of their effects. The final showdown contained the two characters shooting beams at each other resolving in everything blowing up, therefore leading into a giant flash so nothing else can be seen by the human eye.
Within the final showdown of our video game trailer, there were only two effects that were demonstrated, which was a "aura" and "beam exchange." In the video game trailer, the two fighters have these type of "auras" that is revolving around them to demonstrate that they are powering up. Creating both the aura and beam exchange was fairly easy, but confusingly time consuming. I created the auras by using a effect within Adobe After Affects called Particles. What I did with the particles was flipped it 180 degrees and added a extra effect, which I had to download called Trap Code Shine. After finishing the affect, I duplicated the effect and masked out the aura to revolve around the characters. The "beam exchange" was created by making a mask and making that mask extend in time to make it seem as it is shooting out. When the mask was completed, I once again applied the Trap Code Shine to make it cooler. As soon as I completed the beam 100%, I motion tracked the beams to the characters hands to make it also seem as if the beams were being created from the palms of their hands. Once the beams were shot from each of the opponents palms, the collision created a giant blast that was created by using another affect within After Affects called Lens Flare.
We downloaded free sound effects online and used them. We also used the song Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Daft Punk
We began with absolutely no idea what we would do. None at all. My only idea was to have an unknown secret agent planting a bomb that would implode rather than explode. We ended up deciding to make a video to be a trailer for a video game. My job would be to create the environment in Maya and compile sound effects, and the green screen live action would be done by Christian and Kristian. Christian did the special effects and Kristian put everything together in an After Effects composition.
My main purpose during this journey was to create an environment completely from scratch in Maya 2011. I was tasked with making a compelling level for the characters portrayed by Kristian and Christian. We brainstormed and decided on a city scene. In order to do that, I had to create a polygon in Maya that was the shape of a sphere. That sphere would eventually have a picture of the sky "assigned" to it. What that means is that when the image is rendered, instead of showing the inside of a ball, a sky would show. Next, I added a plane that would be intersected by the sphere for the ground. This is a little hard to visualize, so there's a screenshot of it.
When the camera is inside the sphere and positioned above the plane, if you render it with pictures or colors assigned to them, it looks like an environment. So in order to make it look like the city is a floating city, I assigned an ocean material. Now, it looks a little dim because there is no light inside the sphere. When I added a light and placed it inside the sphere, it looked like the image below.
So I also had to add a light, and change the render settings so that the objects would cast shadows. Once I created the buildings and the ground and the walls using the same process as for the sky and ocean, I had to add a new camera and animate it so that it moved through the environment. I saved the animation as a series of images, with each frame being an image. Then, I gave all of that to Christian and Kristian.
The others:
Kristian
"My contribution to the project was keying out the green screen footage. Keying is basically taking the color out of the green screen that way you can put any background behind your footage. Another thing i did was going through the footage that we collected. Then found and picked all of the usable parts, then go through that and pick the things we wanted to see in the final project. I did the animation of the health bar using photoshop. I also put the final composition together."
Christian
Within Blake, Kristian, and I video game trailer/teaser I created the final "showdown" between the two fighters and all of their effects. The final showdown contained the two characters shooting beams at each other resolving in everything blowing up, therefore leading into a giant flash so nothing else can be seen by the human eye.
Within the final showdown of our video game trailer, there were only two effects that were demonstrated, which was a "aura" and "beam exchange." In the video game trailer, the two fighters have these type of "auras" that is revolving around them to demonstrate that they are powering up. Creating both the aura and beam exchange was fairly easy, but confusingly time consuming. I created the auras by using a effect within Adobe After Affects called Particles. What I did with the particles was flipped it 180 degrees and added a extra effect, which I had to download called Trap Code Shine. After finishing the affect, I duplicated the effect and masked out the aura to revolve around the characters. The "beam exchange" was created by making a mask and making that mask extend in time to make it seem as it is shooting out. When the mask was completed, I once again applied the Trap Code Shine to make it cooler. As soon as I completed the beam 100%, I motion tracked the beams to the characters hands to make it also seem as if the beams were being created from the palms of their hands. Once the beams were shot from each of the opponents palms, the collision created a giant blast that was created by using another affect within After Affects called Lens Flare.
We downloaded free sound effects online and used them. We also used the song Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Daft Punk
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