Animation Projects

ALL THESE PROJECTS ARE FROM MY SOPHOMORE YEAR IN HIGH SCHOOL IN ANIMATION ESSENTIALS. ENJOY!

 Bouncing Sphere: I think I used photoshop to do this. There are like 4 layers. The ground, sky, sphere, and background. Simple really. The point of this project is to understand squashing and stretching objects and ease in/ease out key framing. This didn't take very long.

 Character: This is a character animation. I had to draw a character and I choose a cat. Then I had to isolate each leg(I had 4 individual legs), the head, the tail, the ears, and the face. Then I put on the computer. It was preferred if you colored it before you put it on the computer. I used after effects to have my cat cross the screen in way or another. So her tail pushes her across the screen.

 

Inchworm: Here is my inchworm. He has a puppet warp on him so he can cross the screen. This another photoshop thing. I used a few more layers in this one. I wanted a grass texture so there are a few layers of that to get a bit of a perspective thing going on.








Maya Projects:

Intro: This begins the modeling in Maya. Maya is a 3-D animation program. All I had to do was make a few shapes, apply a texture of different colors, and then rotate/move/scale everything to get the feel of Maya. So I have a blue sphere, a green cylinder, a light orange cone, 3 yellow rectangles, and a purple doughnut (torus).






Castle: The castle project came next. The point was to learn about combing objects and the differences of objects. We used the Boolean tool to do that. Then applying textures in a way that wasn't just a single color. Maya has many texture like quarts, wood, and other textures of that sort. You could also download your own texture but we didn't learn that until later so I have purple and black castle floating in no where.

 

Polything: Next was the Polythingy project. We made an sphere and 3 cylinders. We made an x with the cylinders on the x and z axis to make holes in the sphere. Then the 3rd cylinder goes through the
top. We made it gold and added a purple floor. We needed to light the scene. Lighting in this sucked because I didn't get how to do it.




Hammer and nail: My next project is the hammer and nail project. The hammer was a struggle. I needed to split vertices, extrude squares, extrude 2 symmetrical items while bending them. Then I textured it. Because I had a sub during this time(teacher's wife had twins & stayed home during a lot of the Maya stuff) I couldn't figure out how to fix the competing colors on the hammer so I said that my hammer was rusting. It works right?

Salt shaker: The salt shaker involves the skill called lofting. I made the base of the salt shaker with a . I made copies of the NURBs and then lofted them together to get the bottom of the salt shaker. I made a duplicate of the lofted salt shaker to get the glass part that holds the salt. Then I made the lid which was basically half a sphere with holes in it made by the boolean tool. Then I had to put it in a room and light the room to make it all look very pretty.

Container: We needed to make a product. Then have a package for it including a label with the company's logo on it. Basically I made a apple cider container. I made the container an apple because I've never seen one in the store. My label sits is under the lid. The label was made in photoshop but everything else was done in Maya. I got to use a cylindrical wrap effect to put the label on my container. Then was cool. This is the first project where I got to create a camera and animate something. I had to put the focus point in the middle of my container so the camera would revolve around the container.

Ice Cream: This is my Ice Cream animation with ice cream cones and a bowl of ice cream. This was an interesting project. I made 3 flavors of Ice Cream from spheres and we started to play with bump maps. This makes it look like actual Ice Cream instead of a glossy sphere. Then I made a scoop. That was irritating. But I did get to use a shiny texture on it! I made an ice cream holder for the cone full of ice cream. I had my scoop, ice cream, and bowl on a lazy susan and made that a giant group so I could turn it and have the camera sit still for a while. That was a fun thing to do with the camera.



NURBS: A NURBS is a Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines. This is where you draw half of an object in profile and then hit a spherical button that makes this NURBS a 3-D object. I made 2 glasses, a candle, and an ice holder. Then they rotate on a lazy susan. This is another easy animation but the taxing part is the modeling. I played around with the textures and the transparency of stuff like on the candle, the holder is colored glass so I screwed with the transparency. That was fun!

1st Semester Final: We had to make a table scape for a fancy dinner and have a camera fly through the table. The hard part was making 1 table setting. I needed 2 plates, 1 bowl, 1 spoon, 1 fork, 1 knife, 1 chair, and the table itself. Then I needed to duplicate the setting which included the plates, the bowl, and the civilware. I added a table runner to the table to make it look nice and everything and then I had to light everything. The tough part was making everything and bringing it all together so all of it was sized correctly and then coping it to make 4 place settings. So rough but I did it!



Semester two projects

Bouncing Spheres: For this project I needed to make a bowling ball, a golf ball, and a tennis ball bounce. To do that I needed to know how they bounced so I filmed them. Then I watched them and recorded the times then they touched the ground and when they had reached to top of their bounce. This is used for key framing. So I would choose which sphere I would start with and go to the graph editor and at those times I determined I would place a key frame. Then I did that for each sphere. These are still Maya projects.

Motion Path(Rocket): This is a Maya project. I made a rocket first and then I needed a motion path. A motion path is a fancy name for a line that will make my rocket move. So at the beginning I make sure that it was at 0 seconds and the end of the motion path was at the end of my timeline. Then I attached my rocket. Then I added a camera in the middle I think and I tried to attach the aim or focus point to the Rocket but I'm not sure how well that worked so this may be a screwy video, but I tried. I tried.

Moving Logo: I used Illustrator and Maya for this project. I started in horrid illustrator to make a 'logo'. Then I needed to save it as a illustrator 8 file so I could bring it into Maya and make it move in some way. I made a star with my initials in it because my initials are L.A. and Los Angeles come to mind when you see those letters. Then I had my logo spin in like it was the main event of the show. Then I let my scene and set up a camera for this and then exported it.






House: This is the last Maya project I've done. I had to model a house with gutters and windows and a chimney. I needed to make holes for the windows, the door, and the garage. I had to find textures for everything and line them up so it wouldn't look weird and all. Then I had to light everything. The picture on the left isn't lit up but the one the right is.


After effects projects:

Moving Layers: I made a moving carpet ride. I needed a few layers of stuff. So I took stars, and many mountain into Photoshop because I'm done with Maya for now! So each picture is a different layer and the farther back each layer is the slower it will appear to go by as the ones closer up go by at a faster speed. I had the Magic Carpet and the lamp go up and down on a path and I enjoy this little animation.






Graffiti: This is an after effects animation. I talked about this in April 2014 if you want to look at that blog post. I think I named the post Copilot Animation:Graffiti or something like that so look for that. But I had a wall and a floor that we're 3-D layers and had my name masked and eventually looked like it was being written on the wall and then I timed out paint splatters from a package of stuff from video copilot. The paint splatters needed to be re matted and needed to be recolored. The paint and my name are also 3-D layers so they look like they are on the wall instead of floating things in space. Then I added the camera.

Bomb Effects: This is an explosion tutorial also from Video Copilot and I haven't blogged about this one. This video has you bring in a flame and time it out in the area and then add debris, dust, and smoke. The smoke you have to recolor because it was white. Other effects you have to do it make a mask so it goes behind the lamp post instead of in front of it. Then you should lighten up the explosion so it looks like a flash of light and then above the explosion you should add a light because light reflects on things when other things explode so that was added to make it seem more natural. Other things included adding another more subtle flame behind everything. A different dust was added so it seemed like dust was falling from windows above the place where the explosion happened. All these effects are supposed to help the explosion look more natural instead of the video look like it was all totally fake. A struggle was timing everything out and making everything the right size. It had to be just right, not to big or to small and finding the happy medium was not fun. Don't worry, I did get it.

Final: My final project was like the last bomb effects project but in a different setting. I also used a jpeg as the background instead of a movie.