Self Evaluation

Overall i think i did a decent job. I have had a lot of obstacles to to go over this semester and i don't think i could have done much better than i have. I had a great idea and story about an ant, but due to the difficulty i was not able to complete it. Then i continued to move on and started to make a neighborhood, but yet i was still not advanced enough to complete it. I realized i was trying to go to big for this project. I tried twice to do something that would blow peoples minds, sadly i couldn't finish them. I am glad i tried though. I learned some new things and i also learned exactly how good i am at animation. I really made me take a step back and look at myself. I realized that animation was not for me. I saw that even though i loved the final product, getting there was not as fun for me as it was for others. I made me see what i really want to continue to do; video editing and web design. But at the same time i am grateful that i tried this. I tried to make animations that were out of reach. I strived to do great things. After all is said and done i am still happy with my final product and watching it makes me feel good and laugh.

Story board

Here is a crappy picture of my storyboard.

The animation

Next i made the animation. I did this using key frames. I was having some trouble rigging my previous ant so i figured basic shape with key frame movement i would be able to do. I also added walls around the table to give the illusion that it was in the house. In actuality the house is much smaller than the table. I did this on accident and then came up with that tricky solution to trick the viewer into thinking i put it in the house. After that i added the music in with final cut.

The house

How i made the house was i first made a polygon box. Then i grabbed a couple vertices and pulled them upward so i would have place to put the roof. Then i created the roof from two different boxes i made. For the door i used the extrude tool and then pulled out a door shape from the faces. Then i took that same shape and pushed it back in to make the trim. I did the same thing for the windows as well. For the chimney i just made two different shaped boxes and then extruded the one on top to make a little hole. I than added a doorknob out of a sphere and cylinder. I shaded everything in with their respective color and tada i have a house. I put the house in a big black sphere to make it dark around it. I also added in a cool light inside the house.

Meatball

How i did this was actually rather simple. I first made a nurb sphere. Then i gave it a color close to a red, brown color. Then i added a bump map to it and messed with the different randomness and thresholds untill i found the type i was looking for. I didtnt want something that looked real. If i made it too real looking than i would not make it look good when it bounced. I kind of made this as a joking around parody of the bad food that people always eat.

What i had already

So i just want to make clear what i had already. I already had the table, table cloth, fork, knife, plate, and glass. The things i will talk about later are the house, meatballs, camera and use of lighting.

Proposal for final

My first proposal for my final was going to be an ant that crawled up my table that i made for my midterm. Then the ant would grab the steak from off the plate and throw it on the floor. He would grab it and walk away. That was my first try at my final. After i ran into some issues with rigging the ant i decided to part ways with the idea. So i went on to my next idea. I then decided to try and make a neighborhood. I thought it wouldnt be that hard. Wow was i wrong. I made a few housed with windows and chimneys. Then i made a street. I tried to make grass, but every time i tried sadly i failed. I couldnt find any grass that was good enough for me. So after a week of work i decided at the last minute to drop it and move on. So just a few days before the final i got an idea and rolled with it. I decided to make meatball for my table. I was able to use the house in the beginning scene, so it didnt go to waste. I made the meatball bounce as if it were made of rubber. I even gave it a rubber look to it! after the chaos the meatball was stabbed by the fork and it ends. I also added in a nice italian song to go along with it. I edited it all with final cut and i was finished.

Proposal?

I am not exactly sure what to write for the proposal so i am just going to write what i think. I already have wrote about my production log in previous posts. So right now i will elaborate on my self evaluation. I believe that i grew a lot from this project. At first i thought that this class was going to be impossible. I didnt think i was going to be able to do it. After this midterm i have changed my mind. I think that my midterm came out pretty well. I like the way it looks and am proud of the effort i put into it. The assignment was to make any 3 dimensional object in maya and animate it. So i looked on the internet until i found something that look interesting and thats is the wine glass like i previously stated. Then from there i just expanded my idea into a full dining table. I really wanted to add more, but i just did not have the time. Eventually i would like to add chairs, napkins and some kind of middle ornament. And sometime down the road add a room around it to finish it off. I found out that 3d animation is difficult, but very fun and rewarding in the end.

Final video

This is my final midterm project. It was rendered with maya software and not in menta ray like i meant t to be. So it does not look the way i want, but i feel it cam out to look pretty good for me not knowing anything about maya before this class.

One problem i ran into....

When i was first rendering the project i didnt realize that iw as rendering in menta ray. Apparently this is better quality and high amount of reflections. As you can see from the picture the render had a lot of different detail. All this detail was lost when i had to render with maya software.

An extra shot of the dining table...

On to the camera

The camera took me a little while to figure out what i wanted to do. I first decided to make it look like a plane was flying through it, but then realized that it was hard to see my project. So i created a circle and bent two of the sides so the camera would catch the bottom and top of the dining set. I connected the camera to the motion path and let it run for 120 frames.

Utensils continued....

Im going to bunch the next two little projects together. The next utensils i made were the forks and knives. I did this by creating a polygon. I copied a picture of a fork and knife to the background. Then just outlined both with the polygon tool. After that i duplicated both outlines and then extruded them, This gave them their 3d look. After that i had to bend and curve a bunch of vertices until both look like their respective objects. Then added blinn shaders with some reflections.

Utensils

First utensil i made was a plate. The plate was easy to make. I just created a CV curve and then revolved it. After that i just pulled some vertices to make it look more like a plate.

On to the table

After i made the wine glass i figured that making a dining set would be the next step in this project. So i took another glance on the web and found some interesting pictures. I thought about it and decided to go with a picnic looking table. I created a table out of nurbs objects. I then added a wood shader to the surface of the table. After that had to create the table cloth. I did this by creating an nCloth. Once i did that i messed around with the properties until it would fall properly. After that i made it so that the table would be a solid object because if i didnt the cloth would have fallen write through it. Then i had to play the scene for about 3000 frames untill the table cloth fell the way i liked. I then added the table cloth shader.

Start of Midterm

I started my project with a simple idea of making a wine glass. I got this idea form looking around the web. I noticed how cool 3d wine glasses looked and wanted to try it. This is my first part of the project that i finished. I did it by creating a CV curve and then revolving it. I added a blinn shader and messed around with all of the properties until it fit.