Ok here is my final project with bad sound editing haha. Umm i will be sending you an email with the zipped file of it so you can take a look at it a bit nicer. Feel free to check it out on youtube as well. Here is the link hope it works http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1Z0kM_aunM

I am rendering out my last scene right now.

I am very very happy how my new scene came out. I was able to play with the fur, and although it results in long render times i believe it is worth it. I will be uploading it onto this blog, on youtube and sending you it in an email, with a link on the email to the youtube upload. I hope you enjoy it.

I am also excited about getting together this summer for drawing, i hope we go through with it.

I went through some stuff in mel today.  I noticed that a lot of the syntax was like unix.  The commands took an option, i think they call them flags in mel though, and a lot of the variables have to be declared, like in C and java.

i wrote a little code to create a plane and i tried to change the color but i couldnt figure out how to.

The way i think changing color would be to assign a material first.  I looked around in the tutorials to find how to change it but i wasnt able to.  But once i find it i bet there is a color option in the material to change its color.  Probably simply called color

int $planeLength = 5;

int $planeWidth = 5;

plane -length $planeLength -width $planeWidth;

Finally

So i was finally able to get my video uploaded.  My scenes i color corrected in photoshop are not uploaded yet tho sadly.  I am having problems getting the still frames into an image movie sequence.

I have one scene in there where the dog walks sort of unrealistically and i probably should leave it out of the video, probably go back and fix him.  But i did get one scene where the dog is running really fast to look good.  Well at least a lot better than it used to.  The dog has the correct technique way a dog moves, i spent about 3 hours just trying to get him to animate correctly, and i watched many videos.  Ive come to the conclusion tho, with the dog model and rig i am using its difficult to get my dog to look realistic.  

I am very happy with my room scene, that is the one that needs the color touch up in photoshop still, but i think it already has a great color balance.  I wasnt able to incorporate a special effect to my scene sadly.  I am hoping to at least have it done by the end of the semester, im not saying that counts for anything, but i would like to see myself finish this one through.  I created my window using that as my atmospheric effect, and i created a fog on the spot light acting as the sunlight.  But the fog atmospheric effect actually didnt come through that well with my export. 

Well here is the link to my video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9LxKfuES18

Sample image

Here is one of the JPG images i rendered out in my room scene

Im not sure if you can notice the motion blur in it yet. 

 I need to get my layers rendered out so i can work on some color and atmospheric effect.  I still have a work to be done, and im never gonna have it perfect, but i want it to at least fill the requirements.  

Trouble with Layers

I finished my main scene with the table the chairs and the atmospheric affect.  But i ran into a problem where when i rendered out the layers in the batch render editor all the layers came out black.  I used an ambient occlusion on the objects in each layer (1 object per layer). And i also set the color of each object to pure white.  Im not sure what the problem is, im sure its very simple i just must of forgot a step and i cant think of it for some reason and i feel really dumb.  

Although i am happy with the way the scene came out.  i created the room all by myself.  I used planes to create the walls and i used a combination of cylinders and planes to create my window in the room.  Which you will actually never see in the video.  The walls in the room i believe look like they have depth to them, i used a useful image on them to texture it and i think it did the trick.  I also added motion blur in this scene to the ball.  I havent put the frames together yet to see it all rendered and played out, partly because i cant render out the scenes in layers but i am excited to see how it comes out.  

I did render the master layer out as a jpg and for a quick mental ray render i am very proud of the result.  Im gonna try and tackle Adobe After Affects tomorrow to see if i can use that program to play my scenes together.  I sort of want to write a code myself that will open up the images and play them at 24fps.  I cant see how that can be that difficult and im sure it will be a fun task. The great part was if i would be able to code something like that, and actually export it as a quick time file lets say.  Idk just thoughts, that may be harder than i have time for or maybe not, i will take a look into it.  

Homework

Character animating

I needed to work on my dogs animation even more.  I spent a lot of time on it the first time around but it still does not look up to par.  Ive been playing catch and frisbee with my dog the last week to check out how it moves.  It seems like the back legs never really bend and they dont move as far as the front ones. So even though the back legs move back and forth the front one are doing this at a different pace.  It is very hard to notice this when watching a dog.  i had to look for hours and i still dont think i understand.

I found a good video on youtube of a dog running in slow motion.  Here is the link to it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeErz1pl_mc&playnext_from=PlayList&p=828DD3C9C0403D5B&playnext=1&index=29

I also am very frustrated with blogspot because i cannot copy and paste into this selected area so i know that that address is probably not gonna lead anywhere.  The top of the video does have an advertisement or trademark for something called lucid movement which i bet i will check out later and may have some good stuff.  The reason i searched for dogs running on the internet is because even though i watched my dog for a long time it is still very hard to understand all the movements that is going on. And luckily i found this great clip that i hope will help me out.  If i could get the animation to look real that would be fantastic.  

Anyway i still have a lot more to add to my animation, including atmospheric effect.  If i could get dust on a dog that would be great, but i dont know if we are gonna cover that in class and i may not be able to do it on my own.  But if not im thinking of just a window and some disturbed light coming through

Homework3

Rendering using global illumination you have to make sure to turn on the right settings in maya.  You must turn on global illumination in rendering attributes in the render settings window, and the lighting attributes.  Maya help gives a tip of rendering the scene with the normal settings first and then start playing with them to get the effect and look you want.

Maya help teaches that when final gather is incorporated, mental ray will not use photons, but samples the semi-hemispherical area above points in the scene to calculate the illumination.

Ambient Occlusion refers to the darker aresas of the object, typically creases, cracks and crevices.  It is caused by indirect lights inability to bounce around and illuminate areas that are blocked by a nearby object that absorbs the light rays.  It helps add realism to the scene with shadows.

For the area light source i believe it is just the light you can pick in maya lights.  The help menu states to use them to simulate the rectangular reflections of windows on surfaces.

Basically rendering with global illumination is the same as above.  It does make you render time longer so make sure you need it and cannot cause that effect any other way.

Render layers are good because you can assign any object to multiple layers with a different material on each layer.  Which lets you create multiple images for each frame.

From the render layer editor, you can create, manage, and delete layers, layer blends, and layer overries.  You can also create render pass contribution maps for your render layers.

The master layer contains all the objects and materials in the scene.  There are two types of overrides for attributes, per layer and per object.  Per layer overrides change attributes, characteristics, or materia assignments that affect the entire layer.  Per object overrides change the value of an attribute or material assignment on an object in a specific layer on which overrides exist.

A PSD file is created during a render with each layer in each layer in your scene as a separate layer in this PSD file and with all blending modes specified as they were specified in the Maya file.

Today was my birthday.  I missed class and 

i just exported the final differently using final cut pro in order to get it working

Assignment 1

Im not sure why but when i rendered it out as a quick time movie file im not sure why but i lost a lot of the texturing.  All my uncompressed tiff frames are all fine tho.  I exported the depth map also, but im not sure if those came out right, none of the applications i have can open the file. Some of my image files are like this too.  I did try and upload both some samples of the still frames and the movie file to blogspot but ive been having a problem getting them on this site.  I do have it done tho i just need to get it to upload to this site thats all.  

Animatic

This is what i was able to come out with for my animatic. 

I had a lot of fun doing this, although i know i havnt exactly animated the dog the way i need to yet, i learned a lot about maya doing this project and i feel a lot more comfortable in doing this. I have still yet been able to fully investigate the UV texturing in maya, which i need to do because it was what i chose for the post its. One of the reasons i choose it, is because i know it is so important and i wanna become good at it.

Animatic

Ive been working on getting my animatic done now for the last couple days.  Its been setting up my room.  I bought a table model on fluid tunes, and im using that. Although setting up the walls to the room and also the floor is challenging.  I think there is a better way to get what im doing done.  Perhaps i should look into creating a large cube, and using the inside of that as my room.  Im not sure if that is possible though. What i have been doing is just creating panels and connecting them together.  

My first goal of putting the animatic together is just getting the ball path down.  Im not really interested in making it rotate or look complete yet, i just wanna get the timing and positions down first.  I cant figure out how to get the physics of the ball bouncing like Aaron Lenard did in class, so im gonna see if he will show me an example again.  I also need to work on getting the perspectives of the camera down. i think i will just add a camera to each scene, render it out, and start up a new scene with the change in camera. And basically just follow that process.  I need to get my dog model still, and im gonna try and animate him as best i can for the animatic. But im not gonna perfect it yet, until i can figure out a bette way to get the ball bounce.  

My Storyboard

I began doing my storyboard, expecting it to be around 20 frames long, but as i began to break it down, i found i only needed about 6 of them.  Im unsure if that is bad, but i really felt i covered everything a storyboard needed to cover. I broke each of my frames or scenes into the time they will run at. I described what would happen in them.  I had different camera angles, and i described what the lighting should be like.  Although i found doing the storyboard did not take as long as i thought it would, i did see how useful this would be for my project.  

I also spent a lot of time looking for models, i did find a basic model of a dog on turbo squid for around 20.0 but it was for 3D studio and i was told that wouldnt open with maya.  That kind of really upset me because i really have problems finding models specific to maya.  I found a table that was 2 dollars on turbo squid. But i do wish i knew how to create these models myself, because it seems like a table model would be pretty basic to create. 

Learning to Storyboard

On thursdays class when we were told he had to come up with a story board for our next assignment i was basically just wondering what that was, and i was really really confused on what our homework was.  Basically i just figured once i followed the google link on story-boarding and read up and learned what it was i would easily understand the assignment.  So thats where i have begun.  I read up that the story board basically contains everything needed for the project to be completed. For example graphics, video, sound, text, audience interaction, color, type fonts, type size, etc.  It basically just needs to be detailed so there is a clear understanding of what the project will exactly look like. 

Every storyboard  must include:

1. A sketch or drawing of the screen, page, or frame.

2. Color, placement, and size of graphics. 

3. Actual text, if any, for each screen.

4. Color, size, and type of font, if there is text.

5. Narration

6. Animation

7. Video, if any

8. Audio, if any

I am really unsure for the purpose of our homework if i needed all of this though.  I knew a sketch or drawing was needed.  Color text and narration could all be things i can and probably will add.  Im not sure if im gonna be able to have any real animation or video, but i could suggest such things through drawings.  And i will think about the audio aspect of it.  

When actually dealing with creating a storyboard, it seems like you need to create a certain layout or format you will be displaying your ideas graphics.  I looked up a few formats in the google search, and i will basically create my own format, using the others as i guideline.  I feel using my own will be better because i can adapt it to what my project will need

Opening Maya

After yesterday's lecture i was pretty nervous about having to learn maya on my own.  Already a bit confused on some of the terms learned in class I decided i better start learning it early and as fast as i could.  So i opened up maya to basically see what it was about.  I definitely didnt recognize any of the keys or displays that the software had.  Luckily a tutorial guide opened with the program and i went through those, and i actually believe i understand a lot more of maya, just off those brief basic tutorials.  One of the tutorials was on creating primitives, and referring back to the second lecture we had in CS491 we went over nurb vs polygon primitives.  I still wasnt fully understanding these two objects so i searched around on the web for more information.  What i learned was that basically polygon modeling was the basic art of creating 3D models by building  connected polygon surfaces or by manipulating simple polygon based objects called primitives.  And what i learned is that with polygon primitives, the smoother you want your model to be the more polygons you need to add, which probably will add up to a lot and slow down your computer.  I believe this may be why we then use nurb primitives, which basically is a system that uses connecting points to create curbs or splines and connecting splines to create surfaces.  

 N -non

U -uniform

R -rational

B -

S -splines

And using nurb primitives is useful because it requires a lot less detail to create curvy surfaces.

And the tutorial i got this information from is from website is http://podcasts.creativecow.net/mulitmedia-101-podcast/basics-of-nurbs-vs-polygon. 

Another i needed to look into in maya was the use of keyframe controls.  I searched around on the internet for how to use them, but i didnt really find anything and i need to look a little more.  I will be signing on to maya more often now.  I feel a little behind the rest of the class never actually doing any animations, but i hope going through tutorials, and investigating some vocabulary learned in class i can get to the same page as them.

FinishedProject

I finished up the project yesterday.  I was able to get the notecards digitized using my digital camera and i put the files together using photoshop.  Im not sure what happened but it took the file over an hour to render using photoshop.  Finishing up the actual project was a lot of time. During my second sequence of the video, i found an easier way to draw the ball on each frame. For this sequence i really wanted to just focus on the ball and how it affected, so i tried to give it a slower motion effect.  What i did was draw each circle out on one notecard, and i used it as a guide for all of my frames.  This turned out to look a lot smoother and i liked it better than the method i had before, of just using the grid i made on each notecard.  The last scene took a lot of time, and i could have left it out but it was a fun idea and i wanted to see it through.  Shading basically took a lot more time than i thought it would be.  Although my shading wasnt as great as i liked i decided i need to take a drawing class or start drawing more.  I did feel good finishing this project though, it was a lot of work but i enjoyed it. 

Notecard animation day 2

The rest of day one i dealt with solving the problem of keeping my background image of the staircase the same in all the notecards.  The way i solved this problem is by drawing out my image on one notecard, and on that card i poked holes wherever there were corners.  Then all i had to do from there is line up my notecards and color in the holes i poked to mark where my lines should go.  This method has worked out for me well, but for the last scene my background is more complex so i am waiting to see if it will work for that.  i began to draw the ball bouncing down, and i am incorporating the distance it must change from each card, using the information i learned earlier about a ball bouncing down a staircase.  i have markings on the top of my notecards to make sure i am not positioning the ball wrong

Notecard animation Day 1

Ive been thinking about what exactly i can do to make a ball bouncing interesting and fun.  So beginning the project i decided i want to make my ball bounce down a flight of stairs.  Planning this out, i found i had to think a lot about the balls movement and path it will descend the stairs.  Searching on the internet i found if the a ball bounces steadily down the stairs then it will attain the same height above the next step as the initial drop.  Although in most cases a ball does not drop steadily down a staircase so i am gonna have to take into consideration my ball will be gaining velocity and the distance will increase with each bounce.  Drawing a few sketches out on a notecard i think im on the right track of getting an accurate path for the ball.  Also i need to consider the process of how im going to draw each staircase the same on every notecard.  Im considering different camera angles.