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.