24 Hour Animation Competition [Fifth Place!]

Last weekend I participated in a 24 hour animation competition, battling against 32 teams of five, from 7 different schools.  The prompt was given to us at the start of the 24-hour period so literally every aspect of the project had to be done in that time.  This year's prompt was:

“Curiosity landed at 10:32 p.m. PDT Aug. 5, (1:32 a.m. EDT Aug. 6) near the foot of a mountain three miles tall and 96 miles in diameter inside Gale Crater. During a nearly two-year prime mission, the rover will investigate whether the region ever offered conditions favorable for microbial life.  Curiosity returned its first view of Mars, a wide-angle scene of rocky ground near the front of the rover….
Or was it something else?
What did the Mars Rover REALLY find?”  

It was quite an experience for everyone.  I had never used Adobe After Effects or Premiere, nor had I animated so many characters in one shot, nor had we ever done a full collaborative film ever.  So it was a lot of new things we learned.  I did three scenes of animation, some character design, and some coloring.

We ended up with fifth place [placing us high enough to get some prizes], and another SJSU film took first place.

Here is the film:

Here is one of the pencil tests I did:

Click here for a playlist of all the films.

The dialogue said by the Newsman/NASA scientist is Franz Kafka's By The Law:

"Vor dem Gesetz steht ein Türhüter. Zu diesem Türhüter kommt ein Mann vom Lande und bittet um Eintritt in das Gesetz. Aber der Türhüter sagt, dass er ihm jetzt den Eintritt nicht gewähren könne. Der Mann überlegt und fragt dann, ob er also später werde eintreten dürfen. „Es ist möglich“, sagt der Türhüter, „jetzt aber nicht.“ 

Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. A man from the country comes and prays for entrance to the law.
But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant him entry. The man thinks it over and then asks if he can enter later. "It's possible," says the doorkeeper, "but not now."

129A Maya update

Man, I haven't updated in forever.  That was considering that I felt my final projects last semester weren't the best that I could do.

Anyways, here is some advanced modeling stuff for my 129A class.  We're making L4D zombified versions of ourselves.

First pass with only dried blood.

Second pass, added straps and more blood.

Rough simple hand.

Forest Thumbnails

Some quick thumbnails done in Paint Tool SAI for the final forest rendering.

Fuzzy Acorn

Gotta lighten up some of the cap edge closest to the light to give it a bit more roundness.  Otherwise, I'm good to go.

Egg Progress

This was the first egg I had ever painted.  Did this last semester and came out pretty ugly.

This was a required redo of the egg which came out a little better than the first but still had some problems.

This was the egg we had to do in color [mine was placed on a sheet of green colored paper] this semester.  The instructor was impressed.  Still got a long way to go.

Team Fortress 2 Hat Modeling

For our final project in Maya modeling, we made hats for Team Fortress 2.  Steam has a workshop where users can make and submit items to the workshop for consideration in the game.  My hat was a last-minute-conceived angler fish hat.  All the modeling, mapping, and texturing was done without instruction [the only advice that I asked for was how to use the nCloth function].  I'm quite proud of it actually.

 

Here is the model without texture applied.  In these, I forgot to soften the center seam since the piece was mirrored.  The Pyro head model was provided by Valve.

The first run in TF2's itemtest.  Steam's Source SDK was initially tough to work with and miraculously I was able to get it to export.  I wanted to test out how it looked with the low-poly version [the first image] and how it would display in-game.

 After a few tweaks in Photoshop, I rendered the final hat that I would turn in.  TF2 tends to make objects super shiny in the itemtest, so it seems like my spec map didn't do much.  I also finished painting both the RED and BLU versions.

I also tried the hat on the other classes just to see how it would look.  The Sniper was the only other class that the hat fit decently on, besides the teeth clipping into his ears.

I plan to continue with this project so I can submit it to the Steam Workshop and if luck is on my side, get it published.  I received some good constructive critique and positive reactions via players on reddit and tumblr, which is useful to see what the TF2 community wants to buy.  The hat itself is one still object, so I'm going to try some things to that the lure and fins can move corresponding to how the character moves.  Also I am going to add a glow effect on the bulb.

Maya Projects

I signed up for this class last-minute after the faculty opened up a new section, which pushed me to take 3 studios in a semester.  Initially I disliked Maya because it was giving me a lot of problems and I was a Photoshop newbie.  Gradually, I found myself liking it more and more, and now I really do miss the class.  I've learned quite a lot from it, and my professor Dave Gustlin is awesome.  

Here are the renders of my projects.

Our first real project, a Native American shield.  We learned how to make UV maps and color maps.

A Civil War-era belt buckle.  This project taught us how to paint bump maps in Photoshop.

An old trade knife.  We applied a specular map [for shininess] plus the color maps and bump maps.  Probably one of my favorites of the class projects.

A bullet and cartridge.  Taught us how to use AO maps and reflections.  

A Native American war club.  This was a last-minute-proposed project when my professor, Dave, decided we should learn how to model using NURBS [Non-uniform Rational B-Splines].  Yeah, I don't know what that means.  The feather was just an image that was fixed up in Photoshop.