e-Communications: Overview (Final Blog Post)

Final Blog

This being my last year at Olathe Northwest and in the e-Comm program, I participated in our Senior Show. The e-Comm senior show is a time when every senior in the program, not just animation, got to show off their projects to everyone who came. To prepare for this I had to put together a demo reel with a compilation of my work that I am most proud of. On top of that we also had to create business cards to give away (I struggled with this part because I am no Graphic Designer). Overall Senior Show was pretty exciting and I had a good time talking about my work and about my other interests for anyone who came to my table.

My Demo Reel

In my demo reel I had included projects from both my junior and senior year. The first Project that can be seen when watching it is "The Bagman"which is about a really lame superhero who believes a pizza man to be a villain. I made this project with my friends Alan Seidl and Jeremy Ingalls during the 1st semester of school. For the most part I did the modeling. I created Bagman, the Pizza man, all but one building, I helped with the moped, and I had also rigged the characters.

The next project that can be seen is my "Time" project. Last year everyone had to make an animation that related back to the theme of Time. For this project I created a grandfather clock that has hands that are rapidly spinning. This project didn't take a whole lot of time to created but it was still rather difficult. I tried pretty hard to get minute details on the outside of the clock so it would look presentable. I had not done any lighting for it last year, mainly because I didn't know how to properly light a scene, but now that I am somewhat competent in the subject I had lit the clock and put it in my demo reel.

Another project included in the reel was another group project between Alan Seidl and myself. We had each created a pirate ship and I made most of the scene to put them in. This, along with Bagman, had taken up most of my time this year. The hardest part of this project was that the water kept on crashing the project when we tried to render. As it turned out it was how the lighting was hitting the water that was causing this so after fixing that we had to quickly re-render all the scenes put it all together.

My next project was just a sword that I had spent a week on or so. Its certainly not my best project, but I had spent some time on it so I decided to included it in my demo reel. Another project in the demo reel that I had briefly worked on last year was the Diner. At one point I wanted to have people in it, but junior year I wasn't ready to make a person yet, so I had dropped the project entirely. Looking back on the environment, I liked how it had looked, so I touched up a few things and had lit the scene.

I also had made a generator which I have posted about in the past. It was a mechanical model that I spent a long time on last year in animation. I submitted this project to eMagine last year and had taken 5th place, so I think this is some of my better work. To make this I had a reference image that I would look at and attempt to recreate the small details of in maya.

The Last project that is included in the demo reel is actually my most recent project. I just recently had modeled a knight with armor on. This is what I have been working on for the majority of 4th quarter, and I had initially planned to rig it and make it move, but due to time I have not reached that step yet. I had set up a basic rig but I didn't have time to paint weights or fix any problems with the rig. I still want to go back and rig it but for now I still included it in the reel.

Aside from Senior Show, just recently I had one of my group animations entered in the media festival eMagine. We submitted the project "The Bagman" which I had made posts about in the past, into the character animation category. I was very proud with the final outcome of getting 5th place, considering there are very few 3D animations in the Character animation category. I think we could have placed higher if we had spent more time making the animations smoother, but we had a deadline to meet so this was an impossibility. No matter how we could have done, I was very happy to see our animation get top 5 and be played for everybody to see.

Overall, e-Comm has brought me countless hours of joy over my high school career/ I've learned so much about Animation as well as basic video, design, and web design techniques. This program had helped me choose my career path that I will be pursuing during college and has forever shaped mu future. I guess thats why 21st century programs were made in the first place, to allow students to have an interesting career path and think about their future as early as freshman year. But eComm has far surpassed what a 21st century program should accomplish in terms of quality. I have never been excited to go to a class and learn, but with my two hours of animation of every day, I can say that those were the highlights of my week. I will never forget what I had learned in this program and I will always be grateful for such a huge opportunity. Animation had changed my future and made my years in high school an absolute blast and I hope other students in the future can experience the same.

Tutorial- Cameras + Lighting

Camera + Lighting Tutorial

Lighting

Start with an empty scene and create an empty plane so you can see the lighting once we add it later.

Afterwards go to Create>Light>Directional light to choose the light that you will be using most of the time. It creates light in the general direction that it is pointing. To have a scene properly lit you will most likely need three directional lights covering most of the scene with varying intensities. This is called three point lighting

You can also use other lights by going to Create>Light>... These other lights include spot light, which creates a light in a cone shape. Another light is the ambient light which projects light in all directions around it.

You can go the Channel Box to edit the intensity color or placement of any light that you set.

You can also press the 7 key on your keyboard to view the lighting in your scene as you work on it.

Camera

Next up is cameras. To Create>Cameras>Camera. It creates a camera that you cad move around. To view through the camera go to double view and on the left screen go to View>Cycle Through Cameras. You can move the camera around and you can see the camera through the 1st person view on the left side of your screen. you can even set a key frame at 0 to lock it in place.

Hopefully with this little bit of knowledge on cameras and lights you will be able to properly set up a scene for your project.

Superhero Project Semester 1

                                      Superhero Project

      For the first quarter of senior animation I'm making a group, story animation with my friends Alan Seidl and Jeremy Ingalls. For the Project we are having a "superhero" who is very bad at his job take down an evil doer, who in reality is just an average pizza guy. It's taking place in a city environment. We split up the work so it would be a lot faster to finish the project. Alan started to work on the first scenes environment and just started on animation. Jeremy started to work on the second scene. I worked on both the main character and pizza man, which including modeling and rigging the character. Because I finished my characters, because I spent some time out of class, I'm helping Jeremy and Alan finish the scenes. We've had some problems with the rig because it was my first time rigging a character but for the most part the the rig ended up pretty well. We were going to have the character have a cape but after roughly two days of work on it we decided it would make animation a lot harder. I gave my two characters to Alan and he has started animating the first scene. Jeremy was having slight difficulty with the second scene so the remainder of my efforts are being used on helping Jeremy finish the second scene, then i'll probably help Alan animate depending on how much he gets done.

Quarter 2 Update- In Quarter my group and I were able to finish the project. Since Quarter 1 I took over the majority of the responsibility creating the second scene. Jeremy made a building for it. Alan and I both started to animate using the rigs on 1st and 2nd scenes respectively. As we started to animate and finish scenes we would hand them off to Jeremy so he could compile them and edit them in iMovie. Overall, I feel like our project could have turned out better if we had more organization and less confusion on who was doing what. That being said I very much like the outcome of our Animation.

Article Examination- Dreamwork's Job Cuts

After reading the article "NBCUniversal to cut 200 jobs in DreamWorks Animation takeover" I find it astonishing that such a large percent of people were let go from such an iconic and large company. According to the article roughly 10% of the jobs were cut from the DreamWorks staff once NBCUniversal had taken over. The articles quotes NBCUniversal as saying that they want .  so they can represent television because of the many shows that Dreamworks has. Its the 2nd biggest job reduction that Dreamworks has gone through, the largest cut back on 20% of their work force.

Link: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-nbcuniversal-dreamworks-animation-layoffs-20160915-snap-story.html 

Grandfather Clock

Grandfather Clock

For this assignment we had to create an animation that related to time in some way. For this project I decided to create a grandfather clock. I would have thought of something more creative to make but I decided on the clock because I was preoccupied by another project at the time so I wanted to create something that wouldn't consume too much time.

To create the clock I started out with a rectangular prism and hollowed it out and made four differences on each of the sides of equal height and width. I extruded off of the difference sides to create a window on each side of the clock. To add detail I extruded off of the bottom and made a base. To create the pillars I just used a lot of the basic polygons and copied it four different times. I created the top of the clock by making a cube and differencing a cylinder through it. After I finished modeling the clock I would rotate the hands 360 degrees around the face. To do this I had to move the minute hand 360 degrees every 60 frames and the hour had moved 30 degrees every 60 frames. I repeated this until it looked like clock had gone by 12 hours. 

Even though I only spent a couple of days on this project It gave me more practice on using keyframes and mechanical modeling. I also got to practice three point lighting.

Animation Final

Animation Junior Year Reflection

During this year in animation I learned a lot while working on my own and other group project. I worked almost exclusively in Maya and with 3d modeling. The first major thing that I learned was how to manipulate vertexes. Before this year all we learned how to do was put other shapes together and union or differences them together, but learning how to add subdivisions and manipulate them really helped in creating better, more realistic objects. It especially helped when creating organic objects or characters because you can manipulate simple shapes to create a more in depth complex polygon. The other thing that I found to be extremely helpful was the soft select tool. While we had used the soft select tool in the past I had never used it to the extent that I had this year. Its extremely useful in creating chords, wires or even character bases and the body of characters. I also used tools like create text, bridge and center pivot. These tools really saved time and allowed me to get to the more difficult parts of a model more quickly. I also learned that if you want to create a more realistic model, or if you are modeling after a certain object you could always import a photo of what you are trying to create and move a shape to fit it. This was probably the most helpful tip I learned because I saw immediate improvements in the models I was creating. While I worked in Maya almost the whole time, I worked in after effects for a stop motion very briefly for about a week or two. I learned how to string together frames that you import into after effects and make them flow smoothly and steadily. I also learned various things about exporting texturing and lighting but I will get into that later.

I learned the majority of this through my instructor Mr. Netterville, primarily through the project at the beginning year, which required us to create a fish model and then animate it swimming. I found this project to be extremely useful throughout the remainder of the year because I learned most of what I mentioned in the above paragraph through this fish project. Another asset I used to learn about new modeling techniques was Lynda.com (when it was still available to us). It had a multitude of tutorials that I could watch to learn how to model. When I briefly worked in unity it also had some good staring videos so I could learn the basic principles of the program. After I stopped using Lynda, I would scour YouTube for a halfway decent tutorial. This proved to be rather hard considering many tutorials becomes outdated as Maya continues to update and other tutorials just didn’t have a good end product. But eventually I would find a good tutorial on YouTube whenever I needed to find one. Overall whenever I needed to find a tutorial or something to help me in creating a project I was always able to find it.

I would say that my biggest strength is the ability to come up with new projects and get good starts on them as well as have them look pretty good. Having this strength also leads to my greatest weakness, which is starting a project without finishing it. I have roughly three of four projects that I had started but did not finished because I had another idea I wanted to go do. It’s not that the projects were looking bad; some of my better projects are some of my un-finished one. The problem I usually occur is being able to texture or light them. I have learned a few things about lighting and texturing better but every time I have to texture something and try to make it seem halfway realistic it makes my project significantly worse. I think during the summer I’m going to make it a point to finish a couple of those projects just so I can start fresh when it comes time to start animation senior year. I’m also going to work on texturing and look at some texturing tutorials over the summer so I know how to finish projects. I feel like I’ve improved a lot though this year. My projects, while not all are complete, are looking significantly better than what they were looking like last year. I was even able to qualify for eMagine with my mechanical model of a generator. Even though I have a lot of room for improvement, I still have come along way in my 3d modeling and animation skills since last year.

One thing I would like to fix next year is that I would prefer to work by myself from now on. I decided to work in a group earlier this year and it did not end out very well. Even though when I was in this group when I made my generator which was one of my best projects, I ended up doing most of the work for a pretty ambitious project which didn’t get completed with my assets alone. 2^nd quarter through 4^th quarter I worked primarily on my own and I started to accomplish significantly more than what I was first quarter. I’m not closed minded to the idea of working in a group again its just that I prefer to work alone, and ask for input from my peers when needed.

Overall I feel like my year in animation was an educational yet exciting one. I enjoyed nearly every project I worked on, and coming to animation for 2 hours nearly everyday was the highlight of my normally dull school day. I hope to fix and improve on my weaknesses and further improve on my strengths for next year. I also plan on taking my projects home over the summer so I can finish them so starting next year I can work on entirely new ones.

Semester 1 reflection

                   Semester 1 Proegress


Hello, today I will be showing you what I have created over the duration of the first semester of animation essentials class.

For my project I worked in a game engine called unity with Jeremy Ingalls. The picture above shows my first room in the building that I made. This year so far I learned the bare basics for unity and plan on learning more over Christmas break.

My project is essintally just a building where you walk around in as a first person character. It has four rooms right now with doors that open on a timer. Originally I wanted my doors to open when an entity would go within its collider (which would be near it), however, this required coding, so I took my project home a couple days to figure out how to code in C#. After multiple hours in school and out I decided to work on other things first and I plan to learn how to code in C#.

My final produced resulted with no actual script, but they do include moving doors and colliders on every object. I modeled every object in the building excluding the cabinet, the desk, the boxes, pallets, barrels, and a wet floor soon. Things I spent a lot of time include the generator in the final room, opening the door automatically because that required me to use a system called Mechanim so I had to learn how to use that (I can't use Mechanim to its full ability currently because once again my main problem is I don't know how to script with C#). I also made a vault door but due to time constraints I wasn't able to make that open automatically.

I used maya to model and texture everything including some unused models that I might repurpose in the future which includes an untextured factory type building, a drone with a security camera on it and a robot with plugs for  hands which I also created a walk cycle for along with a jumping animation and a plugging animation. Initially I wanted to have the robot be the character that you played as, but once again this required me to figure out C#.

 A few problems, other than C#, that I came across included textures being buggy when being put into unity, Colliders not working and everything being sized proportionally. For the most part I believed I fixed those problems excluding the main one.

Overall I feel like I spent my time pretty well, I modeled some characters, environments, objects and Im learning an entirely new program. I of course would have liked to accomplish more on the Unity front but I will be working on that until I start my next project.