Visual Effects 2: Fluids (kinda) in Maya!

Hi, everyone! This post is all about the horrors and absolute pains I had to go through to get my third project in Visual Effects 2 to come together properly and the end result that I am super proud of!

First off, I spent a good three days trying to get something that even remotely resembled something that could work.
Secondly, I cried multiple times as I sat and watched my projects crash, not work, and just overall bug out in multiple programs.
Lastly, it will always amaze me how simply messing with one singular slider can change an entire project.

My project was using nParticles to create a pouring water effect. After discovering the Liquid Radius slider I was in a much happier place as I watched my nParticles finally start to collide and work. I would go into more detail as to how I did it, but I honestly do not remember all my steps, all I really remember is dancing in victory when it started to work properly.
So without further wasted time, I present my final project with a playblast and render!

Software Technologies Research!

Hello, lovelies! This post is all about the research project I was assigned to do with a group! The group I worked with were Drew Kedra (http://drewkedra.blogspot.com) and Emily Childrey (http://emilychildrey.blogspot.com). We had to choose between making a basketball throw or a marble machine and as a group we chose marble machine. We had to each make two different assets for the machine, and we chose to model ours in Maya. After they were created we exported them and I was tasked with setting them up in Houdini. 

This was the set up I came up with.

Now I passed this to Drew so he could start simulating. Thats where everything went down hill. We had so many bounding box problems and had to go change our simulation from Bullet to RDB. We spent hours trying to figure this out but once we had it, we were grateful. Now it was time to pass it to Emily. More problems this time. The paddle we have in the scene spun out of control and would not work, it even crashed her Houdini so badly she wasn't able to open the scene again. So we all worked on Drew's computer to create textures and render. Where he forgot to set his render file so he had 500+ render images on his desktop. But in the end we got it done! So now for the final product!

Thank you for reading!

Adventures in Character Animation 2!

Hello, everyone! This post is all about my month in Character Animation 2!

First off, I loved this class, and I absolutely hate animating. Well I did, until this class. Our first project was to show a change in emotion during a scenario we picked. I chose to do a vending machine where the candy got stuck. I went about this thinking, "How would I react if no one was watching and harming a machine was legal?", thus the idea was born!

The above pose was one of my favorites I came up with that could actually be used. Many times throughout this month I came up with things that were just not good, and that happened simply because I was having way too much fun with this rig. Many many MANY hilarious faces were made during this month, but there isn't enough room on this blog for all of them. So now time for the final product!

My next project was to do a lip sync using audio clips provided. I chose one I had never heard before and just went with it. It was more difficult to do this one in my opinion, especially because I chose to do a turn in mine. More weird faces were made as well as the mistake below.

I had accidentally tried to rotate the spine and forgot I had every control on the spine selected. Anyway! Now to show you the final product of my second animation! 

Thank you for reading and watching! Be sure to come back and see my future projects!

The Art Test Adventure!

Hello, you lovely people! This post is all about my second and third milestones for the art test I am currently taking this month! Now for those of you who don't know how Full Sail's Computer Animation program works, in order to do a certain discipline (ex: modeling, animation, rigging, ext...) you must pass an art test for which one you want to do. I personally wish to pursue environment modeling. So this month I took on the task of adding another class to my already hectic schedule so I could get this test out of the way.

Now onto the model!

Reference Image

This is the reference image that I was tasked with matching in two weeks. The first week was modeling the pot itself and matching the lighting. 

First Try

The above image is my first attempt at creating the model and the lighting. To start it off I used a curve to create a revolved polygon shape in order to get the base shape of the pot. This worked well, up until I got in ZBrush. Now I used Zbrush to create the paper on the top because they were folds and things I personally am not able to achieve in Maya. It was going well but I was struggling with matching the reference. The edges are very soft and not distinct. I had a deadline to meet, though, and pushed on to try and get it decent. The poly count was incredibly high and not up to my standards, so in an attempt to get lower poly's I tried baking the normals. I tried for hours. My efforts were fruitless. Midnight was clicking closer so I did my lights, turned it in with a heavy heart, and vowed to fix it with the critiques I would be given. But I wasn't given critiques. 

Second Try

So once I wasn't given a critique, I took it upon myself to fix what I thought was wrong. I remodeled the entire pot. I started with a different base mesh, took it into Zbrush, and lined up my reference images in a completely new way. 

I took all my references, cut the tops off, and put them together in photoshop so I was basically "rolling" my pot across it as a sculpted to get it all in the right places. It took hours to get correctly but I was so incredibly proud of this. But the next issue was poly count and topology. It was all really shaky and not working well for UV's, so I made an executive decision and decided two pieces of geometry would be what I needed. I used the base mesh for the bottom section because it had such clean edges, and cut off the top of it when it reached the part I had sculpted. I also deleted all of the lower half of my detailed pot so it fit snuggly on the base mesh. After a few hours of quad drawing to fix edges I finally had a good model to start texturing. This is where my Milestone 3 started.

Texturing was something I really had to be strategic about. It wasn't mandatory to hand paint textures so for the actual pot color I could have used the pictures put together to make it. I chose a different route, however.

Layered Texture

I decided a layered texture would be better to do so I could avoid seams, repeating textures, and blurring that can commonly occurring when you do textures from a photo. To start, I used a ramp shader in my layered texture with the colors the pot needed. I did lighter in the middle and darker towards the top to give it the glazed look it would need. Next I started playing around with noise in a different ramp texture to kind of break apart the solid colors. Following that I did a marble texture to give it the over lapped/ not perfectly glazed texture I knew it would need. After that I tried a mountain texture to get the yellow flakes in it, but opted out of that when it wouldn't work right. I ended up finding a paint splatter like texture online, creating an alpha map with color, and doing it that way. I did that for the yellow flecks of paint and the black, to make sure they didn't overlap I gave them an offset with different repeating limits. Lastly I gave it a ramp to clear off the paint spots from the top of the pot. I followed that layered texture with another layered texture on a Mia Material so I could give it a fractal that broke up the colors in a cloud like pattern so it wasn't so perfectly colored. 

After I had that done, it was time to do the top of the pot. I clone stamped out certain areas to make it as seamless as possible and not shaded in weird places, but it wasn't enough. That is when I found the 3D paint tool in Maya. This magical tool allowed me to clone stamp directly in Maya on the model so I could clean up seams flawlessly. I spent a while working that but it was nothing too spectacular. 

Texture Test

My next step was to create the stickers on the pot itself. I spent a few hours trying to create them as projections, even going back to my Visual Development class files, but nothing was working. I then went to a back up plan. Look up how to make cards and make them all in 40 minutes because thats how long I had until my deadline. I researched and watched videos and I finally had it! I had made stickers out of cards and was proud! I finally imported it into my lighting scene and BAM! I had my final result!

Version One

Version Two

These are the final results of my Milestones. I did two different renders because I wasn't sure which one looked best, but I am so incredibly proud of both. Thank you for reading along!

Bottle Project for VSD

For this post I will be showing the different passes for my bottle that I made in my Visual Development class. For this project we had to make the bottle look like glass, put on a label, add paint/blood, and a bump for it so you can see the "company" that made it. So lets discuss the different passes!

This is the diffuse pass.

This pass is used to define the colors in the scene. As you can see I made a Dr. Pepper bottle with paint splatter all over it. The glass however does not show up. Strange, right? Well I will explain why that is in the next few passes!

This is the indirect pass.

This indirect pass shows how the different light bounces off itself to make the colors change and become more vibrant. This pass also is how the caustics (the red light on the ground) comes through. Still no glass though.

This is the reflection pass. 

This is the reflection pass that is showing the glass now! Because glass does not have a color is relies on all the reflects and refractions in order to have any kind of form. Without this pass we wouldn't have the form on the bottle. 

This is the refraction pass.

This is the refraction pass. Without this pass you wouldn't be able to see how the light bends when it comes in contact with the bottle and the liquid inside. 

Lastly this is the specular pass. 

This pass is used to help make the highlights come through more. Its an important pass to make the bottle seem more real. 

Final product!

This is what it looks like when everything comes together! It was a lot of fun to make this bottle and see how it all came together. I will definitely be able to use this in the future for many many things. I cannot  wait to see all the wonderful glass things I can make!

Character Animation One Final Project

This is my final project for Character Animation One. This was so not my strong suit, at all, what so ever. I had so many emotional moments with this project because for the most part I didn't understand the movements. I only really knew what I was doing in lab when I had someone there helping me learn, and re-reading the PDF files like crazy. It turned out better than expected though. I had to learn to take it in bits and pieces and not as a giant whole, otherwise I would get overwhelmed. Anyway, enjoy Bugsy and his elevator button push!

Visual Effects Project Three

This was my third Visual Effects project for this month. We were to make a soft body effect so I created a Vaporeon! I'm prouder of the model I made more than the video, though I think it turned out ok. I had to use a Blinn rather than Mia Material X. Originally I used the Material X because it was a higher quality but the render was on its way to taking 40+ hours. So I switched to lower quality to get it in on time. Enjoy!