Year's End Reflection

It's Been A Good Year

Let's Look Back

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Junior year is notorious for being one of struggle and strife, but it can also be one of learning and exploration. From Petri to Ampich-Anne, I have had many chances to look into and develop many new, more complex skills than I had the chance to last year whilst focusing on design and animation. From the trials and tribulations of this bird to the new realm of stop-motion I have been able to learn many things about modeling, project planning, scope, team management, rigging, and much more.

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From the very start of this year we had something to do. One project I did not post directly about was a fish. (from the concept art on the left) The goal of this project was to teach us all better modeling techniques, weight painting, and some ways to animate something. It was the springboard for all the modeling and rigging know-how I was to learn throughout the rest of the year. Only now do I truly understand how vital it was that we did this particular project at the beginning of the year.

Looking back upon this fish, I can directly see how it links to what I have been able to accomplish this year. Having to draft the fish initially taught me the advantages and necessity of having an image to go off of. I have repeated this technique with both Petri and Ampich-Anne, as seen in their respective posts Here and Here. Next, we learned vital modeling skills which I have taken to heart with every other 3D project since. We learned a little about UV texturing (probably the least developed skill of mine) and a lot about rigging (Which was then reiterated for me with, yet again, Petri). Each of these skills was learned more though trial and error than direct instruction. Nothing teaches you to plan ahead like having to redo the same steps ten times over due to a lack of forethought. Technically, I feel far more confident in modeling ad rigging than I did before. I feel familiar enough with Maya now as so that I can envision exactly how I intend to pul life out each and every pre-generated shape. (Maybe next year I should practice straying from those...)

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A dramatic scene from this year's group project

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Beyond those technical skills, this year has given me more vital practice in working with others. All but the stop motion project this year were my solitary ideas and solitary efforts. For me, working with those of differing skills and mindsets is a whole other ballpark of difficulty. Not to say I am introverted to the point where it hides my working: I'm not. Rather, I walk a fine line between wanting everything to go my way and wanting to sit back and watch things unfold. I generally lean towards the fist kind, however, when I have not worked with all the people involved before (and even then my trust only goes so far until I have seen them preform). I feel that this project was the most successful diplomatically for me, as I followed the mantra "If you think you can do it better than the person, you are assigning them to the wrong job". After the cooperative creative process, I was semi-burdened with the task of assigning jobs to people. Many were first picks for certain tasks like set building and model moving, but I often found it difficult to entrust some of the smaller things to others, even if it meant a mountain of extra work for myself. This is something I surely need to work on.

This industry is an industry of people, and it is nearly impossible to go into it without expecting to have to compromise and work with new people along the way. I must find and embrace my strength soon, so I can refine it and combine it with the strengths of others to make a truly skillful work. Last year was a jack of all trades, but really skillful at nothing in particular beyond concept art. That is still something I feel I excel at more than most, and I want to use the skills I have and will gain to be able to both create concepts that can be feasibly executed in these programs and to be able to execute them myself in the way I envision them.

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Looking back at all I have done, I don't think I would honestly change anything. Every project messed up, every minute wasted, showed me countless ways that I could improve myself and my project workflow. I was not as productive as I could have been mid-year, but I learned from that, in hindsight, how I could manage my time better. If I had to change something, it would be watching more tutorials before diving into something new. Maybe, if I did that, I wouldn't have to redo as much.

All thing considered, I feel this has been my most beneficial year in e-Communication to date. I have had the rare chance to explore a field that I am interested in pursuing as a career this early in my life. To me, it's best to dip your foot into the ocean of possible careers as soon as possible, as to minimize time wasted pursuing something that you turn out to hate. Maybe that causes me to put too much pressure on my early decisions, but I suppose we'll see how that directs me in the future.

I hope to keep up my posts a little more this summer, but in the meantime, this will be my school-end farewell!

Ampich-Anne: Character Modeling

Waiting, She's Waiting,

(Waiting for the frame to render...)

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Meet Ampich-Anne: a friendly girl with a robot body! Well, not actually. The real concept is a bodiless alien that can inhabit machinery, but that is not too important right now! What is important is my attempt to create her! After dealing with Petri for so long, I wanted to use my rigging and modeling knowledge on something new!


I knew that rigging a mechanical character would be much easier than doing another organic model, so I wanted to keep the specs of my project smaller so I could be able to rig and model it within the rest of the mostly gone school year.


On the left I have one of my pictures of my character, but I knew I couldn't keep to it very well: The webbing would have been nearly impossible to do with my skill set and time, there were a lot of extraneous bits on the legs I knew I would leave behind, and the shoulder and thigh joints were to unrealistic. (With that arrangement she wouldn't be able to lift her arms up straight, and I had no idea how to manage the drawn hip setup) So, I went to work simplifying the design and making it smoother. Given that I drew her a little different each time, I didn't have many qualms changing the little indiscreet details for the sake of this model.

When I started, my major alterations were to the upper arms and thighs (I added a luminescent glass texture to them) and a small skirt-shaped piece that concealed the rough end of the segmented torso. I was very proud of how the body and face and hands came out, I took many, many, gratuitous screenshots of it. There was one GLARING problem, however (and no, it was not the eyes): the shoulders (again). You see, I didn't notice the problem I had mentioned earlier regarding the arm mobility until the point when I tried to move the arms. I ended up having to redo them completely and replaced the shoulder shown above with a more doughnut-shaped one.

At this point perhaps you may be wondering why I'm showing you all of this. Is it just a model? Am I going to animate it? Am I just showing off? The answer to all of these is "maybe, we'll see". but in all honesty, this project is a kind of final thesis for me, I think. It has taken all the small lessons I learned about Maya and combined them to make this (relatively) usable character. While I have not animated it, I certainly have posed it. I think My main goal with this character was honestly light practice and modeling (both in the creating and posing sense) practice. Below are a few examples of lighting (left) and posing (right) experimentation.

Coincidentally, I worked on this project around the same time that my teacher assigned us the topic of "time". Being in animation, it should be exceedingly easy to display time in a non-alarm-clock fashion. I, however, wanted to try to show time in a still image. I wanted to show her waiting. Not being in an organic body, She could feasibly wait in one area for extremely long periods of time. My idea was to take two identical images with differing textures and fuse them into each other as if they were a before and after statement.

Here is the result! I made it go from a more lush field to a sandy wasteland, signaling a deterioration of the climate, or maybe just a season change. I have her looking to the right as if she is looking towards the future, longing. If I were to fix it, I know I would increase the shadow resolution (to avoid that blocky-ness) and maybe make the grass and sand fade into each other more instead of just harshly dividing at Ampich-Anne. It contrasts a bit too much with the gradient sky.

But anyway, I thank anyone who has been sticking around and checking on my work over the last few years, heres my final, desired result of my shiny texture rendering. I hope you enjoy the intricate reactions as much as I do!

Good Golly, Gummies!

STOP!

In the name of stop motion!

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Do you know what stop motion is? It's very likely that you have witnessed it whether you know it or not! Films such as The Boxtrolls, Coroline, and The Nightmare Before Christmas are all stop motion productions! What this means is that most if not all of what you are seeing consists of actual, tangible, 3-dimensional models that are moved minutely, frame-by-frame and taken pictures of to create a moving feature film.

It's real, and it's very, very tedious. But it is yet a passion of a small sect of the animation community. This semester our project was to incorporate stop motion into our projects! It was a group project, something I had not done since last year's E.T. clip, but I was surrounded by people I knew and somewhat trusted, and I was confident we could get something together.

The hardest part always seems to be coming to a consensus on the direction of the short. We had ideas involving clothes, living models, and most favorably, candy. The prevailing idea was a short story taking place in a kind of candy land with the stars being gummy bear villagers and a ferocious Bionicle beast. It was not meant to be long, but in hindsight we could have pulled off a longer fight scene to our benefit. After carefully crafting our edible utopia, we set the stage and delegated jobs. Sierra Draney was our intrepid photographer, Jake Combs our monster animating connoisseur, Katelyn Brule our music selector and co-set creator with Sierra and Anna Gaiche, and yours truly as the gummy moving master.

And the best part? This was our winning(ish) entry for eMagine this year! My team and I placed second for animated story!

I hope you enjoy watching it as much as my friends enjoyed eating it!

Petri Swallow: Revamped

The Bird Is Back

For the last time, however.

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Remember Petri? That yellow bird that gave me so much grief last semester? Well, I revived him! (Mostly by popular demand of my peers, however.) I wanted to make something out of him to prove that I had not spent an entire semester working in vain. (Which it really did feel like I kind of did, in a way.) 

So, I buckled down and made my quasi-rigged bird move for the audience of expectant friends and parents. And, looking at it now, it wasn't as bad as anticipated. Surely not as good I wanted, but ok.

Here it is:

Now, I know it's short and the rigging is not smooth and he never does get his drink, but I think this particular animation is a testament to this past year of animation and my growth in dealing with some particularly horrid issues and incomprehensibly frustrating challenges along the way!

JCCC Technology Challenge

Two Hours of Work, 

Four Seconds of Animation

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Hey there! 

It's been a while, I know. And it's been a while since I participated in the event I'm going to talk about, but now is better than never, isn't it? Anyway, let's get right down to it!

A few months back, I had the chance to participate in the Johnson County Community College Technology Challenge as an animator! I was admittedly quite nervous about it, since I had never participated before, and had no clue as to the criteria of the competition. I was very scared that I was going to be out of my league going, but I went nevertheless.

And oh am I glad that I did.

Until that point, I had been relatively unaware that JCCC had an animation program, let alone a rather good one. Kansas, sadly, is not a typical place you'd expect to find good areas to study in that field (But then again, here I am learning this in high school). But despite that assumption I found myself in a beautifully equipped classroom with PCs (I love them, but I hadn't learned to animate on them), tablets, and a second mac monitor. It felt like home, and the teachers that worked there were nice and very helpful, to boot.

The challenge? It was far easier than my fears of character rigging, animating a rock concert, or even having to collaboratively work on it with the people I arrived with, none of whom I knew particularly well. What was it? A logo. 

The JCCC Logo, to be precise. Our job was relatively straightforward: create and animate the JCCC Logo in Maya and create a brief animation displaying it.

This is the logo

We had two hours, and I managed to squeak out four seconds of relatively solid animation from that! (Boy, does modeling suck up time) Here are those precious four seconds:

I placed second overall for the animation category! I feel that if I had been a little less finicky with the text, and had been able to make it more straight, I could have maybe pushed into first place. But, alas, I did not. But at least I lost to a fellow e-Comm classmate!