Final Project Storyboard

This is my storyboard for my final project. My final project will consist of a short scene. The scene is going to start with a wide shot of a person and a record player on a table. The person then will move towards the table with the record player and the camera will move towards the record player. We then see a close up shot of the person's hand moving the needle onto the record and the record starts to play.

I also wanted to add music when the record starts to play, I think that would add a lot to the scene. 

Texture and Lighting Models

For this week, I made two different models, both using lighting and texture within the model. The first I made a bed, which included a few different kinds of textures as well as a spotlight. The second model I made was a simple chess piece with a spotlight and a texture on top. On the bed which you can see below, I used a wooden texture as well as a cloth texture, which are both 2D textures in maya. I did not run into too many problems while making these models but I wanted to change the wood on the posts to make them more realistic.

The texture on the chess piece is just a 3D texture. I put the marble texture on the chess piece and changed the marble colors and style to make it how I wanted. I really liked the way the chess piece looks, I think it looks realistic.

This is the rendered view of the chess piece with a spotlight. I really like the way this looks and I am happy with it.












This is another rendered view of the chess piece with ambient light on it. 

Simple Animation

For this week, we were told to animate something simple. I decided to animate my mug model that I made before. I changed the mug to something more realistic, which I think helped the animation a bit. It was a very simple animation, just showing the mug lift and tip over to show something pouring out. I was trying to figure out how to show water or something pour out and I looked at some tutorials but it wouldn't work for me. Anyway, I am happy with what I have because it shows what I set out to do.

Here is a screenshot of the mug in air, which is in the middle of the animation.

Lowman rig animation

For this week we were assigned a lowman rig animation, which I found to be fun. I decided to make my figure turn his head and motion to someone next to him as well as move his leg. I animated his head first, which was relatively easy. The hardest and most complex part of animating the lowman rig was definitely animating the leg. I also enjoyed animating the arm, that was a lot of fun because it was fun to play with what the hand can actually do. I asked one of my friends to also act out what I wanted my lowman to do before I animated him, which helped a lot.

This is a screenshot of the middle of the scene with the lowman. This shows you the movement of the arm, leg and head.

Surface Modeling Project

For my surface modeling project, I decided to model a cupcake with a cherry on top. I wanted to create a simple cupcake for this project but I also wanted to use the bend tool in order to make the cherry. It was a simple project but the most challenging thing was making sure the dimensions were correct. I first began with making a wire frame with the CV tool for both the cup part of the cupcake and the part that somewhat hangs out. In this picture you can see the rendered objects, the cup and the muffin top part of the cupcake. It was pretty simple getting to this part of the project.

My next image shows the icing part of the cupcake put next and the cherry on top. I used the CV tool to draw the wire frame of the icing and then I also rendered it to make sure it was aesthetically pleasing looking. The cherry was a simple polygonal sphere which I then distorted and extruded part of the top in order to create a crevice. I also rendered this part of the cherry.

This last image shows the final product with a rendered view on the side because I also added a spotlight because I thought that would look nice also. I am pretty happy with the final product, especially the stem of the cherry. To create the curve of the stem I used the bend tool which was pretty easy to use. Overall, it was a simple project, but slightly tedious.

Second Modeling Project

For this modeling project, I wanted to create a simple mug and also add a texture and render it somehow. I was able to do this quite simply, although I did run into some trouble. I started off with a simple NURBS cylinder, from there I had to make sure it was in component mode.

 Here we can see a screenshot of my initial NURBS models of the cup part of the mug and the initial handle. I realized that I needed to delete half of the torus in order to create the handle so it wouldn't show up inside the cup. This is when I encountered a slight problem. When I tried to select the components that I wanted to delete from the torus, it wouldn't perform the task the way I needed it to.

Before I pushed the middle of the cylinder to make the cup I had to make sure that there was a varied amount of sections in both the cap and the full cylinder. I also had to change the height ratio of the handle in order to make it look like it was actually meant for the mug.

I put it together, however I really did not like it as is. I thought it seemed too simple and not like an actual mug. Most mugs are thicker and have a different shape. So I decided to start all over again. But before I started again, I wanted to render it and I chose the phong and added a blue colour to it.

This was my first final draft, but I wanted to make it more realistic, so I changed the shape of both parts of the mug.

This is my final mug, I wanted to make it more realistic but I also used the same colors and also the same rendering texture, "Phong." I was happy with this final product. I ended up using polygons instead of NURBS. This allowed me to convert it into a face object and delete and change what I needed to to make the final product. 

Bouncing Ball Tutorial

I began the Bouncing Ball Tutorial with a simple model of a ball and a ring, and I positioned them where I wanted to put them. This part was definitely the easiest, as I remember most of the positioning and the actual animation part from class. I wanted to make sure that the initial positioning was exactly where I wanted it to be. I had to move around the ball a little bit and the ring also, in the picture below you can see that the ball is not in the right position. I just wanted to share an initial bump.

Next, I wanted to add the floor surface, which you can see in this picture also. That was quite easy when I had put it on the plane of (0,0,0). I also wanted to make it larger than we had it in class in order to accommodate any other movement of the ball. So instead of making it 40 units each way I decided to make it 50 units. This allowed me to play around with how many frames I wanted the animation to go for and any other kinks.

After creating the ball, I had to add some animation to it. I also remembered how to do this from class, so this was relatively easy. It was easy to create the 60 frames and select the key frames to animate it. I did not include a screenshot for this step as it basically looks like the one above. There was no rendering involved or anything other than moving it and creating a wave like animation for the ball.

After that I wanted to add some reality to the ball and the animation, which was part of Chapter 2. This was pretty simple because the notes and the scans of the directions were pretty straight forward. I played around with the curve, which allowed for a real bounce to the movement of the ball. Next, I wanted to add some bounce to the actual ball. This was done using the Squash Deformer. I had a little trouble with this step but I was able to overcome it with the help of the tutorial pages. The hardest part for me, also seemed like the easiest for some of my peers. It was moving the squash deformer to exact points to make the ball squish and move at the right points.

I was then able to add more character to the squish that the ball had. I also had some trouble with this because I entered some wrong numbers in some of the bend nodes. I then fixed it by doing this step over again. After that, I tested it out and it worked! This pretty much concluded Chapter 2. I then moved onto Chapter 3.







This photo also illustrates Chapter 2 motion bending. I wanted to show two different views and one with a mistake and one without. This is for future reference.












The next chapter deals with rendering, which I also remembered from class. I had no problems in this chapter, which was a relief. I wanted to render the models the same way I did it in class because it was something I knew and was one thing I did not have any trouble with. I selected the hypershade panel to render three different things in my scene. I added an orange sheen on the torus (ring) using the Blinn tool, which added an interesting look to the entire ring. I also used the same took on my ball, which became aesthetically pleasing. For the actual surface plane, I used a texture node. I then picked the same colors I used in class, a red and purple shade. I then had to add an actual texture on the ball using the face.iff file which was provided to us. This was also pretty easy because I remember how to do this from class. I used the 2D textures that was found in the Hypershade menu. I then selected the file I wanted to use and then put that on the ball. I had to move it on the ball to make sure it was exactly where I wanted it to be. That encompasses the rendering part of the third chapter.

I had to then add a spotlight, which was simple. I then went to the lights window and then added a spotlight to it. I wanted the light to be strong and on an angle facing the scene. It was quite easy to move and scale the light using both the move and scale tool. I had to check the position of the spotlight in all the views, the perspective, the top view and the side view. I checked the position a few times to make sure I had put it where I wanted it. The cone angle was changed using the show manipulator tool, which was shown in the notes for the class. I then started to play around with the render view, this was a lot of fun as it also helped with the position of the spotlight. That concluded Chapter 3.

I now moved onto Chapter 4, this was the part where I was going to add fire to the ring and also finish my scene of the bouncing ball. I found this part a little challenging, but I was able to get through it. I added the fire to the ring and then edited the attributes to get it to where I wanted it to be. I had to play around with it a few times to make sure it was exactly what I wanted. Another way to test out my fire, a better way (in my opinion) is to actually see the render view. I did it many times and came up with a lot of views and got many ideas on how to actually change my fire. The biggest change I made to the fire was changing the density and the lifespan, to both being larger than the default setting. I then added the streak particles, for when the ball collides with the fire around the ring.

I pretty much finished Chapter 4 at the end of this step, and was just about to render the scene with 60 frames. I noticed that the spotlight was a little off and then I moved it to where I wanted and I think I had my final product. I then rendered the project, like I remember in class and then exported the images through FCheck and had a final movie of a bouncing ball that bounced through a ring of fire!

This photo is one of the images from my final product!