Thursday, December 6, 2012

Creating Stereoscopic 3D Images!

For this assignment we created stereoscopic images. I had a lot of fun doing this assignment! I tried to do an image from a Maya scene too!



Thursday, November 29, 2012

Recreating Lights and Camera in Maya

For this project we attempted to recreate a lighting setup in Maya, based on a photo. I don't think I was able to do very well on this, I wasn't able to really figure out the lighting tools, despite much effort. So I made two bad ones, to make up for it.

Photo:


Maya Renders:






Photo 2:
Maya Renders:



Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Building a Scene in Maya

My initials modeled in Autocad's Maya
One Point lighting:
Two Point lighting:
Three Point lighting:


Sunday, November 11, 2012

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Outline for the Second Term Paper



OUTLINE:

   Introduction:

-Physical law: Newton’s third law of Forces: Action/Reaction. For every force there is an opposing force in the opposite direction that is equal and simultaneous with the first.
-Thesis- Newton’s third law defines how people interact with objects or other people in a physically realistic world. However, film directors will frequently break this established law, to instill marvel and amazement in their audiences.

   Body Paragraphs:

1. Star Trek (2009): In the new Star Trek film, Kirk and Sulu fall from a platform hundreds of feet in the air. Without a parachute, Kirk desperately calls in to be “beamed up” to the ship before they are killed by the fall. Just in time, Chekov is able to teleport them back, but their momentum from falling was conserved during the teleportation, and they smashed onto the landing pad as they re-materialized. Although they began the fall on the planet’s surface, momentum was conserved for a very high fall; the force of falling should have killed them, but they survived.

2. Hero (2002): This Chinese film is full of beautiful choreography. One scene in particular features the popular wire-fu, where the actors appear to float in the air. Two enemies meet and they have a sword battle, walking on a lake and pushing off the water’s surface with minimum effort to glide up very high in the air.

3. Mulan (1998): The animated film Mulan, by Disney Studios, is about a Chinese woman who goes to war. During a pivotal battle, the General Shang is being swept off a cliff by an avalanche. Mulan saves Shang on her horse, but all three of them fall off the cliff. Mulan’s comrades save her by shooting a rope tied to an arrow, and they pull her up. Despite the incredible weight of a falling horse, a thin rope is able to hold all of them. Furthermore, one man is able to pull up the suspended weight of two people and a horse, as well as to life two others at the same time. This feat would never be humanly possible because the force exerted by the weight would be too much for one man to lift, no matter how strong.

   Conclusion:

-In these examples Newton’s third law was broken as the force exerted was at a disconnect with the reacting force.
-The ability to break physical laws is one of the most exciting things about movies. Filmmakers are constantly pushing physics to the limits and beyond, with exciting and entertaining results.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Stop-Motion Character Animation


My short claymation. For better quality video you can watch this on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRYLbxe2_a4&feature=youtu.be

This is the story of a young witch learning how to cast magic spells.


For this project, once I had finished with story, storyboards and character design, I began by sculpting my character  First I created a wire armature based on some designs that I had seen, and then I went about adding the clay to it. I used an oil based plastalina type clay and beads for the eyes so that they would be easily posable.

Once the character was sculpted  I rented some lights and went about creating a set for the scene. I tried several different lighting setups to see what would work. Lighting the scene was probably one of my favorite parts, because you can achieve so many interesting effects just by moving the light a little bit.

When I was ready to shoot, I began animating. There was a lot I learned about the difficulty of stop motion on this project. My set and character were quite small, and I kept bumping pieces of the set as I worked. The armature was not very flexible and in the more extreme poses it was difficult to work with. One trick that did help me was that because I was shooting with a digital camera, I could flip back and forth between the live view and the previous frame, just like in hand drawn animation.

 Once all my scenes were shot, I did a lot of paint fix, and I assembled the final edit in imovie and quicktime.



Music track is called "Find your Thing" and belongs to Kaiser Permanente.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012