Term 4

Holy Crap, Term 4 is over already! That means only two more terms then I graduate! Anways, crazyness aside, it was an awesome term. We had a major focus on our streams this term, so for me that meant a ton of animation! We had one class where we created animation shorts in one class period where we were given whole weeks to do previously. Then we also got into full swing into our demo reels.
I'll show some of the Animation exercises we were able to do in class:

You would be surprised at how difficult a balloon is to animate; they don't move like normal objects!

 I also got a chance to animate a quadruped, it is a little different than a human walk cycle. There are two more legs to deal with. It was still fun!

For our last assignment we were to animate our quadruped running, all I have to say is that tail is dang annoying but I had fun and turned it into a fox :)


Near the end of Term 3 I decided that Layout played into my storyboarding and illustration skills; so that I wanted to pursue it further. So my focus turned more toward layout and animation kinda took second place. Also, during this term we met with industry professionals that went over our demo reels with us on a weekly basis to help us get more focused. So what was awesome is that the school brought in a professional Layout Artist for one of the mentors. I got to pick her brain every week to know more about the industry. It was Amazing!

With my mentor I was able to lock down a pretty solid animatic, before the end of the term. So that I was given the option to try another animatic or continue with the animation of the animatic. I decided to continue with the animation to the end. That way I can showcase my skills in Layout and also animation.

So to finish off the blog I will post the first version of my demo reel storyboards. I want you to know that everything in the reel has changed... seriously I think the only thing that is the same from the original is the theme (which has been tweaked) and the asset. Enjoy :)

That is really how productions go; they start off in one form but by the time it is finished it is completely different from what is was. Don't believe me, go check out the original story of Star Wars.
alright, till next post :)

Term 3 update... sorry for being late

Whoops, I realized that I didn't update my blog with what I had worked on during Term 3 and Term 4 just finished. Sorry about that, term 3 was awesome! It wasn't as crazy as term 2 was and we started getting into the pre-production work for our demo reels. This meant storyboards, beat boards, and character designing. All that super fun stuff. I also got into premiere and started playing around with the program, it is very similar to Avid; with an Adobe spice to it so it was quick to learn. But lets jump into what I worked on during Term 3:

Term 3:

In term 3 we had our last lighting and surfaceing classes; here we mainly focused on strategies that hit all the fields of Modeling, VFX and animation. For lighting we worked on RGB lighting and Gamma Correction; and between Lighting and Surfacing class we learned how to work with Renderman. To show us the difference  between Mental Ray and Renderman: Here are some images that I worked on in lighting class:

 This first one was my first attempt in lighting with renderman; I found it incredibly frustrating. With the low light that I was going for there was a ton of grain left over in the render to the point that I had to go back into photoshop in order to fix it. It was still a good experience though!

The above image was our Gamma Correction assignment; another head ache. I had missed the original class teaching the theory but I was able to meet with my instructor about it; but despite all of that it was still a challenge to get my head around the concept. I know it now but it was still a head sore trying to get the image to look like I wanted it to.

Onto Surfacing:

 This Assignment we were working with surface shaders. At the beginning, we were given the option to use Renderman or mental ray. I attempted Renderman but again I was having issues. First everything was blue and then I couldn't get the water to look like water; the displacement was affecting all the layers and so the water took on the brick surfacing. Finally I gave in and went back to Mental Ray, which is more complicated but I was familiar with it. I was also able to fix the displacement with the alpha channels. I am happy how it turned out!

The last assignment we got in Surfacing was with fur, all the fun stuff you can do in Maya! I might have gone a little overboard with the hair but I like my hairy caveman!


I am not going to show any of my compositing stuff, mainly because the files were pretty big and I didn't want to wait around fo the upload time but here is one animation from my animation class:

It's a simple stand up animation but it was fun to do and turned out pretty good; wait I just looked at it... I'm getting better I promis

I was considering putting my storyboards up but decided that it might take too long. Maybe I'll stick it up in another post.

Ok, hope you all enjoyed the update; sorry again for it's tardyness.

Inktober

My old friends from school are having fun with inktober; so  decided to join in and try my best to get back on the illustration ball. So I dusted off my art kit and pulled out my old crow quill pen and started drawing.
Thankfully it was General conference this weekend as well which not only uplifted me spiritually but also forced me to sit down, and listen and draw. So here are the couple of drawings I've done during those great meetings.

Hopefully, I will find the time to keep drawing the rest of the month so I can continue to participte and just get more practice of the talent I love.