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.