Captains log - Week 14

       Honestly, not much exciting happened this week. I basically made the final changes to my character clip. None of which are very significant. I think the only things I fixed or changed was the way in which the biped falls through the air, and the way he lands in the water. But they're very minor changes. The production of my character clip is 100% done, but it just needs to be rendered.

       The other things that I worked on this week was Mr. Smiths factory arm. I didn't work on it too much though because I was more focused on fixing my character clip, but this is what I got done.

It's not much, but it's something. Anyways, it was a pretty straightforward week.

                       This has been a PSA,
                                                         Captain out

Captains log - Week 13

       This week has been a pretty big week for my character video. I have gotten a whole lot farther this week than I was last week.

       One of the most noticeable things I did this week was that I placed a green-screen behind my helicopter. The purpose of this is so that I can easily create the image of a moving sky behind the helicopter using adobe premier. I still have to light up the screen a little better, but it's going pretty smoothly thus far.

The only problems I need to fix with the green screen are light up the corner so that there is no black shading, and reduce the shinyness of my helicopter so the you cannot see the green reflecting off of it.

       The next thing I did to my scene was I finally got the door placement 100% correct, and I got my biped/character to jump out of the helicopter. My overall goal with this project is to have my character jump out of the helicopter, and land in a large pool of water. So far I have all of that animated, but all I have to do is add some water at the bottom of my scene, which won't be too difficult.

 

The animation isn't as smooth as I would like it to be, but it is definitely presentable, and the best I can really do. I've been struggling with the animation of this guy, so I am really happy with the results. I should have this scene totally rendered out by monday.

                   This has been a PSA,
                                                         Captain out

 

Captains log - Week 12

       This week I worked a lot more on my helicopter, and a little bit more on my character. The main thing I did this week was that I finally was able to cut out a nice looking door for the side of my helicopter and get it to open.

This was honestly a very difficult task because I was having a lot of trouble figuring out a way to cut a hole in the side of my helicopter, and then making a shape that fits over that hole perfectly and works as a door. I was able to accomplish this by making a copy of the body of my helicopter, and deleting the outer poly's, forming a square, and then deleting the inverse poly's on the original copy.

The other thing I accomplished this week was placing my character inside of my helicopter. All I had to do was scale my copter to the correct size, and insert my character into the scene. And it works nicely because you can see my character through the windows of the helicopter.

Overall, I think this works very nicely, and I am happy with the results. I also worked on the inner part of the Helicopter, by making walls to form the inner area, and adding a floor for my character to stand on. It didn't take me very long, but it looks quite nice.This is what the inside of the helicopter looks like.

Anyways, that's pretty much all I did this week.
  
                                          This has been a PSA,
                                                                             Captain out

Captains log - Week 11

       Week 11 has been quite an interesting week. Throughout the duration of the week, we mainly focused on creating and modeling a character or figure by rigging a mesh outline of a character to a biped. The creation of the mesh skin itself was not a difficult task, and neither was adjusting the biped to fit inside of the mesh. The issues lied within the rigging of the mesh to the biped. Whenever I would try to move a body part, some of the mesh from a different limb or part of the body would move with it. And when I tried to adjust it, not all of the limb or body part would move with rest of it.

Here is a clear example of my failure at the rigging process:

       Another thing I focused on this week was finishing up and fixing my helicopter. My final plan for this project is to have my biped/character jump out of the helicopter while it is in flight and land in water. The only difficulty with this project is that I seem to be having trouble animating a door for my helicopter. I have created the windows on the sides, and finished almost everything else, but creating sliding doors for it seems to be quite the difficult task

The other thing that I'm having some trouble with is animating the window for the cockpit to its final shape. I've been able to modify it to something that looks better than what it originally looked like, but it still needs a lot of work. I suppose I am slowly making progress with that part of the project.

Here is what the codified cockpit currently looks like:

 
It still needs a lot of work, but it's slowly getting better and better each day.

                                     This has been a PSA,
                                                                             Captain out

 

Captains log - Week 10

       This week was pretty interesting. Since we were still locked out of MAX for more of the week, we learned how to use Maya and Flash. Maya wasn't super interesting, but I do like it more than MAX. The reason for that is because there are a lot more possibilities with Maya. There are just more options and settings. I'm choosing to stick with MAX though because I actually know how to use it, and Maya just keeps confusing me. Flash was pretty fun though. I haven't used the program since I was around 10 or 11, so it was nice to revisit something I used to do. When I was in flash, I created the official Monsters Inc. 2 movie. It was quite a success, and I'm positive that Disney will be more than satisfied with my final product.

Here is a sneak peak of my Movie:

But other than my awesomely created movie, we FINALLY GOT BACK INTO MAX.
This was really exciting because I've been trying to work on my helicopter for 2 weeks and I can finally finish what I started. The helicopter is a totally random and completely pointless project, but it's fun and I'm enjoying it. The main thing I have to do on the helicopter is create and model a window for the cockpit, and maybe model some cockpit accessories, but other than that I'm almost finished. I haven't decided what I want the helicopter to do in terms of an animated video, but I'll figure it out soon enough.

Here is a picture that shows the progress I have made on my helicopter over these past few days:

It's not completely done yet, but it is definitely a project I pan to finish.
  

                                         This has been a PSA,
                                                                             Captain out

Captains log - Week 9

       This week, we were locked out of MAX... Again...

       Mr. Smith kept me away from my beloved Helicopter for another cold, and long week. So to get back at this evil Smith Lord, I decided to totally destroy him in a bet that will ultimately result in him doing 30 humiliating push-ups in front of the whole entire class. The bet was on who had the better video? Mr. Smiths dumb little genetic video, or my AWESOME Star Wars Episode 7 movie. The class hasn't decided yet, but come Monday, they will decide on who's video they enjoyed more. I'm almost positive that my video will come out victorious, because the plot is stupendous, and the special FX are top par. 

Here is my perfect video:

  

       And on a productive note, this week we spent a lot of time working on Kuder navigator. I typed in the few careers that I'm interested in, and compared them based on education and salary. The first career that I'm interested in is becoming a Police Officer. I am currently in pursuit of this career, and am already doing special programs to achieve my goal. Education wise, I technically do not need to do anything. But I plan on getting an AA in Criminal Justice or a class of that sort. And once I graduate from the JC with my AA, I'm going to apply to the police academy at the JC and hopefully graduate from there. The average earnings of a patrol officer is about 112k per year, so if all goes well, I will be living a pretty well organized and successful life.

       The only other career path I can really see myself pursuing would be something along the lines of becoming a therapist. The reasoning behind this decision is that a lot of my friends come to me for advice on various things, and I've even had my friends mom come to me for parenting advice once (which is weird considering I don't have the slightest knowledge or experience on parenting). But if I can currently help people and give half-way decent advice without any actual education in this field, then I believe that if I were to get an actual education and real training in this field, then I would definitely be able to do my job as a therapist rather efficiently. In terms of education, I'm not really sure what I'd exactly have to do because Kuder doesn't have a therapist as one of their options, but based on other related jobs, I believe that I would have to receive a graduates degree, and some form of state license. And in terms of salary, it appears that I could make somewhere between 75k and 100k per year, which is definitely a comfortable pay.

I already have my mind set on becoming a police officer, and based on this short little compare and contrast thing I did, I have come to the conclusion that it is definitely the better choice. By becoming a police officer, I would save a lot of time on education and school because I do not need a graduates degree. I would also make more money as a police officer. So out of these two choices, a law enforcer seems to be the most desirable choice. But who knows. Life is weird.

   

                                        This has been a PSA,
                                                                             Captain out

 

Captains log - Week 8

       This week I mainly focused on modeling. During the time we weren't watching presentations, I was modeling this really cool helicopter. I was going to post a picture of this awesome helicopter, but as we are currently unable to use 3ds MAX, I will not be able to provide such a picture. The helicopter is coming along rather nicely. I have almost finished modeling the the shape and design of the helicopter, and I plan on finishing the color scheme of it sometime next week. I haven't decided what type of helicopter I want to make it yet though. I'm thinking of either making it an army helicopter, or a search and rescue helicopter. There is no real purpose behind this helicopter. I just randomly decided to make one at the beginning of the week and now I'm pretty hooked on this project so it's going to be something that I finish.

       The other thing that I worked on this week was animating bones and skin. I learned how to place a skin around some bones, and I learned how to animate them in a way in which it looks like an actual limb is moving. Although this week wasn't super eventful, and we weren't actually taught a whole lot due to presentations, I still managed to get a decent amount of work done. Which I'll probably show in next weeks blog post.

                                       
                                        This has been a PSA,
                                                                             Captain out

Captains log - Week 7

       During week 7, I solely worked on my project in premiere. I basically took the original rendered MAX version, and just added some splash and noise effects to bring it more to life.

The only real difficult part about editing this intro in premiere was finding decent splash/explosion effects, and color-correcting them to look the same color as the water. It wasn't that difficult though. Just slightly time consuming. Anyways, I'm quite content with the outcome of my intro. But I do hope to improve it at some point in the future.

This has been a PSA,
                                                       Captain out

 

Captains log - Week 6

       This week I spent all of my time working on my intro for "unpeeled". I finally animated my banana, which I think I talked about last week, but I also animated a few more things to go a long with it and rendered it.

I didn't really learn much this week, because I already knew how to render and use adobe premiere, but I did render my first video this year. That's all I really have to say about this week.

This has been a PSA,
                                                       Captain out

 

Captains log - Week 5

       So, week 5 was not my greatest week. The assignment was to start creating an intro for ourselves, and that has turned into an absolute fail for me. I wanted to make an intro for Carlos, Brant and I's comedy show called "unpeeled". My goal was to make a banana that un-peels itself, and the inner banana says unpeeled. I didn't even make it remotely close to my goal. I made about half of the banana before I realized that this was going to be a very difficult task.
here's prototype 1 of my banana:

I've made many other banana prototypes, but this was the very first one I made, and the only one I've saved. I accidentally made an eggplant instead of a banana.

       The only thing that I somewhat succeeded at was learning to use bombs. I blew up some text, and that's about it. It's pretty basic. I tried to modify the explosion with some gravity modifiers and such, but none of those worked either. So this was barely a successful project.

Before

After

I also learned how to use cameras more effectively.

This has been a PSA,
                                                       Captain out

 

Captains log - Week 4

       This week has been a very eventful week. I've learned a lot about shaping the default shapes into something else using the "edit poly" tool. I knew how to use this tool prior to this week, but I definitely used the tool a lot more effectively this week. The main project I've been using the tool for is my "Tony Hawks Pro Skater 4" project. The high-tech skateboard animation I created used edit poly tool/modifier, and the mesh smooth modifier quite a lot. Here is a quick display of just the skateboard

The trucks (Displayed in the first picture), and the deck (Displayed in the second picture) both required me to use the edit poly tool. I manipulated certain points on each of them to give myself the main shape of the items, and then I used the mesh smooth tool to make them look a little cleaner and nicer. I did mess up on one of the trucks because I did not clone the entire thing, meaning both sides are not completely symmetrical, but I plan to fix that later.

       The next main thing I've been working on this week is using the slate modifier and editor tool to place pictures or textures onto shapes and designs I have created. I pasted Carlos' flawless face on a sphere to give the human I have been animating a more realistic feeling (even though the human animation isn't very realistic to begin with). I also pasted the Mexican flag on a box to make Carlos holding a mini Mexican flag, showing his pride for his country. I used this perfect replica of Carlos to create an animation of somebody doing a quintuple heel-flip. Here is a display of what I have been talking about.
       This screenshot was taken in the middle of the animation in which Carlos is committing to a quintuple heel-flip. The last thing I've been trying to do is use bipeds effectively. It didn't turn out so well, but I was able to make the biped to scale with the skateboard, and I was able to place him on the skateboard. I was unable to actually make an animation with it though.

 

This has been a PSA,
                                                       Captain out
 

Captains log - Week 3

       This week I started to mess around in the 3DS program. I spent most of my week designing the new Harrier for Call of Duty: Ghosts with Carlos. I must say that I am very impressed with my work, and I'm sure that fans of Call of Duty will really enjoy the game that Carlos and I are creating.
This is the official design for the harrier:

As you can see, I used high tech programs and animation skills to come up with this design. With the help of Carlos, I was able to make an exact replica of a US harrier that is currently being used by the United States army. But in all seriousness, it took me all week to create this small scene, and it wasn't easy for me. I learned how to use the boolean tool, and I also learned how to shape and manipulate objects using the "Edit Poly" modifier. I may not have created the best plane using these tools, but I tried my best and this is what I came up with. Carlos taught me how to take a normal 3D plane, and change the color of it to a picture that I saved to the computer. So that really helped me create my design for the new Call of Duty Harrier.

                       This has been a PSA,
                                                       Captain out

Captains log - Week 2

       This week I started using a lot of the 3ds Max program. We've been doing quite a few small projects, such as building a snowman and learning to make text, but I've been working on a semi-project throughout the duration of the week. My project is called "The City", and basically I am just creating a small layout of a city using the skills and tools that I have learned since the beginning of school.

       
       This screenshot shows the whole layout of my city in progress. I know it's not great, nor complete, but I created this in a short amount of time using the little amount of knowledge I currently have of the program, and animation in general.

       This screenshot is a close-up of what I'm really trying to accomplish. The actual 'movie' aspect of this animation is simply a poorly animated car driving down the road, stopping at a stoplight, and finishing it's drive once the light turns green. I'm also working on stacking items on top of each other, as you can see on the building in the far back with my use of windows, the road with it's yellow painted lines in the middle, and the building on the left with the door. The project is going well to my standards, and I am learning new ways to modify it every day.

                       This has been a PSA,
                                                       Captain out

Captains log - Week 1

       I didn't do very much this week. The only thing I truly accomplished was successfully creating a blog for my 3D animation class. I even missed a day of school due to my horrendous illness, so it's quite possible I missed something. But from the sounds of it, I didn't miss anything important.

                    This has been a PSA,
                                                       Captain out