Captains log - Week 2

       This week wasn't necessarily a very big week for me in terms of animating. I think out of the 5 total days in a school week, I only animated for one of them. The reason for the being I was busy building and finishing my 3D scanning box. That project has been going quite well. I'm nearing the finishing steps on it, but it's taking me a while to finish. The only things I have left to do are to paint it, attach the lazy Susan, and attach legs to the bottom to elevate it off of the platform slightly. Once I have completed those tasks, we will have a fully functioning box. The only thing that would be left would be to get the Kinect software that we can use to do the actual scanning and processing. But I think Gregg is in charge of that.

       In terms of actual 3D animating, the only thing I really did was work of the face of the Joan of Arc project. It went pretty well, and it wasn't that difficult.Unfortunately I do not have any images of what I did yet because the computer I am currently using is not hooked up to the server yet and I have no way of retrieving my project or information. That is basically it for this week.

                         This has been a PSA,
                                                            Captain out

Captains log - Week 1

       It's been so long since I've posted. I've lost track of time. We have to start from the beginning. We have to go back to week one.

       So this week has been pretty interesting. We started modeling our "Joan of Arc" character, and that has been going pretty well. By following a tutorial on the internet, I have (so far) been able to make a character using the box modeling technique. This character is nowhere near completed, but it's something.

       To complete this task, I started with the reference images. By following the tutorial, I placed two planes onto my scene and pasted some images on them. These images help me trace the outline of my character while I continue to model her. The way that I am actually modeling her is very simple. I started with one simple box, and the rest of the body is just an extrusion of that one single box. By using the extrude tool, I managed to manipulate that single box into the character I want it to be. But just extruding the boxes isn't really enough. I also have to move the polys and vertices into the correct position so that each body part comes to a proportional size.

Anyways, that's all I've been really working on this week. It is a fun, yet difficult project.


                            This has been a PSA,
                                                                  Captain out

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