Final and Reflections

The final went much more smoothly than the midterm did (which has magically reappeared in the folder, much to my surprise). I started with a couple key scenes and added more until I ended up with a 25 second commercial.  More Maya work went into than I previously expected, mostly because it wouldn't cooperate with rendering every time. I'm pretty happy with how the masks in the TV set and DS came out. The PC is a little wobbly so I opted to use that as the last scene and have the title zoom over it as a sort of distraction. The sound is probably my least favorite part because I'm limited to sub-par equipment and it can pick up white noise in the best conditions.

The wobbling PC scene and my shameless distraction

I did most of the special effects (particles, masking, color correction, some of the motion graphics) in Combustion and put it together with transitions in After Effects. The audio was recorded in Audacity. The text effects were done in Illustrator and Photoshop.

The final product...

Storyboard for Final

This is the first storyboard I drew for the final. My concept is a commercial for a game a friend and I were working on. It features rubber ducks, so I planned to recycle a duck model I made in Maya last year.

The first two frames are the sort of infomercial gimmick where they depict life as dull and grey until the subject of the commercial is introduced; compare the normal boring rubber ducks with the magic swimming Maya ducks.

The next part would describe the game, preferably with two actors playing against each other. The commercial would end with the game title and a release date. Down in the corner are my notes about what techniques I might need to employ; Maya, particle effects, motion graphics, transitions.

Rotoscoping

I realized that my old homework was unusable due to a missing file so I did a new one. My original rotoscope was sort of a failure anyway; I tied a toy to a string so I could make it dance on my desk and later edit out the string, but the trackers were all wrong and it didn't work. So here's one of my gerbils walking around outlined in blue.

Drawing over the frame stuff like Walking Life was the kind of rotoscoping I was most interested anyway, and the only reason I didn't do it at first was because I was having trouble getting something easy for me to animate. I wish we had the kind of program the Walking Life studio used to interpolate frames, but they are unwilling to release Rotoshop to the general public.

The anything goes homework

For homework I was smart and tried to do something for my final.

 

It's the magic animated ducks in the sink. I rendered a video of them swimming through air and resized them until they fit in the sink. I used a still image rather than a video because initially I tried to zoom in with a camera, but it was tricky to get the scaling to look good. I think the particle effect is a nice touch, even though I had to do it by hand because the tracker wouldn't cooperate.

 

I tweaked the emitter a lot. It's so useful to know after the problem I had with the tree before.

Particles

My idea for the particle effects homework was to make a fall tree from the leaf effect and change the colors from green to red and gold. This is what I came up with at first:



It looks kind of like a Minecraft tree, and the falling autumn leaves particle is invisible. In class, after adding a mask to the leaves, moving the autumn leaves to a different layer, and making two layers of the tree trunk so that it would work properly, it looks like this:



I couldn't find how to change the colors of the particles at first so I took a screenshot. You have to go into the particles menu and make sure the last node is selected.

3D composite

Exploring the ocean in my submarine.

I used a background image from Google for the water and stretched it out so there would be lots of room for the sub to go. The kelp are closest to the foreground, the sub's in the middle and everything else is way in the back. The camera and sub are keyframed to move to the right.

2D composite

My first homework was a 2D composite where Roscoe and I fight a giant praying mantis.

Originally the FIGHT had a fiery texture using the Set Matte operator, but when I opened the file to take a screenshot it wasn't there.