Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Autodesk Presentation

At the autodesk meeting in the AIMM building, i only stayed for the first two presentations. Watching the first who was apart of the group, i was not as interested as i could have been due to the vast difference in use of maya. He was primarily using maya to create stills and then brought them into photoshop to enhance the effects. As of right now i do not think i will be doing much work in between photoshop and maya other than maybe making a map to apply to an object in maya. It was cool to watch as all the effects started to unfold and the image grew brighter and more interesting to look at though.

The next presenter who was from TCNJ taught about dynamics in maya and interactions between objects that have them. The bullet through the drapes with the explosion upon impact was an interesting demo to watch due to the fact that the presenter did different variations of the animation each time in addition to building it right on the spot for all us to follow and see. This was particularly interesting to me as i hope to be able to create models and animations similar to stuff like this.

Final

Final run animation with lasers being fired and rockets launched.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Screen shot

Documentation

Abstract: The model i have here is a recreation of the vulture mech model from the MechWarrior series. I looked at several images and videos and modeled it to the best of my ability as well as added my own skins to it to make it my own. If i use this for my final (which i probably will) it will be able to move through the joints that are all over its body as long as i can modify them.

Production Log: Starting this project, i naturally started from the bottom and built my way up the model. In the beginning i wanted a layout for as much of the project i could at any given time. What this led me to doing is duplicating objects early on that would mean i'd have to do twice as much work rather than duplicated after identical objects were completed, so naturally my work ethic changed shortly after. I made the model with all nurbs primitives that were modified to create the shapes they were in the model.

Starting from the leg, after i finished that i created the base in which the leg would be attached to. As soon as the base was in place i duplicated the right leg and inverted it over the z axis i believe in order to make the left leg. By duplicate i mean copy because i wanted to be able to alter each leg individually rather than have the strings attached to the opposite leg that comes w/ the duplicate tool. Moving up the model, the rest of the shapes were mostly just pulling and altering the nurbs in the shapes until they were the desired shape.

This was the main focus of my project but with the extra time i had and current lack of knowledge on how to make a skeleton model, i decided to focus primarily on the modeling process of the model. I added skins to the model and fooled around with the vast variety of options i had until i got results that i was happy with. The material editing probably gave me more trouble than creating the model itself. One concern i have is that i added a spotlight to my project which looks great on the front but when i take a screen shot of the backside which should be dark, it looks like it is universally lit. I will do my best to work on that.

Self-evaluation: As i stated above, the material portion of the project gave me the most trouble. Once i get the hang of that whole region of work, i will get this model up and running and look more realistic than it is at the moment. I did enjoy creating this model from scratch with the aid of the image. I found that i just put time aside for me to go at this and did not stop until it was done 95% (the other 5% being minor tweaks that i made in class time). If and when i continue with this project, i will put a skeleton structure into it so taht it can move, walk and shoot things with its arm guns/ rockets.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Warcraft III is always great. Even with it's animation that is 7 years old, it inspires me.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

About me

My name is Ryan Janelli. I am a sophomore digital art major here at TCNJ. Video games have been a passion of mine since i got my first sega genesis console and the animation process of video games themselves i have found very interesting so thats why i'm here.