Week 05 - Use of Composition

Here, I practiced use of composition to make a 2D image, while gathering inspiration from a list of provided artists. I used the rectangle composition, meant to frame the picture. My inspiration was Eyvind Earle, an artist who focuses on landscapes, heavy use of contrasting colors/lighting, and strong shapes. This went through quite a few iterations before I decided on the final landscape. In the end, I used masking, blur, and overlay to produce the resulting effect.

Basic Rig Homework 5

This week, I was tasked to rig, skin weight, and FK a provided character. The rigging was fairly straight forward and the FKs mirrored that. The skin weight, however, proved more difficult as it required time and patience to get it working properly.

Module 2 Week 05 Homework (Advanced)

This assignment, I started on a 3 week process of creating a model from low poly to game ready. This first week was focused on getting the low poly proxy model ready to be high resed in Z brush. The process of making the low poly was straight forward, as I chose a model that had a lot of square logs in it's design. Breaking it down into its real life counterparts definitely helped with the creation of the model, especially the mechanism of the catapult.

Week 04 - Use of Basic Lighting

This week, I focused on creating a 3 point light system in unreal. Then I used Photoshop to recreate it. I had a lot of fun making this, but was unsure of what method to use to get realistic shading and gradients. In the end, I painted the extreme values and then used a gaussian blur while retaining the hard outlines using masking.

Reference

Recreation

Bouncing Ball 3rd Pass

This week, I focused on the final tweaks to the ball bouncing. I rotated the stretch to be more in line with the movement, added squash and stretch to the pipes, added shadows, and fixed a few clipping issues.

Module 1 Week 04 Homework

This week, I rendered a blueprinted scene through the Unreal Engine 5, Maya, and Adobe After Effects. This certainly took a while setting up all the blueprints and getting the video to properly render. I am quite satisfied with the result, though I wish the gears spun a bit slower. To do that, I would have needed to go into each blueprint and change the timeline manually.

Week 03 - Use of Value and Contrast

This week, I focused on using Photoshop layers to make an image using values in a non destructive manner. I was hesitant at first when putting the base values down, but quickly realized how easy it was to add lighting and shadows using the layer method. I had fun lighting up this landscape.

Bouncing Ball 2nd Pass

This week I tuned up week 2's bouncing ball. I added lighting, fix the rotation of the ball to better match the angle of movement, and other minor improvements

Bouncing Ball Assignment

This week's assignment was to make a bouncing ball. I had a blast animating this and getting the camera to act as a physical object. Had to look up reference of a ball hitting a camera XD

 

Module 1 Week 03 Homework

This week, I learned to organize our models using the hierarchy.

Part 1: I grouped a claw in the hierarchy for animation using Maya's playback feature. This was simple enough, but using .avi format made the video file WAY too big. Installing Quicktime allowed me to turn it into an .mov file, making it significantly smaller.

Part 2: I imported my claw into Unreal Engine 5 to compose and present. I had fun messing around with materials and emissives.

Part 3: I was assigned to make a large object using simple shapes that is aimed to be animated in the Unreal Engine. I plan to make an abstract gear structure. I also assigned basic materials to get a feel for color. My goal is to have the gears spinning and wobbling with the pillars bobbing up and down slightly.

Week 02 - Use of Silhouettes

 This week, I was tasked to make thumbnails and silhouettes of pre-existing characters. These were meant to be fast and loose, witch ended up with some strange results.

Overall, the I was amused by the experience. Creating images aimed at quantity over quality had me reeling for a minute, but it let me flex a creative bone and get a feel for how things look before putting a lot of time and effort into a character that is still in the air as to whether it is the final appearance or not.

Module 1 Week 02 - Homework

    This week was designed to help us get a feel for topology, Maya modeling, nurb curves, and kit bashing. I had a blast using the nurb curves and deformer tools. It was really easy to modify the shapes and get real time feedback on what the end result was going to look like.

    The kit bash assignment went through a few iterations until I was finally satisfied with it. Being able to quickly move and re-arrange components made the process really easy to play around to see what the right composition should be.

Week 01 - Use of Basic Shapes

 This assignment focused on making 3 different creatures. Each are based on a shape: circle, square, and triangle respectively.