Thursday 11 March 2010

Second year- 1st semester

The work I produced on the first semester of my second year of animation course, when we were introduced to maya; we had two assignments throughout this semester, one requiring modeling and the other one being practice of animating using the software.

ANIMATING IN MAYA

The assignment was to come up with a gag, 10-30 seconds long, and animate it in Maya. Once I got my idea polished and thumbnailed, I made a quick rough animation test to figure out the proper timing for this piece


Once I got that right, I moved on to animating in Maya, starting with setting the key poses and then inbetweening them as tight as necessary. The version below is a final one, but it still needs a few more inbetweens- it's not smoothed out, because the splined version still has some issues which would need fixing if I could continue working on this.


Character rig I used is Moom, made by Ramtin Ahmadi.


MODELING IN MAYA

We were expected to model a simple setting based on research and visual references, preferably based on a historical period. My choice was the victorian era, and theme I came up with was a private study of an astronomer who apparently discovered a new planetary system

1. concept art

After I found reference pictures of some beautiful objects from the victorian era, I decided to redesign them slightly, to match the idea better and to fit the scene in the way I wanted them to. These are some examples of my rough concept work from this stage

model of the planetary system

desk

chair


I also decided on the colours and textures of the objects I was going to place in the room; these are examples of the colour concept sketches I painted

pocket watch

model


Once I knew what I want the scene to be like, I painted a rough image of the scene to help me decide on the overall composition and the preferred camera view


2. refined designs

before I moved to the modeling stage, I had to refine the rough sketches I made before to get precise reference for shapes of the objects and for proportions between them. I cleaned-up the drawings and drew all objects from three points of view for reference during modeling, and also I drew the topdown plan of the room

top view of the room

chair

desk

model

telescope
(no perspective applied in the drawings, for these were imported into Maya and placed on planes as reference during modeling)


3. modeling, lighting, rendering

At the end of the work I was quite happy with the modeling work I did, but texturing proved to be much more difficult than I expected; then I had problems with lighting the room and as a result the final images are too dark to even see anything; I tried to fix it, but I couldn't get the grasp on the lighting and unfortunately these are the final renders



I still think the models themselves are good, so here are some screenshots with wireframe view of some more interesting models








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