Walk the Dog

Here I've animated the dog that I rigged. The hand manipulators always gave me a hard time... I think that I didn't orient one correctly and that's why I couldn't get it to behave. The other one worked ok.

UV Dog Skeleton/Rigging

Here you can see my overall skeleton I put in the dog in the first picture. The second picture is my pose I had him do, and the last picture shows the foot manipulator as I worked with it.

Memo on Prometheus:

To those of you who are wondering where my final product of all those other posts with birds and clocks and houses and gears is, I'm working on it. It's finished, but Blogger doesn't like the file and won't upload it so I'm attempting to go back and re-render it as a video that won't be too heavy but also won't be ridiculously pixellated. So for the moment, just observe all the tutorials I'm going through, and I'll get back to you with Prometheus later.

UV Character Creation

Here I used UVs and the 3D paint tool in Maya to texture a pre-modeled dog. I didn't like how inaccurate I had to be at first but it got better once I edited the UVs and was able to select and texture certain faces.

Depth of Field with Prometheus

I followed a depth of field camera tutorial for Maya (after I finished Prometheus of course) and used it in the end scene just to see what the results would be. It doesn't look too bad but I'll definitely need to experiment more with the locators in order to get the hang of this technique before I use it in a film.

Mud Tutorial Dynamics Concept

Did a little bit of texturing in this tutorial with soft body collisions. It was a little hard at first since I couldn't see what I was doing but eventually I made it work. It was pretty interesting, and it would be a good effect if I ever did sand again.

Screwdriver Tutorial

Here's a tutorial I did on using booleans to help sculpt. It wasn't very hard but I couldn't get the main metal texture to work so I substituted an arisotrophic for the actual metallic end. I think this will be a useful technique for the future.

It's a little fast, but I've done the animation of Prometheus hovering after he's lost the berries, looking to see where they went. I tried to put some motion into his legs, as if they were bobbing up and down with gravity while he sits in the air. I might have to work with some of the lighting, but this is pretty much what I'll be putting into the final product.

Secondary Interior Flight and Impact

Here I've put pictures of the action leading to the conflict and then the conflict itself. I've made the hit more dramatic because of the way I placed my gears. Rebounding off the first gear would cause Prometheus to hit the one directly below him, so I thought to have a more dramatic perspective of the berries falling.

Bird Lighting

In the first picture, I had a secondary light for the bird that was too bright. You can see how it makes him kind of two-dimensional. There weren't enough shadows for my taste. So I lessened the intensity, making it over 100% less bright than before. It gives (in the second picture) a softer look to the bird while the gears still have a highly illuminated feel to them. I like this contrast since the whole premise of the story is that the bird is going into a hostile territory.

Prometheus Interior Animation YTD

So far I've animated 101 frames of the bird flying through the clock. I'm now working on having him glide around the pendulum and steer towards the vertical gear so the berries can fall. After I've finished 200 frames I'll render it out and start the next part.

A Study on Emotions: Flour Sack

A short exercise in showing emotions based off of the flying carpet in Aladdin: I hereby dub thee Sack. Order of emotions: Happiness, Sadness, Anger, Excitement.

Internal Animation Shots

Here are some shots of Prometheus flying through the first part of the clock. I've lit him underneath with a basic spotlight and left the rest to dim point lights to be more of an atmospheric lighting rather than a stereotypical lighting setup.

Interior Animation

Since I wasn't able to finish the entire storyboard for SKILLS District (this Thursday-Saturday), I'm going to attempt to complete the other half for State competition in March. Here's a screenshot of my lighting of the first frame inside the clock. I've added a light for underneath the bird since then, but otherwise the shadows and lighting are exactly like this in the file.

Prometheus 3.0

Here's the video with soundtrack. I hope it's slower than before. This is all just testing to see if it'll work.

Prometheus 2.0

Here's Prometheus with an alternate intro. I think I'll use this one instead.

Prometheus 1.0

Here's the cut video for the masses. I'll work on sounds next and if I have time I'll get rid of those nasty "bushes/trees" that I used to disguise my horizon...

Lighting Problems and Answers

Here are two pictures displaying my sky. The first one (upper) shows the new sky I've done after light-linking, which took a while but is very useful. With the lower picture, you can see that the color isn't uniform and has a darkening around the edges. This was because my lights were messed up. I also had to light-link because my three-point lighting systems were displaying shadows from the buildings onto the sky... Which, as we all know doesn't happen in real life. It didn't take too long to get the hang of light-linking and once I did it, my scene was properly lighted to look like a sunny morning. Problem solved.

Clock Shadowing and Details

I've been working on three-point lighting on all my models, especially the tower and the bird. I'm only partially done with the overall lighting but This previews a little of what I've done. I disguised the edges of the "horizon" with tree/bush things, which I can replace later with more detail if I need to (which I will). Next I'll be making general lights for the houses, which hopefully won't take long.

After Effects Video Copilot Tutorial #63: Smoke Screen

I enjoyed this tutorial and I actually used it in a separate project (has nothing to do with this class: commissioned by a friend) but totally changed the colors and made it so it could loop and stuff. But I did enjoy this. :)

After Effects Video Copilot Tutorial #8 "Text Blur Titles"

I liked the way the lens flare contrasted with the text, but I altered the text by putting a drop shadow behind the text to add to the dramatic feel of it.

Prometheus Title Final

I finished the previous tutorial, but I added the second part and then some to spice up my effects.

Prometheus Title Animation

This is a tutorial I did from Video Copilot on After Effects. It's called "Titles Part 1" and is number 8 on the main page.