Final Project: ANM 302 - Week 15

So, this is it, the finished final project in ANM302. It's done. Am I happy with it? Well, am I ever happy with anything I do? I would have liked to tweak the newton field of the trailer more and worked on the turbulence field too. The particle spray from the missile really should be more smokey and it should shoot out of the back of the bazooka. And, the animation of the character is stiff, but it's done. And there is always the future to rework it for the demo reel. I guess that gives me something to look forward too!

167 Hours: ANM302 – Week 14

One hundred sixty seven hours. That's how much time I have left to complete my final project. That seems like a lot of time, doesn't it? But let's back out sleep (64 hours), work/school/driving (50 hours), preparing for the day/eating (16.5 hours) which leaves 36.5 hours. Of course some of that will be taken up by working on other projects and doing a take home final exam. Why am I doing all this math when I should be working on my project? Simply because I have nothing else to share in this final blog entry. It's been a good run – I like SFX in 3D. I have pieces from the class that I want to include in my demo reel and I even think I might want to follow a career in simulations/visualizations. I don't think it gets better than that. Well, except finishing the my final project and ending this semester.

The End: ANM201 – Week 14

This is it. The final push. One last week of frantic work and it will all be over. I know I have a lot of work ahead of me, but I can really start to feel the pressure coming off simply because I can now see the end of the semester approaching. Looking back, it was not a great semester – there were WAY too may emotional lows. I even failed to complete a project. Yet, even with that having been said, I've learned a fair bit and advanced as an animator. I've figured out a new technique to use in After Effects. I've produced a couple of pieces that will wind up in my demo reel and I've made a huge head start on producing my Sophomore film. That alone has made the semester worth while. So now I'm allowing myself a brief moment of joy, before I get back to the grind of finishing my final project. I have a feeling it will be a winner.

The “Learning Maya Blues”: ANM302 – Week 13

3D animation is a funny thing to me. There are times that I really get into modeling, or skinning, or animating, or SFX but it never all happens at the same time. I always seem to start off doing whatever needs to be done with a great deal of frustration. I cannot figure out how I'm supposed to do whatever it is that I'm supposed to do because it's been so long since I did it last that I've forgotten the basics. Then, eventually, I hit my stride and blow through it only to start some new aspect of the project and run into the same wall. I'm sure it's a combination of my inexperience with Maya and the fact that it's and incredibly “deep” program (so much so that virtually everyone in the industry specializes in a particular facet). Needless to say I'm running into the situation with my final project since it requires modeling, animation, and several special effects. The thing is I like 3D animation and working with Maya...it's just that I hate it at the same time. Ah well, that's life.

Time: ANM201 – Week 13

So, last week I had a brilliant idea on how to make my animated film look and feel like I had actually hand-drawn every frame. It was seriously great. This week, however, I've had a bit of a reality check. After half implementing the technique to get the boiling hold – which is gorgeous – I realized that the time it takes to do the actual animation a few frames at a time is going to take WAY longer that I had first thought. Thus, I am back to using straight Puppet-Pin animation to get the characters to move the way I want. Hopefully the smoothness of this animation won't detract from the over all look. We'll see how it turns out.

Bazookas: ANM302 – Week 12

I like to blow things up. Maybe it's because when I grew up the Cold War was still on and all we had to play with were war toys. Maybe it's because I used to stay up late to watch the Muppets on the Ed Sullivan Show and the skit would inevitably end with something exploding (or Kermit getting eaten my a monster – I had nightmares!). In any event, I have chosen the explosion effect in Maya to be the main point of my final project in this class. To that end, I intend to animate an generic character rig, taking a bazooka, firing it at a small trailer (yes, that's something from my childhood too – my parents would drag me on camping trips in our trailer – I hated it!), causing the trailer to explode into a million pieces with a giant fireball. Fun, huh? So I have to model the bazooka, model the missile, model the trailer, animate the character and the missile, create a smoke trail for the missile, make the glass in the window of the trailer shatter when the missile hits it, make the trailer shatter into a million pieces while its associated bits go flying, and create a giant fireball to go along with all of it. Whew! Hopefully I haven't bitten of more than I can chew. We'll see...

Inspiration: ANM201 – Week 12

This may sound strange, but I get some of my best ideas while in the shower. Perhaps it's the mindless activity of washing that allows my mind to wander, or maybe it's the invigorating spray of the water, either way something brilliant inevitably comes to me there. Yesterday it was an idea for animating a scene from my Sophomore film project – which will be my final project in this class. Originally, the film was to have been hand-drawn but after estimating production time at nearly a year, I knew that was out of the question. My adviser suggested doing the animation in After Effects with the puppet pin tool. That's a great idea, but it veers heavily away from the look I wanted with hand-drawn and it's rough boiling holds. Of course I can simply pre-compose a boiling hold for all the parts of the character in AE, and them animate them with rotation and puppet pins, but the motion will still be smooth from keyframe to key frame. That's when inspiration hit me. To achieve the “jerkiness” of hand-drawn animation what I'm going to do is “jump cut” the pieces to move them. In other words, for each drawing of an arm moving up, I'm going to insert a separate pre-composed boiling hold of the arm. This should give me the roughness I'm looking for. I can then use the puppet pin tool to shape the generic pieces into whatever form I need at the time. We'll give this a try, see how it looks, and more importantly – how long it takes. Next semester is going to go very fast and I want to be done with the film in time for its premier...