stop motion animation

Last month  we were asked to create and animate a live action stop-motion video, and i goined a group consisting of Andrew Stover, Laura Armstrong, Logan Keck, Jake Williamson, and myself.

We had originally had to have some sort of rising competition going on in between wizards until the tension rises to a climax and all hell breaks loose and then the wizards fight it out until either one or both lose.

We started with naming off ideas that we had until something stuck. well after naming off a bunch of random and pointless ideas, we had decided upon combining some of the ideas that we named. then we slimmed them down till the point in which we got Mage Wars. Then we sent Logan to put our ideas into pictures as we yelled them at him.


We then had to have some sort of rough idea to what we actually wanted to do.  at first we were kind of unsure about what we wanted to have for the shots. and since i didn't want to be an actor i ended up teaching both Logan and Andrew how to act out the scenes and choose many of the positions of the shots as we made them up. and with the collaborative efforts of five people who had absolutely no idea of what we were doing we ended up with a rough idea.

Rough:

From the rough we had decided to put the green screen room we had to use and started filming our project in there. Well we were idiots that hadn't anticipated that the awkward lighting and having reflective materials in a bright green room would have been a problem. After filming most of the project it most certainly was. we ended up having to start filming again with slight changes in costume, position and lighting.

from the time we started filming we had a kinda vague idea about how we should actually end this. So i suggested after whistling a bunch of western themes a straight up Western showdown in which both draw and end up disappearing and the then the camera switched to the audience in which both our wizards sat and applauded for a more comedic relief.

And from this we pretty much ended filming and moved on to digital editing removing the green screen and adding special effects and a new background.

Animation Part 1

Animation part 2

animation part 3

Animation final part

My Groupmates:
Andrew
Logan
Jake
Laura

Quater 1 Project

I originally had two ideas for this project, the first was two build some type of mech-suit or to build a motorcycle that I saw on TV. to decide what I was going to do I was like lets start with a cube and see where it goes from there. and After some tinkering i had started a motorcycle.

                                                                                    To build the motorcycle I had looked on you tube for some information asked Logan and Jake for help with texturing and looked at my other blog posts to get an idea on how to do vehicular modelling. AS for planing i Really just went along with what I could do. Because at first I thought I could try to rig the motorcycle and make a full commercial, but then i decide to put it on a stand instead.


     To build the motorcycle i had started with  a simple cube and subdivided it. then i had started inserting edge loops and merging vertices and i had managed to get a food looking front to the motorcycle. from there i decided to built the back end the same way by staring with a cube and inserting edge loops and extruding. i thought that this part was the most difficult to model because ti took anywhere from 30 - 40 extrusions to make the curve flow nicely into the front. The seat is a cube subdivided and bent multiple times. The wheels were a bit difficult because they went through 4 or 5 iterations before i got them too look like what i wanted. the handle bars are built out of a bunch of cylinders. After building the whole thing my main focus was on the texturing of it, so i had first put a red phong texture to get it looking like metal. Then i decided to colour the bottom half with a black phong. I still thought something was missing so i inserted the white stripe in the middle to end up with something like this:

 After texturing i had the began focusing on the lighting aspect of the scene. When i started lighting i had two or three lights i decided that that wasn't enough so i put another 35 lights in there and decided to build a room and a platform to direct all the lights at. and after putting some cameras with simple movements in i ended up with my scene looking like this:

 

 I had ran into some issues and the most prominent one was that I could not render out my footage due to conflictions between software on the computer. Another was building the body and seat so they would fit together well enough to look nice.I am disappointed to see my project turn out so well even though i had no proper plan but not being able to see all of the work together

Final Project (This year)

My final animation of the school year went really well, since the last project went to shit and basically destroyed itself. The whole switch from more mechanical and man made modeling to constructing a natural environment with a greater focus on the texturing rather than the models themselves is pretty different. It started with me being angry at the mechanical models I had been working on and I decided to try and work on something really different from my original plans to build a city so I had an idea to build a small natural scene with a temple type structure in the center.

I had started with a smaller plane and started to sculpt its geometry to get the natural ground look. I had then built some stairs to lead up to the platform where the temple would be. Then I decided it looked to small to fit in the screen area so I made a second plane to expand upon the first and then sculpted it geometry as well. After looking a the scene I decided to build a much larger more pyramid like structure and with a few tweaks to the first plane I fit nicely. I had also set up several Tiki torches lining the stairs to highlight the temple.

After creating the torches I put a fire effect on the center part to make them light up the nearby area. Looking at the scene as a whole I decided to make it an island and insert an ocean because I have been making this work as I have gone. And Again I looked at the scene and felt like it could use something in the background, so I put the moon behind the temple and began to ponder about texturing. Then I figured that I should texture the moon like cheese because what else would the moon be made out of. I also decided that the land looked pretty flat except for the hill the temple was on so I raise some parts to make another hill and lowered other to create a more interesting shape for the island. I also deleted the fist plane due to a weird line between both planes.

Since I felt confident in my landscaping I went on to pretty much texturing and effects. I started by editing the values for the flames to get a much nicer flame but due to its small size it didn’t quite end up as smooth as I would have liked. I then went on to applying several different textures to the torches to get a nicer overall texture because the parts didn’t fit quite right when they all had the same texture. Then I went on to try and give the moon some depth by adding a bump map and giving it a small glow effect to make it seem like its giving off light. I had then give a stone-like texture to the stairs and notice for some of the faces the texture was broken. I had tried to fix that issue but nothing seemed to really work and I eventually just gave up on that and made it look as best as possible.

The temple was for me the most annoying thing to texture was the temple itself. The sides and the front were warped because of small little edits to the points and caused weird texturing to happen. So I found out that by adding a LOT of faces it would stop the weird texture derp. Then came bump mapping the thing that annoyed me to hell because I really hated having to set up a custom bump map to get the grooves between the bricks and just making the temple itself look more interesting. I did set it up correctly and get a better look for the temple but it didn’t really seem to have the depth that I really wanted. So I kept upping the bump depth until it gave a decent depth to the bricks.

I went on took make the island textured which I found more difficult tan I first would have thought. It wasn’t supposed to be difficult but due to limitations of the program, it was made much more difficult. I kept on trying to get a suitable texture for the island but there was not much I could do because I could realistically have one texture. Its not like I couldn’t but with 120000 faces I wouldn’t want to spend a couple hours to select the faces and then try to get the two textures to ease into each other. So with my decision finished I ended with an island that looked similar to golfing green. With the island texture I focused on the water surrounding it. I continually messed with the ocean settings to try and get the water too look its best. I made the waves of the water larger and darken the color.

After finishing all the texturing, I went ahead to set up some basic lighting to emphasize what time of day it was so I set up a darkened ambient light to light up the island. While in the program it looked really nice but when I rendered it out it kept on being either too light, or too dark. So I went and kept it a bit brighter because the lighting wasn’t the important thing to me it was more texturing based in this project.

Then I set up a moving camera to get the full view of the island and I set up a large spiral going around the island and ending right in front of the temple. When I attached the camera to the path it attached upside down which I thought was pretty funny so I had decided to keep it like that. I will state that “The camera is upside down because it wants to be, so don’t question it.” After setting it up and tweaking the path I went ahead and rendered the thing finishing the project.

e-magine project final update

I started with a four view of my M1 abrahms tank and placed a plane on it. I edited the vertices to match up with part of the tank. i then started to extrude the plain and cut the face until i created half the body for the tank. i then just duplicated the half an reflected it to finish the body. i used the same process for the turret as i did the body. to make the cannon i extrude a cylinder several times. to build the wheels i built a circular plane and extrude it several times. and i built the tread with a plane that was subdivided and extruded several times. the details consisted mostly of my extruding cylinders several times and duplicating them. the i applied some rather simple texture like most tanks have and added a few lights to get that near life like lighting.

e-magine update lighting

lights have been put in to give the tank a better depth than  just the default

the tank also still has a plain texture because i had a digital tundra camo that just would work right.

The light also provides that really nice shadow and since i really could not come up with a background its just void

e-magine update 3

I applied some more textures and added a bit more details since last time with a few bits and pieces have been tweaked since last time.

time is running low on what i can do I've lost out on doing some of the smaller details like the tanks extra paneling and the flares.

It took more parts than i expected for the smaller details and it created more faces than i thought i would have needed.

I know that these things could use some more work but due to time constraints have caused me to rush a bit.

e-magine Project update #2

The main turret block-out has been completed since last time and now along with some minor detials being added to the body

i've also gone through several views in maya  and edited some points to look a bit better.

its sad that i don't have any plans to make things move but it definitely would look cool.

The next thing is to pet the details on including the antenna and the treads plus those little bar things on the sides of the turret.

e-Magine project post 1

I just finished building the very basic block out of the main body M1 Abrams tank. i had hoped to have a more fine tuned block out by this time but i will save a bit of the tweaking the body when i have the treads and the turret finished. Still this is a large step in what i need to have the full tank.

My personality type

I found out that my personality type is ESTP and that my personality says that I'm energetic, physical, logical and spontaneous.  My personality type is an energetic thrill seeker that is active and has a good sense of humor. It also says that we are the typical adrenaline junkies and that we perform in risky activities. A few famous people who share my personality type are Theodore Roosevelt, George W. Bush and Evel Knievel.

 I would think that the type pretty much describes me as a person because I am the person to solve the problem with my hands and to focus on the here and now. I am full of excitement and normally spontaneous with my actions.

My personality type gives me a much deeper understanding of me. It lets me know why i am so spontaneous and excited all the time. It also lets me know why  I play games the way i do and why i do what i do.

My personality type shows me why i am willing to be  a bit flexible with my position in my teams and family. A just want to get to where the action is and get it done. If it does not follow the action I get bored and try to fix that by switching spots until I fix it.

I have had people misunderstand the way i act because i am straight forward and don't really look beyond my scope of actions. people who don't get thing s done the direct way i have got into arguments with or they were just too slow for me.

I have learned that there is some reason for the way i act and what i do and that lots of others that act in a similar way to myself. So in a way there is many more me's across the world. Mwahahahaha!