Musky Ox - Personal Project - Work in Progress

Here's more of musky ox leaping through a field and frolicking in the flowers. I wanted to work on some stills of this character that will describe the story I have for him. Anyway, this is a work in progress. A lot of it is borrowed from my other project. You'll be seeing more of him!

Compositing 2

So, I've been watching Korra and guess what? I'm a nature bender! Look what I can do with wooden chopsticks!

Vimeo:https://vimeo.com/49362403

... and I guess I'm a homeless person? Or narcoleptic.

Hahaha! Ok, I'm a dork. 

Anyway, in Compositing 2 we had two main projects outside of a few small Nuke assignments. The first is a green screen composite, and the second is a match move. There were some parameters, but mostly, we were allowed to be very creative!

Here is my concept for my green screen project. I decided to go with the sleeping on the table idea, and regrettably scratched the hair curlers from my green screen shoot. 

Here's a still from my green screen footage. I wish I could have spent more time tweaking the lighting to match my background footage. 

And here's my quick storyboard for my match move project.

I took the footage into PFTrack to create a camera and ground plane to match it, then brought it into Maya. In Maya I modeled chopsticks (hahaha. difficult, right? I actually put some thought into it and modeled it with the wedge in the middle, and a seam where it breaks crookedly. But you can't tell, because it's too freaking small!) and animated them with lattices. Then I rendered it out with the camera and plane from PFTrack, moved it into Nuke to match the chopsticks, roto-ed a shadow on top of them, and comped in the chopstick's shadow pass. 

Compositing is pretty awesome. It'd be fun to do a whole series of faux magic tricks!

Programs used: Nuke, PFTrack, Photoshop, Maya

Dynamic

In dynamics we did a lot of little exercises, so it was mainly a class to play around with dynamic simulations. It was fun to try and be creative with all the small assignments even if the playblast/renders still just look like quick tests.

Rigid bodies:

Particles:

Soft bodies:

Fluids:

Missing a few assignments on my hard drive, so I'll add those later. 

I think it'll be fun if I actually have specifically created assets in an environment to apply dynamics to, versus my ghetto quick tests. Also, my classmate, Jenny, pointed out how useful it was to use particles to help quickly create 2D assets with an alpha (for snow, rain, etc.).

Motion Studies

Motion Studies class is for us to understand the process of motion capture and bring it into Maya.

We had some rigs to choose from so I came up with a story and selected the Heavy and Pyro models (from Team Fortress). 

Here's my quick storyboard. (The story is inspired from my friend Crystal Sun's idea. Thanks Crystal!)

I used Vicon Blade to capture the motion capture data and clean it up, then brought it into Motion Builder. After, I brought it into Maya and adjusted/textured/lit the environment, added dynamics, rigged Heavy's face (using clusters), and animated the hands and face. (It was a busy five weeks of T&L2 and Motion Studies!)

And here's the final product!

I also volunteered to put on the mocap suit and do some of the acting for my classmates' stories. IT WAS AWESOME! I had so much fun. I got to be a hunter, a pyromaniac, a kick-butt spy, a dancing stormtrooper, etc. It was also funny when I was acting out my Pyro and my hat fell off. Everyone immediately turned to look at me with horrified shock on their faces, because on the monitor it looked like my head fell off. HAHAHAHA!

Plus, while everyone was working on their mocap, I kept thinking, "THAT'S ME! THAT'S ME!" I'm positive that being in the suit made this class more fun for me.

Here's a photo of me in my suit. Not crazy flattering with the pant's man crotch... Also, I was busy running, dancing, kicking butt in it, so I got really sweaty and yucky in it. So, gross feeling me, right before I finally got to take off my suit and run to the bathroom:

I don't know what I was doing... but my phone's camera was broken with the flash and it caught the markers! Cool!

Programs used: Blade, Motion Builder, Maya

Texture & Lighting 2

In Texture & Lighting 2, I modeled and textured Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes!

Here is my character sheet:

This was an interesting class with lots of trials and errors. I worked with Renderman and Ptex for the first time and came across a lot of technical issues. Testing things out on different computers made me certain that my specific computer had some program installation issues, so I ended up scavenging and jumping onto different computers that were being unused by my peers. Hahaha. I felt like a vulture. But, it was a really good experience to combat technical problems and try to get my project done in time!

I took my Modeling 1 model of Wolverine and transformed him to be less Wolverine-ish. Then I modeled him some Sherlock Holmes-y clothes.

Here's the turntable that I ended up with.

I did most of my work in Mudbox, since my teacher found it to be the most stable working with Ptex on our school computer system. However, it gave me a slightly terrible time. I had to start over a few times and my final version is probably my third from-scratch-version that I sculpted in Mudbox. It forced me to practice a bazillion times though, which is good, right?

Here are some stills:

And this is the screenshot of the face I sculpted and textured in Mudbox. Eyes seem a bit intense...

Which... didn't turn out the same when I tried to render it in Maya. Hahaha. Here are some test renders:

Terrible blonde hair, the eyes and VDM broke, and lighting is horrible which revealed to me how fabulously pink his clothes were in this test render, but I did think it gave me a Robert Downey Jr. feel, no?

Because the criteria for our final project was to have a turntable of the full body, I ended up giving more time to work on the overall look to get it rendered in time.

Anyway, it was a very interesting class. It was sometimes frustrating, but I learned a lot. And now, I know I can keep a level head and trudge through difficulties. Also, I learned that starting over isn't as bad as it sounds. I got to be pretty efficient in the end!

Programs used: Maya, Mudbox, Photoshop
Renderman and Ptex

Figure Drawing

Some more gestures and renders from weekend figure drawing sessions.