Friday, May 24, 2013

Final Project--A Character Animation



My final project for my Advanced 3D class at UMBC was to animate the character rig that I've been working on for the semester.  Above is the final, fully rendered, result.

 Steps for creating it:

1) I extracted audio from the film Born In Flames (1983) for the soundclip.

Here is the portion I used.





2) I imported the audio and used my character's blendshapes to lip synch with the audio.





3) Once all of my lip synching has been completed, I modeled a simple microphone to use as a prop and for eye-tracking purposes.









4) I then animated the character's torso, head (head, neck, eyes), lower body, and arms.







 5) My next step was to create a scene and render it. I created the radio station using Photoshop and bumpmapped it using Crazybump.






6) I added lighting and arranged the wall textures for the final scene.







7) Lastly, I batch rendered the scene as .PNG files and then composited the images with the audio in After Effects.



Saturday, May 18, 2013

Satellites at the IRC

So as I mentioned in this post, I acquired a 3D modeling internship at the UMBC Imaging Research Center (IRC). The project that I participated in was a joint effort between IRC and NASA (the Goddard Space Flight Center facility in particular). I made low-poly previsualizations based on the satellites from the NASA Global Precipitation Meausurement (GPM) mission.

I modeled them in Maya and in the next few months they will be textured and rendered by my supervisor, Ryan Zuber.

By the end of the summer they will be part of a short animation on display at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.
















For scale and detail references, I used publicly available art renderings, schematics, and photographs such as the ones below:




https://directory.eoportal.org/image/image_gallery?img_id=189545&t=1338557852321




http://www.spaceflight101.com/uploads/6/4/0/6/6406961/2481265.jpg?455




http://www.spacemankind.com/images/ms/20091019-dmsp-hr.jpg











Finished Game Assets

Here are some new screenshots from "Detached". During the second phase of development, I was tasked with a large redesigning of the level (compare to the old level from before) . I had to remodeled some of the gravestones and walls and I then textured them using photographed images and bump maps.

Some of my assets were:
-Rocks
-A tree
-graves
-Mausoleum
-walls

I was also tasked with building the level in unity by laying out the assets and assigning colliders to them.

The ground, lighting, and rendered grass were created by Stephanie Ruff.








Friday, May 17, 2013

3D Character Walk Cycle

Here is my attempt at a basic walk cycle with the character rig I created. I used the basic 24-frame cycle and I animated it in the "layered" fashion as opposed to "straight-ahead".