Senior Project -- "Dinos in the Desert"

In early May, I completed my senior project for the Visual Arts program at UMBC. As part of the Animation/Interactive Media track,  I enrolled in a capstone course along with other cinematic arts and animation majors.

During the Spring 2014 Senior Projects class, I was tasked with developing and completing a film to demonstrate the skills I learned during my undergraduate career. I chose to create a 3D-animated short film about Dilophosaurus dinosaurs. I created all of the models and animated them by myself.

Prior to taking the class, I periodically worked on a dilophosaurus model between the Summer of 2013 and the Fall of 2014.










When I first developed my story, I initially imagined it being a fantasy story about a young boy who woke up in a prehistoric jungle and gets chased by a Dilophosaurus--only to wake up at the end of the film and realize that he was dreaming during a class lecture about dinosaurs.

I eventually scrapped this idea after realizing that due to time constraints and lack of man-power, I would not be able to complete a project on such a scale by myself with the deadline that was arranged. After re-evaluating my goals and from hearing feedback from my peers, I instead decided to create a more scientifically accurate film in the vein of a nature documentary rather in the style of a feature fantasy film. With this new goal in mind, I did more research about the Jurassic time period and the Dilophosaurus and realized that the setting of the film would not take place in a jungle since the Dilophosaurus habitat were mostly deserts in the American midwest. There is evidence that during that era, the midwest had evolved from mostly jungles into mostly desert plains.

I am satisfied with the direction that my film took. I feel that it is a better representation of my skills given the time I had to produce it. This project was a positive experience for me and allowed me to further evaluate my knowledge of storytelling, animation, and computer graphics in general. I feel that I have a better understanding of what I need to improve on and what my strengths are. Hopefully I can have more professional opportunities to test my skill.

Dilophosaurus Work in Progress

For my senior project, I have continued working on my dilophosaurus rig. I spent the past few weeks rigging my model and I plan on making an animated short film about dilophosauri fighting over a carcass.


Along with a joint skeleton, I have included reverse-footlocks on both feet, and set driven keys on the tail, tongue, and eyelids.

New Addition to My Portfolio! -- Rendered POES 18,19 Satellite

I recently rendered an old model that I created during my internship last year at the IRC.

The low-poly model is the POES 18,19 satellite from the Global Precipitation Measurement mission.

I rendered it in Mental Ray:
- using the blin materials and an aluminum foil source photo for the foil textures
-using the bulletin_bdsf_mirror shader for the instruments
-using specular and normal maps for the Thermal Cylinders
-using the MR Sun and Sky [(no) Background] render option

CG Clouds

A recent mini-project of mine was to create clouds in Maya.  I achieved it by creating a fluids container and toggling with the textures and shading attributes.

 

I also created a sky using Mental Ray's image-based-lighting. 

 

I then used the expression fluidShape1.textureOriginZ=time*.02 to animate the clouds.

I rendered the sequence as .JPGs and then composited them in After Effects.

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.

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".

Blendshapes--Human Character Project

For my Advanced 3D Animation class I have been building a human character throughout the semester. One past project was to create the blendshapes for the character and to animate to lip synch the animations to an audio clip.

The clip I used was from the Harley Quinn character from an episode of Batman: The Animated Series.






I created the blendshapes by duplicating and extracting the head and then moving the vertices of each duplicated head in order to replicate common phonemes and facial expressions.

When animating the character, I tried to match her facial animations to the character from the audio. Harley Quinn is a villain that is known for her madness. I tried to keep that quality in my animations by creating some exaggerated smirks and odd grins.

New Projects and Internships

Wow! Quite a bit has happened since I last updated:

1) Unfortunately, my game "Conduit" was not chosen to be continued past its prototyping. Despite this, working on the prototype was an excellent experience that provided me with the opportunity to learn level design/editing in Maya and arranging level assets in the Unity game engine.

Instead...I will now be an 3D artist/level designer for the game "Detached", a third-person, action role playing game. "Detached" follows a zombie that awakens in a post-apocalyptic world in which mythical creatures run amok. As your body parts rot off, you must replace them with the appendages of your enemies!

2) Since mid-February, I have been hired as a part-time 3D Artist Intern for UMBC's Imaging Research Center. I am very excited about the work I am doing with them and I am looking forward towards the final product; an informative animation that I will elaborate on once the project is complete.

3) The World War II special effects project, that was a collaboration with a Cinematic Arts student, has been canceled due to the student had problems with acquiring the props and locations for their film and the time constraints that were placed on their project.

4) Due to conflicting commitments, I can no longer continue to be a game artist for KleptoClockers in the Game Developers Club.

 
Here is some of the work-in-progress from "Detached"

Rotoscope

"Parallel Scenes" is a rotoscope project of mine. I rotoscoped by tracing over frames from a video project I made, and clips from "The Matrix" (1999, Warner Bros.) I used the 2D animation software "Pencil" and a Wacom Intuos 4 tablet and stylus.

Here is the clip from "The Matrix" I spliced throughout.

Recent Work

Lizard in Maya

Here is a lizard I modeled in Autodesk Maya for my Intro to 3D/Computer Animation class. I modeled it by importing an image of the lizard into the grid and by tracing it with the Create Poly tool. I then cut the faces of the geometry and pulled the vertices away from the grid to give the model some depth. I then used the "duplicate special" tool to duplicate the other half into a mirror image.



String Animation

This is my stop motion string assignment for my Intro to Animation class. The assignment was to use string to create movements. I used the Dragon Stop Motion software and down-shooters/line testing station. I painted the background in acrylic paint.