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.

November 1st -- 2D Animation

"November 1st" is a short animation that I created. It follows a boy walking through his neighborhood until something catches his eye.

The boy's cycles were animated on pencil and paper. The character was inked and colored in Photoshop and Illustrator.

The backgrounds were images that consisted of houses, trees, and a street that were modeled in Maya, and a far background matte that was painted in Photoshop.

The foreground elements (pumpkin bag and candy) were created in Illustrator and Photoshop.

 All of the background and foreground elements were then composited in After Effects.

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".

"Flux"

"Flux" is my first animation created entirely in After Effects. I mostly used the shape layers and the scale, rotate, and opacity keyframing buttons.

Tagline:
"Flux: Things aren't always what they appear."

Recent Work

Here is our first animation project in my Intro to Animation class. The assignment was to create a stop-motion ball bounce animation using paper cut outs and animating them in the Dragon Stop-motion software.

Hardware

Nikon Camera + Line-testing machine

Software

Dragon Stop motion

Recent projects

Modeling in Maya

Here is a car I modeled in Maya. I have not taken any 3D/CGI classes yet, so I have just been teaching myself in the meantime.

I modeled it using polygon forms and the extrusion tool to extrude the faces. Then I smoothed it using the hotkeys.

Final Project VC4

My final project for Visual Concepts 4. This video is somewhere between a documentary and a narrative.

Techniques used were:

-static and motion camera angles
-sound mixing using microaudio recorders

-Color correction

-Edited in Final Cut Express