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"

"Conduit" was picked!

Just an update from my last post: my game pitch for "Conduit" was picked for my game development class! There were approximately 30 pitches in total and out of those 30, 12 were picked for prototyping by professor Marc Olano.

Hopefully my prototype will go well and will be among those prototypes selected for the final round of development.

Mockup for a game

My "Group  Game Development Topics" class requires of every student to pitch a game that is to be considered for development by the class.

So far, I am currently working on the pitch for my untitled game. It is a first person horror game in which the protagonist is a mechanic for a spaceship that is infested with aliens that cause havoc on the ship's utilities. As the mechanic, the player travels through the dimly lit ship in an attempt to fix the failing parts and exterminate the galactic pests with only the aide of a flashlight and whatever tool they come across (hammer, blowtorch, etc.). The game Slender and the film Alien are just some of the influences for the concept.

I plan for it to be in 3D computer graphics, modeled and animated in Maya, with textures created in Photoshop. The game engine will most like be Unity.

For the mockup itself, I created it entirely out of 2-dimensional images in 2 steps:

1) I drew out the basic outlines of the walls and hands as separate Photoshop documents and I used photographs of metal as textures for the walls and floor.

2) I arranged the separate files in 3D space using After Effects and then created a spotlight, which I arranged on top of the layers.

WW2 FW190 Fighter Plane--3D Model (Phase 1)

I am currently working on a 3D animation of a WW2 German FW190 Fighter plane. The animation will be for a UMBC Cinematic Arts student's Senior Project. It will be a 3D model that will be rigged and animated for a live-action video sequence.


I have separated the process into distinct phases.
Phase 1: The Propeller
Phase 2: The Plane body
Phase 3: Rigging and Animation.

For each phase, I am modelling, texturing, and bump mapping the components.

For the propeller phase, I started by modelling one blade and by creating the spinning "socket" that the blades attach to.  I then textured and bump-mapped, the blades and socket and then duplicated the blades. Lastly, I combined the blades and socket together.

*Technology used:
-Autodesk Maya for 3D modeling and UV mapping
-Adobe Photoshop for texturing
-CrazyBump Beta for bump mapping.

Phage Game

Phage

November 2011

• Left key = left
• Right key = right
• Spacebar = shoot antipathogenic substance
• Refresh page = Reload game

Phage Game--Part 1

I am currently in the middle of developing Phage, a Flash/AS3 game. Phage is a platformer game in which the player assumes the role of a white blood cell (leukocyte) that defends the body from invaders.

Currently only 2 levels have been created.
Control movement with the left/right keys, up key to jump/double jump, and spacebar to shoot.
*It is best to restart the game each time you play because the webhost makes the program glitchier than it normally is.*

Some changes that I plan to make in Part 2:
-fixing glitches
-enemy collision events
-Background scrolling
-etc.....

I based the code and layout off of a tutorial from AS3 Game Tutorials
http://as3gametuts.com/2011/11/11/platformer-1/

***EDIT***
I have now fixed the collision bugs. The only thing left to do is to add the mods mentioned above.


***It is also important to note that because of how GoogleSites hosts code, the game's formatting looks different than as a normal swf file. As an swf file running from Flash, the background scrolls with the screen without any white spaces, and I'm not sure how to fix the aspect ratio on the Google-hosted code so that it scrolls with the screen.