Masks and such

So, I'm not super super happy with this. I had a lot of trouble making headway on this assignment. I thought about doing something like a luma maks with a video clip, but I really want to move away from using random footage from the internet and I didn't have any of my own. Perhaps I will do that anyway, though, for more practice.

At any rate, it took me altogether too long to figure out how to get the paint tool to work, and how to modify the masks's points after I'd created the shape. I ended up making this sort of practice animation of vines engulfing sleeping beauty as she also gets masked out in a heart shape. The heart shape has no significance. I drew the vines with the write-on tool using my tablet, but I want to go back and clean it up when I have more time (that is, if this clip does get used in our final project). I also plan to clean up the character art (if this is the version I finalize on!). Anyway. Short. to the point. Will look into more ways to explore these tools.

Sleeping vines from Lady Subrosa on Vimeo.

Lighting and updated Texture

Now with bump mapping! This post will be edited, as I am still planning on playing with the lighting, but check out my batty with some warm lights. :3 so cuddly and fuzzy!

3D and an early animatic

Dolly Through Window from Lady Subrosa on Vimeo.

This is my 3D project :D This is actually an early version of what I want to make. I want to add a crowd of people to dolly through, but my hand got really tired last night. Clearly I can't draw as much as I'd like to in one sitting, but I will go back and fix it for the final project. This is actually going to be part of the opening sequence for an animated short I'm working on with fellow class mate, Bruce Li. It's gonna be totally awesome. His script is hilaaaarious. If you see his project, you'll see that his is the very beginning of this "shot," and this is the last bit.

Textured

Not the best texture, I was having trouble figuring out how to best UV map this thing. I'm still a little confused on the process, but I took the head/body and UV mapped it spherically and then applied "automatic" to each wing. My goal is to make it look like it's made of yarn.

Text + Particles

here comes the SOUND from Lady Subrosa on Vimeo.

So this was my text and particles combined. I got the sound from one of my favorite songs (since high school, no judging man) "Give 'Em Hell, Kid" by My Chemical Romance. I always loved the quick tempo and rhythm of the lyrics, so I thought it'd be fun to put to kinetic text. I also got a little fruity and decided the background should be a colorama that cycled through several colors over the course of the project. Yay! Most of my text effects were modifications of existing ones, but a few were my own invention that came from figuring out exactly how the text animators worked (it took me all together too long to figure out the "Start," "End," and "Offset" functions, but that's another story).

The particles in this are a little simple, but I layered several together. I also played with Shatter. Mostly, I wanted it to look like this coming of sound was an explosion of candy pop ness. I hope it's visually interesting.

The untextured bat

Hey everyone! I still need to go back and scan my preproduction stuff, but I finished my model :'D I will update this post later with more relevant info. For now, enjoy le bat

Preproduction for My Model

This is a little late, perhaps, but I didn't make a post about this part because I wanted to talk more about it when I was done! But, It's probably a good idea to keep me on track with my blog posts.

So, I've decided to approach this assignment by taking it as an opportunity to practice character design. Because Halloween is coming up, I decided to create a little spooky, bat. My goal is to make a little character that can be both cute and scary (that's what the holiday is all about to me, anywho). I've begun by sketching out different ideas. Some of them are based on cartoony bats I found on google images, others are variations on characteristics that evoke cute and spooky for me. I am having a little trouble deciding on the way to approach the body vs head, but I think I have settled on the basic facial characteristics. I also wasn't focusing so much on how the wing shape was going to be (because I would probably create the same wings no matter what). I will update this post later with some scans of my concept art.

Last week I began playing with the idea of the bat. Over the summer I had a digital media internship here at UT where I learned Blender. I now work for the media lab. I told my supervisors about my upcoming Maya character project, and we decided to have a little mini competition to model a bat in 15 minutes. This is not necessarily exactly what I will model, but I thought I'd show you this other pre-vis I was working with. Bear in mind I spent the first 5 of these 15 minutes relearning the Blender tools!




More coming soon