Classical Animation for Term 2

Just thought I would post all my term 2 classical assignments at once. The requirements for these assignments were quite simple, just make the actions work (cape jump, swing, box lift, reaction). I always added extra imagination to my animations just to make the assignments more interesting to do. As you can see, I put in a cameo of my killer rabbit for assignment 4.


Assignment 4: Reaction


Assignment 3: Box Lift


Assignment 2: Swing


Assignment 1: Cape Jump

3D Texturing: Airplane (Part I)

These are the final renders for my unwrapping / texturing / lighting assignment for term 2, everything is based upon real-life reference. I think this is not a bad attempt considering its my first time unwrapping something more complicated and textured with only simple shaders (blinn). Plus its my first attempt at lighting.

The plane was not modeled by me, I only did the texturing. It is textured according to an actual surviving airplane (a Mustang) from WWII, the "Old Crow". Reference photos of the actual plane can be found here:

P-51 Mustang Survivors: "Old Crow"
P-51 Mustang Survivors

3D Modeling: Jack Sparrow

It's been a crazy term so far -- we have a big presentation coming monday so I have been pulling off around 10-15 hours at school almost everyday trying to polish up my stuff. As a matter of fact I would still be working at school right now if I didn't already have a previous engagement. All my computers are either broken or malfunctioning this way or another so when I am not at school I have nothing better to do but to update my blog.

Anyway, this Jack Sparrow is for a 3D modeling assignment where we have to model our own superhero. I was going to model batman for a detailed muscle-anatomy study, but I really like Jack Sparrow way more than batman. I took this assignment further (as a challenge to myself) by rigging, lighting and rendering it. This is my first time modeling a character, rigging a character, lighting stuff, and rendering sequence.



The youtube video turned out kind of small and blurry, but this is the actual rendered size of the video.

Photoshop: Editing & Compositing

Our last photoshop assignment with 2D compositing opened up a complete new realm to me in terms of 2D, because I did not know this was possible before.

Basically we start with a rendered image of a 3Dmodeled room. We take that into Photoshop and layered "textures" on top according to the room's perspective, with very very flat lighting. Then we take pre-rendered lighting "passes" and use that as a base for lighting. The resulting image looks to have the illusion of 3D and looks very realistic.

Below is a breakdown of the different stages:


This is just another assignment for our photoshop class where we had to remove the background from a photo and do color adjustments. Was a piece of cake for me since I used to do image editing all the time, so I went a little stylistic with it:

3D texturing: Spacefighter

This assignment is just an exercise to learn unwrapping and practice texturing with diffuse, bump, spec, and transparency maps. Since this is not about copying references, I exerted random creativity and had a little fun with it.

3d Animation: Beluga

On week 2, we went on a class "field trip" (my first field trip in many years) to the Vancouver Aquarium to study the movement of the Beluga Whales since we are going to animate it in 3D. This kind of research is typical for animators.

I found that 10 out of 10 times when the Belugas swam in front of us (submerged window in the beluga tank), they flip themselves around the swim with their belly pointing up. I don't know if they are just showing off or they do that naturally when they dive deeper in the tank, but that's what they did 10/10 times so I decided to put it in my animation.

Hectic Beginning for Term 2

So term 2 has started a full month ago and I've finally found time to do a quick blog update. Not that I was so overwhelmed with work -- more like I was overwhelmed with classes going from 9am to 8pm 4 days a week, and therefore had to sacrifice the rest of the nights and all the weekends for homework.

I pace myself well so I get enough sleep everyday and get my assignments done earlier than the due date, but that only means I have no free time on weekends. All is fine though, no complaints here :), after all I am learning more awesome stuff this term than last term.

To top off the busy schedule, my computer had gone haywire on me so instead of spending hours and hours at home in frustration trying to fix it, I resolved to spending more time at school to actually get my homework done first.

Anyway, I've got only a few things to show so far, since we've been given more complex assignments this term that takes a few weeks to complete, whether than the short week-long assignments of last term. Enjoy.