Stuff, Animation

While my blog has been rather empty, we have been very busy in animation. This is going to be a massive post containing everything we have done in the Maya program, including a few things I've already posted on my blog.

Polything

The polything was a very simple project meant to introduce us to a few new tools, including lights and booleans. We were told to make a sphere, use cylinders to cut holes into it and put lights and textures in various places to make it look cool. I started with my sphere and made a cylinder and put it in the center. I then duplicated it and turned it 90 degrees to the left, and then again 90 degrees down, in order to create symmetrical holes. Then I set up lights around it to create shadows, and rendered it out. I feel like I made the cylinders too big, and so if I were to do this again I would try smaller cylinders, but I think the lighting I chose is perfect.

Hammer

The hammer was another simple project to introduce other tools, in this case: the extrude, bevel, and cut face tools. We needed to simply create a hammer and mess with the vertices in order to make it look like a real life hammer. We used the cut face tool to shorten the hammer head and create more polygons to make it look more realistic. The extrude was to create the head and the back in the first place, and then to create the tail-end thing. Finally, the bevel tool was used to round the edges. I actually ran into technical problems and so couldn't bevel the back of the hammer, so if I were to do this project again I would try and fix the back so it isn't just the front that is beveled. I like my choice of textures however, and I will probably use them in a future project.

Ice Cream

The ice cream project was my first real challenge. We needed to create various ice cream parlor items- a bowl with 3 scoops, an ice cream scoop, a cone with 2 scoops and a holder for the cone, all on top of a table with a background. With this project we used, for the first time, bump maps and in the end turned it into a looping movie. It took me a couple days to create everything, and then we used bump maps. They are basically textures that are put on textures. When you make a thing, and put a color on it, you can put a bump map on it. This makes the texture look better, and look far more realistic. In this case it put a kind of glisten on the ice cream (to show that ice cream is, y'know, just a little wet). We later on created a simple mini-table and made it spin in a circle, to show off all of our items. The video loops, so if you were to set it on repeat, you could watch it spin forever and not notice an end.

Bouncing Spheres

The bouncing spheres was a fun little project. We went into the flex theatre with a golf ball, a bowling ball, and a tennis ball, and dropped each one and then re-created it in Maya. This was our actual first animation with Maya, because we made this before we made the ice cream spinny-thing. We also used the graph editor to fix the spheres. By default, animations are set to ease in and ease out, which makes it look like the spheres are sliding up and down, rather then falling. It took a few days to map the keyframes from the videos of the flex theatre, and took a few more to actually re-create the videos in Maya and then to texture them. I made a custom texture for the bowling ball, but of course because of that I don't think it looks very good. However, I think that the golf ball and the tennis ball look a lot better.

Cup

This project we learned about NURBS, which stand for something really long that i don't remember. We used a "curve" tool to create the shapes, and then used the "Revolve" tool to create the shape.

Salt Shaker

With this project we used the curve tool, but in a more circular fashion in order to create a salt shaker.  We then lofted it, which created a surface that essentially blanketed over all of the NURBs-shapes, leaving a hole at the top that stretched to the bottom. We were then able to create a cap that 

Revolve Cup, Animation

This week we created containers in Maya, an animation program. We used something called NURBS which stands for something that I can't remember. What we did was we created a curved line, and then the Maya program duplicated it a few times and connected the dots. We then converted them to Polygons, which is why they look so round and not blocky- since each polygon is a dot, we can set the new polygons to have, say, 500 polygons which makes it look better then 50. The more dots, the smoother. In this case I used 5,000 polygons. The goal was to make 2 containers of some kind, and in this case I made a glass and a cup. I spent a long time actually trying to make the lines and the shapes perfect, only to learn later that you can edit the points individually after you make it, so if I were to remake this I would definitely do that, because I would probably have shaved off a good 20 minutes of time to spend on other stuff. We learned about the NURBS themselves in class and went on a PDF from there. I don't like how the cup looks, but I am very happy with the glass and I'm pretty sure I know how to recreate it. In the future I'm probably going to be using NURBS for other various projects.

Trendy Lines, Web

For this project we followed a tutorial website for creating a similar project, although it required the use of a couple tools we don't have. I created a pattern using a square of colors, and then used it as a brush and painted diagonal lines across the artbourd of various size. Then I curved them around and made a few curvy lines of various sizes. Then I painted shadows underneath the overlapping lines to create the impression that it was 3D. We needed to use a tool we didn't have to make a texture over everything, so we had to find something close, but I think in the end I didn't pick the right brush and if anything I should've flat out skipped that step because it makes my picture seem a little crowded, and doesn't make sense.

Project 1, Web

This wasn't actually supposed to be posted on the blog, but I thought it looked really cool so I posted it anyway. It was originally supposed to be blueprints-y but I wanted it to be a little more original. The name originates from a in-class joke that came from me putting 2 typos in my name back to back. I have 2 eComm classes, in one I accidentally typed Mogran Stewart and in the next class I typed Morgan Stewrat. With the encouragement from a few friends my name became Mogran Stewrat in eComm.