Victorian House

Victorian House
EGD380A – Advanced Seminar in Art & Animation.
Fall 2009 – First Semester, junior year
Montreal Campus

This is pretty much a big disappointment for me. I really don’t know what I was thinking. This class was an advanced seminar in environmental art. The whole semester was just one project. Stupidly, I f@#Ked up and didn’t really think about what I was doing. The assignment was to basically make an interior or just something complex (one of my classmates pulled off creating a Warhammer 40K Thunderhawk, it was sick). I decided I wanted to create an interior of a Victorian house, and add in some elements of steampunk into it. I really wanted to create the house in VHE (Valve Hammer Editor) instead of the Unreal engine because I hadn't yet wrapped my head around how powerful Unreal is, and also I was very familiar with VHE. To make a long and stupid story short, I spent too much time doing things that didn’t matter, wasn’t using an engine our teacher was a specialist in, and didn’t manage my time wisely. The good news is that just like every class I took in Montreal Campus, I learned a crap load of stuff that I probably never would have found out if I was back at the Vermont Campus. The bad news is that was the first time I got a D as a grade. Ever.

I still got the credit though (through the screen high five?).

Protector of the Sacred Artifact

Protector of the Sacred Artifact
EGD245 – Foundations of Concept Painting: Final Assignment.
Fall 2009 – First Semester, junior year
Montreal Campus

I’ll admit, I’m not very good at concept artwork, but I thought I’d add this to let you know that the school doesn’t just offer 3D classes for people in the Art & Animation major. There are also other classes we’ve taken like Flash, concept drawing, and Concept painting. This journal is intended for mostly the 3D work that I’ve done at Champlain College, and in the future any 3D related projects I’ll be working on. But then again this blog is mine, right? So it might change.
Anyway, this class was pretty awesome even though my drawing skill isn’t. However, I did finally learn a few concept painting techniques in Photoshop that I never knew before. For your own safety, I won’t post the pictures I did in class, but I will post our final project. The assignment was to create a guardian of a sacred object, and have an Egyptian theme to it. I actually had to create a scene in Maya and draw over it because I couldn’t get the perspective right. This is definitely something that won’t throw you off your seat in amazingness, but it’s a big improvement for my photoshop painting skills.

Dynamic Character Animation Sequence

Dynamic Character Animation Sequence
EGD335 - 3D Animation: Assignment three.
Fall 2009 – First Semester, junior year
Montreal Campus

This was the most entertaining animation project I’ve done so far. This project was to use everything we’ve learned to create a 10 second animation of a bipedal character that can pick up and drop an object. The character also had to do 5 different actions. I tried very hard to set up my character to get as much control over it as I could. I used a combination of tutorials my Art & Animation advisor created, as well as the Learning Autodesk Maya 2008 The Modeling & Animation Handbook to help me with rigging my character. I wanted my animation to be very fast paced, and have minimal pause times. Whenever I animated my character I’d think to myself “What would Jackie Chan do?” My original animation had a few hiccups in it, where the character would do some very unnatural movements that looked really weird if you watched it a few times. Excluding the jumping over the table, either my roommates or I would act out certain positions. I’d also look on youtube for freerunners or parkour traceurs to get a better understanding of the limits of movement the human body is capable of. I came into a big problem about 3/4ths of the way into animating the project, which was Gimbal Lock. Thankfully I was aware of what Gimbal lock was before I encountered it since fellow students in the past had problems with it in previous assignments. Thankfully I was able to fix it for some things on the character, but unfortunately for something like the boomerang I wasn’t able to.

The difference between this video and the one i submitted is that this video has an increased resolution and a different lighting setup. Also rendered using Mental ray.

Walk, Run, Jump!

Walk, Run, Jump!
EGD335 - 3D Animation: Assignment two.
Fall 2009 – First Semester, junior year
Montreal Campus

This assignment was to create and animate a figure that had a large center of mass compared to the rest of its body. Just think of Mike Wazowski, the one-eyed green guy from Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. I just created a skull with basic robotic-like arms and legs, but the main part of the assignment was to animate him walking, running, and jumping. We used The Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams as a guide when creating our cycles. This book is filled with 2D animation techniques, but it applies very nicely to 3D animation as well. This project actually started making me enjoy animation just a little more. Maybe it was because when things went wrong I was able to find a solution or easy work around, or it was the sense of making a biped character come alive. Whatever it was, the project was pretty fun. We had no limit on joints, and I don’t even think we had a limit on time since it was just a cycle. We had to render out the walk, run, and jump cycle in a front, side, and 3/4ths view.

The difference between this video and the one i submitted is that this video has an increased resolution and a different lighting setup. Also rendered using Mental ray.

Obstacle Course

EGD335 - 3D Animation: Assignment one.
Fall 2009 – First Semester, junior year
Montreal Campus

I wasn’t too excited about this project. I already knew we were going to be limited in the amount of joints we could use, and wasn’t looking forward to it. This assignment was to create an obstacle course for an object that only had one point of contact to the ground. This is pretty much the same as the assignment I did using the fire extinguisher, but our animated object needed to hop and move around things. We were required to make it do a certain number of actions, at 30 frames per second for at least 18 seconds. I didn’t feel like doing something like the fire extinguisher because it had very limited moving parts, so I went with something more complex. Pixar did such a nice job when they animated Luxo jr. because he (or she?) was able to use the weight of its head to assist it in moving around. I wanted to do the same thing and tried to mimic a small robotic arm (kind of like the arms that you see in automobile assembly lines). After figuring out how to make a nice skeleton for him only using 5 joints, I noticed I could take advantage of his claw for some nice secondary animation. The animation was supposed to be longer, but I started getting annoyed because my hierarchy of joints and controls wasn’t allowing me to do what I wanted the claw to do. I found this out during the middle of animating it and didn’t feel like going back to fix it, but I sucked it up and animated him the best I could.

Montréal

Champlain College has a satellite campus located in Montreal, Quebec. The reason for this is that Montreal has a couple game studios up there, and Champlain knew it would be beneficial to the Electronic Game Development students as well as other business and Graphic Art students. We were fortunate to dorm at UQAM's International building, which allowed us to interact with other students from culturally different backgrounds. It was a little difficult though, since we weren't sure if the person standing next to us in the elevator or in the laundry room actually knew English. Luckily we eventually meet a lot of nice people in the building.

The other cool thing about the Montreal campus was that our teachers were from the industry. It was great to hear the teachers telling us all these little tips and tricks to better our art skills and what the industry is looking for. Game related or not, the amount of things I learned while up in Montreal was enormous.

I'd do anything to get a job up there, Montreal is friggin' awesome.

Crawler

Crawler
EGD235 - 3D modeling: Assignment three.
Spring 2009 – Second Semester, sophomore year

This final project was something we could choose to make with everything we’ve learned during our time as an Art and Animation student. I really wanted to create a cool looking walker/mech/spider type machine. What you see is actually nothing like my original concept. You know when you picture something in your head that you really think is cool, and you think “I can get that done in no time! It’ll be wicked easy!” Well apparently that doesn’t apply with me, and I completely ignored scope and had to change a few things here and there in order to complete the project. Actually, I didn’t even complete this project in time. I was able to model and UV unwrap everything for the deadline, and textured it slightly. During presentations the next day my teacher noticed the lack of a quality texture and was kind enough to give me a couple days to finish the texture and get it to him before grades had to be turned in.

Environmental Game Asset

Environmental Game Asset
EGD235 - 3D modeling: Assignment two.
Spring 2009 – Second Semester, sophomore year

This assignment was pretty cool, and really tested our artistic abilities. This assignment challenged us to re-create an Unreal Tournament 3 modular asset. We had to find two modular assets in unreal, like a wall and a wall with a door. We had to study the model and its wireframe in Unreal, and then re-model its basic shape in maya. The teacher really wanted us to put a different texture on the model, so it wouldn’t match exactly, and I thought it would be cool to make an Art Deco styled asset (was thinking about Bioshock at the time). Unfortunately for me, I didn’t take advantage of Xnormal. For some stupid reason, I assumed Xnormal was meant for organic styled models, I don’t know why. Also, you’ll notice that the texture looks like crap. Again, out of my stupidity I decided not to use royalty free textures, like the ones on CGTextures.com. I used my own and edited the crap out of them in photoshop. The yellow-orange color is supposed to be gold. I should have studied the models in unreal that had a gold material applied to them and see if I could duplicate it in mine, I’m sure it would have made my project a tad bit better.

Re-Topo

Re-topo
EGD235 - 3D modeling: Assignment one.
Spring 2009 – Second Semester, sophomore year

This was fun; this was the first time we got to mess around in Pixologic’s Zbrush. We didn’t do any sculpting, but messed with the re-topologizing feature Zbrush has. We used Zbrush’s DemoHead as a high poly model, and re-topologized it trying to get it under our target triangle count. I don’t have the original paper, so I can’t think of the max count, but my grade sheet says I got under that amount with 1,192 triangles. It was an interesting project, trying to figure out how to get the polygons to follow the form of the head and not have messy geometry. After we created a low polygon version of the head, we were then shown the UV unwrapping program called RoadKill. This allowed us to easily unwrap our head model and clearly see any stretched or compressed UV coordinates. Once we were happy with that, our teacher gave us a nice high resolution front, side, and top view of a human face to use as a texture. Everyone had different ways of creating the texture. My way was to just edit the face in photoshop on my UV texture as a reference. Then I went into Zbrush and fixed the seam in the back of the head using Projection Master and ZApplink. As you can see by the freaky looking stare he’s giving, I didn’t really pay attention to the eye placement. I tried as much as I could to change the low poly model’s eye lids without the texture getting too distorted.