Well it's been a long time...

Semester B has been incredibly tough, which isn't a excuse for not posting anything the whole time, I've just found it really hard  to start posting again.

Sememter B pretty much wrapped up on Friday with Film Day, which shows the best work from the 3rd years, as well as the odd piece from 2nd year. It was a really awesome day, I even got a free uhanimation T-shirt for helping out. I'm feeling pretty motivated to do work because of it, or prehaps more being scared into doing work because I'd be gutted if my 3rd year project didn't make it into film day so I need to keep up the work over the summer.

You can find all the film day films at:
uhanimation.co.uk/expose
I'd highly suggest cheaking them out, because they're all  really amazing.


I guess now is a good time to post up some of my work from this semester, I might post some more stuff later, before I start working on a personal summer project.

My animation show reel


Animation Showreel from Victoria Newbery on Vimeo.



Showreel Summer 2014 from Victoria Newbery on Vimeo.

Final renders for digital systems project

The final racing car render

It's kind of weird knowing that this units finished now, I learnt a hell of a lot from it. I am pretty annoyed at myself though, because I seriously fell behind over the Christmas holidays so finishing everything for the deadline was one serious rush. Luckily my tron bike, toy car and shark were pretty much finish and so didn't really suffer for it. I'm somewhat ashamed of how unfinished and bare my table loos though.

Anyway here are my other renders for this project. 

Toy Car progress

I've mostly finished modelling, I just need to model the tape and a few other details such as the head lights. But I'm going to wait until I've finished texturing the main body of the car. There's not real reason for this other than the face that I don't need to model the tape first. I suppose it gave me a break from uving, which is nice.

Mesh

 Mesh with UVs

Racing Car base mesh

I got the base mesh finished for the racing car (and most of the wheel)  after my second attempt. The shape of the front headlights is still pretty rubbish, but I’m not going to worry too much about that right now since I’m more concerned about how I’m going to reduce the density of the mesh along that edge. Cutting the mesh into sections may be a solution, but I think I’ll try and finds some models of similar cars that show the wire frame first to see if that gives me any ideas.

Out of the Box Toy - Racing Car

 

After placing front top and side images into maya I started modelling using curves that followed the main shape of the body like we were taught for the tron bike. This was a little tricky because the part with the lights sticks up above the main bonnet, which meant that I had to guess the shape of it to an extent. 

 

After lofting them into a polygon, I started to extrude around the bottom of the side. Then extruded inwards and up between the two wheel to model most of the side.

I then started to fill in the gaps between the top and the side. I had a bit of a problem getting them to join up neatly but I'm not too bothered as I intended to use this as a base mesh like I made for the shark.

I knew my reference pictures weren't quite straight and so I was already compensating for that while modelling. However I hadn't realised that the scale and alignment was quite as far out as it is until I started working on the front lights.

So I'm going to retake the images and make sure that I line them up properly this time. I'm also also going to try tracing the images so that I have actual lines to work from because I was finding it quite difficult to see the shape of the car once there's polygons in front of it. Then I'll see if I have to restart the model or not.

Character Design

Just wanted to share my character from the visual narrative project for this semester. I'm actually really proud of my work for this unit, particularly because everything had to be done by hand, so no photoshop. Colouring the environment was pretty painful because of this. And annoyingly I forgot to scan it before submitting it. So I guess sharing that will have to wait until after Christmas.

A little bit about my character
Her name is Kristina
she's a 16 year old living in Munich in 1930
she has the loudest shout in the world
she has large muscular forearm
and she fantasises about being a slave of Satan

I really want to know who came up with these... some of the other characters were crazy.

Anyway the image at the top is my character turn around, which is painted in water colours. We also had to make a plasticine maquette, which was pretty fun too.

Pipes

I haven’t added any progress updates in a while, which I’ll probably add tomorrow since I ended up spending this evening working out how to make pipes rather than spending time on my logbook.

I wanted to add some pipes to my podracer and trying to make them by extruding a polygon cylinder doesn’t seem to work very well. Seeing as I’m not in a class I decided to google different way of making them.

A lot said to make a curve and then extrude a nurb circle around it. This did work, however I couldn’t get the corners to look right. I think this is to do with my lack of knowledge of how the different curve tools work. I made the curve using the cv curve tool that we used for the tron bike and when extruding used snap to control points. I think the problem was that the curve points don’t lie on the actual curve and there isn’t enough of them.

Method 2

Using Bend deformers

create a cylinder and increase the hight divisions in the channel editor.

Go to the animation menu

create deformers > non liner > bend

adjust curvature in channel editor

this makes the bend in the pipe so extrude the edges for the straight parts.

edit

you can increase the number of control points on a curve by going edit curve > rebuild curve. However I found that it had to be increased to about 45 before the corners looked nice, but the extra edge loops on the straight parts can just be deleted afterwards.

I found using the bend deformer easier and quicker to get looking right, however I expect that the cv curve method would be quicker if you were planning to make a longer pipe with lots of corners.

Work from earlier digital systems lessons part 3 - Shark

Work from earlier digital systems lessons part 3 - Shark

shark lesson 1
making a base model means that you have to worry too much about the topology.
Start with a cube with  and shape to make top of sharks nose.
Extrude down to make mouth then back for the body.
Extrude out fins

Once the shape of the shark is finished, smooth the object twice
press make the selected object live and use the middle mouse button to snap vertexs of the new model to it.

Shark lesson 2
Uving shark
Delete one side of shark, the remaining half can be duplicated, flipped and stitched back together one the uvs are done.
Use create uv’s based on camera angle
Unstitch the fins and uv separately
use unfold to fix distortions created by using the camera angle.
Use uvref image to check for other distortions and that the normals are around the right way.
For front fin.
UV top and bottom separately using create uv’s based on camera angle


Texturing

Seams are difficult to fix in photoshop, so Lewis suggested to use Mari
I have a feeling that I managed to move the uv’s after taking the uv snapshot, which would explain this

Shark

I realised I hadn't posted up my shark at all. This is actually version 2 of it as my original one was so out of proportion and had kind of blobby fins. Still need to finish it though. I doesn't even have a proper mouth at the moment. Or eyes... Or teeth. And a shark isn't much of a shark without teeth.

Tron Bike progress

Besides a few details, I'm pretty much done with the modelling part. I was going to finish Uving it tomorrow but after looking at my shark and realising I had done a lot less of it than I thought, I'll work on that instead. I really am still far too slow at modelling.

Wednesday's lesson - UVing

Spent the lesson Uving a head for practise, I didn't finish, but it was definitely worth it because it makes everything that I need to model for this module seem a lot easier than they did before.
I don't know who modelled the head, it was just given to us by the lecturer for practising UVs.

 

For the most part it was just splitting the object up into flattish planes and using the uving based on camera angle. Then unfolding them as much as possible then stitching them back together. The ears, eye balls and the inside of the mouth and nose remain separate to prevent over lapping UV's.

Podracer continuation

I redesigned my pod racer again. I'm actually happy with it this time, although now I'm just experimenting with adding different parts. Hence why the cylinder like shapes aren't attached, as I was just seeing if I liked them there.

I also started trying to make the engine look less like it's based off a portal gun. It isn't, it just looks like it. I changed the shape of the underneath part. It looks better up the other way, but I may just delete that part and redesign it anyway.

Tron bike progress

I had to redo the main body of the bike because the curves I had used we too uneven at the front of the bike, so it looked terrible even when smoothed. I also notice that the model was actually a lot more detailed complicated than I origionally thought, and so also had to take this into account when remodelling.

Work from earlier digital systems lessons part 2 - Tron Bike, lessons 2 and 3

After the second week

Class notes

Tron Bike week 1
File > Set Project > tron bike
Use the CV curve tool and revolve to model the different parts of the wheel.
Move the pivot point before revolving as it’ll revolve around that point
Lofting- for tron bike main body
Follow the shape in the side view with the cv curve tool
Duplicate and move the curve so that it follows the shape of the bike.
Select these curves and use the loft tool to create a polygon.

Tron Bike week 2
Fill side of bike using append to polygon tool
Add horizontal edge loops and shape around wheels

Cutting out parts for wheels
Duplicated and scale to -1
Join the 2 halves together using merge edge tool
add edge loops and cut of parts of frame

UV mapping
assigning Uvref to object
in hypershade, select lambert
next to colour click on the checker board
click file and add image
select the object, right click on lambert > assign to object
select object
create Uvs > choose type of mapping
adjust in UV texture editor

Podracer this week

12^th November

Continuation of Pod racer

I just started to refine some of the shapes, for example the side part now curves with the main shape rather than being vertical. I also added a ring to connect the bottom part to (highlighted) because I was thinking that maybe the part underneath could spin.

Te bottom part still needs a little work, the shape is kind of odd.

13^th November

Pod racer lesson 2

Due to my usb stick dying I decided to work on the pod. This was really hard, probably because I haven't really got a firm idea of what it should look like in my head.

I started with a cube, but after deleting multiple faces, I might as well have started with a plane.

I just extruded edges and then moved vertexes in the orthographic views. It ended up being a very slow way to work and I'm not particularly happy with the out come.

Work from earlier digital systems lessons part 1 - The Table

 Modelling a table was really just to introduce us to the basics of Maya.

Notes from class

Create cube

Snap the pivot point to one of the top corners of the cube.

-Press insert

-move while holding v

-Press insert again

Snap pivot with the corner of the desk.

Scale leg till level with grid

Duplicate (ctrl+D) and move each leg to other corners

Change rotations to match

Edge loops are needed to retain sharp edges when objects are smoothed

Edit Mesh > insert edge loop tool

Curve Tool

create > CV curve tool

plot points on a 2D plane around the centre line

Select surface in the drop down menu

surfaces > revolve (the little square for the options)

-check axis being used

-Output geometry as polygon

-quads

-control points

Check for non-quads

Table after first week

For a first try I was fairly happy with this, however the table legs and scale really needs to be addressed and they really just don't work.

Concept City Street Project

Just wanted to post my two final images from my first module. The brief was to make two concept images of two different cities, one contemporary and the other historical. I chose Sibiu and Miami.

I loved this project and learnt a lot from it. I may have been pretty good at perspective drawings to start with, but designing urban landscapes was something that I really didn't have a lot of experience with. My use of colour has also gotten so much better. Before I used to use a lot of different bright colours and avoided both realism and restricted colour schemes because for some reason they always had a tendency to look muddy. Not a great look.

Anyway I can always say that I could have done better, but I'm actually really proud of these.

Digital Imaging Lesson

This lesson was based around using photos as a starting point for creating character designs. This was done through photo collage, digital painting and the use of other tools in photoshop.

I found the photo I started with online, however because I never intended to post it and was only messing around with it in class I don't have the reference for it. But I'm pretty proud of it for 2 1/2 hours work..so yeah... perhaps being a little naughty here.

Podracer so far

Okay so maybe I didn't do any more. But like I said I would I'm posting my progress that I've made on my podracer.

I made the main part of the engine as 3 parts, an inside, a middle and an outside part. All using cylinders. For the rest I just started with cubes and extruded them. It's still pretty basic, no detail yet, but I happy with the over all shape. And considering that something when wrong with nearly every piece I think I did pretty well to get this far anyway. For example I forgot to reduce the number of subdivision down to 12 from 20 and by the time I realised it was too late to easily fix it. Other parts just went really weird when I pressed 3. I have a feeling it was because I was trying to extrude the edges around a face instead of the actual face.