Building a Scene In Maya

I just realized I posted these on my main blogsite instead of here... whoops!

Extra Credit: Lighting a Scene.

One-point lighting

Two-point lighting

Three-point lighting

Third Term Paper

I will not be writing the third term paper. My first two term paper scores were 90 and 90.

Outline of the Third Term Paper

For this paper I will be studying rain effects in TV and film, both animated and practical.

Pacific Rim: fight scene in Hong Kong. This is a very long fight that takes place in the rain. All of it is computer generated. Combined with good lighting and texturing, the rain appears very real. Everything looks wet, and is reflecting the colorful lights of downtown Hong Kong.Very effective at looking real and at setting the mood.

Gotham: Episode 4 climax. An assassin is coming to kill his next victim, but Jim Gordon gets to the house first. The scene is set up outside the house, where it is raining. The rain is meant to change the mood and get the audience ready for the confrontation that is about to happen. The rain is a practical effect and was filmed outside in the daytime. It can clearly be seen that it was sunny when it was filmed due to the shadows in the street in the background. This creates a weird scene, which doesn’t portray the right mood. It looks like actual rain, it just doesn’t look like it should be raining at the time. 

Stop-Motion Character Animation - Team Grilled Cheesy

   

   Team Grilled Cheesy's stop-motion short! My fellow teammates were Kaitlyn Joe, Lauren Chin, and Jessica Lin. We started out by finding characters we could use to animate and then shaping a story around that. We had a lot of pairs of characters, so we eventually came upon the idea of having a lonely character looking for a friend and grieving an old one. Each of us took a part of the story and did storyboards for it. Then we came together and consolidated the story and did a quick animation run through. The next day we spent entirely on animation, followed by a day of editing.

Story boarding!

   Our setup was a simple table with white cloth pushed up against the wall. A camera was set up on a tripod slightly above the table level. We didn't have much to hold the characters in place, so we had to use tape, or hold them up with our hands,which were later edited out.

Editing time!

   In terms of how the work was split up, Kaitlyn was directing from behind the camera, and the rest of us took turns animating. I ended up animating on the later scenes. Mostly the Pikachus, the paper flying towards, and the rolling Pooh bear at the end. During editing we each took a chunk of the film. This involved photoshopping out our hands and other objects used to manipulate the animation, as well as timing out the animation. Jessica took charge of directing us in how to composite our photos. I edited the opening scene up to the page turning scene using Photoshop, and compiled it in After Effects. Each piece was then put together for the final film.