3D Character BIO
This is he project I loved the MOST out of this year at Freestyle, which was creating my own character from scratch and turning it into a 3D model. It all started with Maya, building it up slowly with basic shapes. Then transferring it to Zbrush where we smoothed it out and sculpted it and gave it detail. Finally we put it into Substance Painter and gave it all of the color. Then we rendered it out and described our character. I loved learning how to use all of the software, I was so excited for this last year during my Junior year, and now that I finally did it, I am never going back. Here is my character Carley!
Walk, Run, and Jump Cycle
For this project we had to take our 3D model and start animating with it. The first step was to give it bones. The way you give it bones is to take the model to Maya where you measure it out and apply where the joints will be. Once you do that and a few button presses later your model now moves when you move the skeleton. Bu sometimes it would distort when you would move it. So then we had to do weight painting, which is where you highlight a certain part of the model and make it solid. Once you do that and move it, the model won’t twist and turn awkwardly anymore. Here is the finished animation!
Motion Capture
The Next project was motion capture. This is where you take a live feedback suit and put it on. Once you do, you sync it with the computer and a live skeleton on the site is lined up with your movement in real life, super cool! This was for our Narrative team project, but we can talk more about that later.
3D Lip Sync
For this project, it’s exactly what it sounds like. We were tasked to go back into Maya, take our model and cut out a mouth shape, make lip shapes like, Eh, O, Ah, F, ect. and animate those shapes with any audio we choose. This was a little harder that last year when we were tasked with the same thing except with 2D animation. I overcame it though and created something I am proud of, even though it’s a little silly!
Narrative 3D SR Animation
This was the longest project ever. It’s the same idea as last year, where we had a team and made an animation story together. I was made team leader second year in a row! This time we got to create a 3D animation instead of 2D. This was a LOOONNGGG process but we got it done in the end. The first step was to gather our group and brainstorm an idea, then we assigned roles to who would do what. Then the rest of the time was modeling and animating. This is when the Motion capture came into play! We got the recording from the suit (which I did), and we imported the animation into Maya and aligned it with the model. Then it was exported into After Effects where we did sound design with an intro and end credits. I learned how to work with peers and got a glimpse into the industry of the world of Animation. I valued my group most of all, having them put effort into what they did with love and care made me so happy since I do the same all the time, and their want to get this done and made was amazing. Now, without further ado, I present Caffeine Chaos!