Zenith

The Zenith project is the last big project we do here at Freestyle. This project is ment to show off the best of who we are by giving us the freedom to complete anything.

My Process

The first thing I had to do was a lot of research. There weren’t any tutorials that I could find on how to do professional scientific 3D animation. Most of the science related animation tutorials were for graphics that might be in a Youtube video or something similar. None of them used Maya and none of them made the result I was looking for.

Then I found this guy running a blog called Biocinematics. He was doing stuff closest to what I was looking for, so I browsed his tutorials. In one of them he mentioned something called something called “molecular maya”. This was a lifesaver, and the only reason I could actually do this project. I sort of explained how molecular maya works in my presentation, so make sure to check it out if you want to here about the problems I ran into using it.

The next thing to do was to detach the shell of the proteins and add some bones into them so that I could animate them. Animating was pretty easy after adding the bones and so I added a light and a green background to use as a green screen.

Then I rendered and put all the frames into after effects. I showed the event happening in the background by adding another layer and moving the video in a 3D space.

Then I voiced over the animation and it was done!

Final Outcome

As a finale, I presented my project in class, the recording of which can be found here. The actual project that I made can be found below it.

Audio Reflection

I recorded a reflection of my experience with the project in audio form, which can be found here!