3d Character
One of the first things that we did with our newfound modeling skills was creating a unique character. I decided to create a samurai modeled after Madara from Naruto. I think it turned out pretty well, however when baking the textures onto the model a lot of the fine detail that I modeled was lost. Other than that, I like how it turned out.
3D Character Walk, Run and Jump
The next step after creating our characters was to rig them and animate them. Rigging a character model means adding a skeleton to it so that the body moves correctly. This was an especially tough process for me because the clothing that my character wore always glitched inside itself when moving the limbs. However, I eventually figured it out and managed to animate a walking, jumping, and running sequence.
3D Character Lip Sync
The next project we had after rigging the body was making facial animations to lip sync an audio. A lot of the detail that was lost when I baked my model was a loss of facial detail. My character lost his smooth eye shape and plump lips. This was a problem when it came to animating the face because I didn’t have much to work with, as the facial features were paper thin. Despite this, I still made it work in the end. I decided to use Jesse’s voicemail from Breaking Bad because I thought it would be funny. A slight oversight was the “biatch” at the very end of the audio clip. However, I cut that part out before submitting it to Mr. Cho on the evo.
3D Character MOCAP Animation
After hand animating everything, we were ready for MOCAP (motion capture) animation. We had to get premade motion capture data from the internet and apply it to our character model. This was easier said than done as sometimes the MOCAP would totally break your character. I decided to make my character do a fighting pose because I thought that it was pretty in character.
3D Narrative Animation
Our narrative animation was a team animation. I worked with Lucy Wang, Harry Kumar, and Theresa Mattia. We were each in charge of different parts of the animation. One thing that I worked on that I am pretty proud of is the water and sky environment lighting. Since we we did a lot of things with a character in the past, I wanted to switch it up and do environment modeling. We did use a lighthouse asset from the internet but the ocean and lighting was all done by us.
Reflection
Before doing 3D animation, I didn’t think that I would like it that much. However, after spending some time using all the programs, I have come to appreciate it a lot more. Although using Maya was pretty difficult, I still think that it is super cool. Because I know that my Maya license will run out and because there are more accessible tutorials, I have moved to Blender, which is the 3D program I am using to create my Zenith Project.