Solar System Animation

Finally, my animated sequence!

Solar systemmmmm... Circular movements, I found, were a little more difficult than I anticipated. After rendering, I see that there are some parts that are not completely smooth. And yes, I know. No Venus! :P

Motion Tracking Project

It took me a while to get this uploaded for several reasons:

One, I was having trouble in general trying to figure out how to get the sequence onto Maya and then the steps you take from there. In Maya, it took me way longer than it should to get the camera set up. Maya shut down a number of times on me, which was rather irritating.

I tried placing a relevant object into my scene, which textures and everything, but when I tried doing this, Maya would shut down. So in order for me to fulfill this project, I simply inserted a non-textured sphere. And voila!

This was a deceptively difficult exercise. I'm glad I learned it, but I wish that Maya wasn't being so buggy.

Particles (Fluid Motion)

Made an ocean (a tempestuous one at that) and floating log. I tried to render a longer animation than this, but it would stop at 60 frames. Not sure why.

But here it is!



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Edit [10:29 p.m.]
BLASTED. I think my slow internet connection ruined the upload of the video somehow. It took nearly 1.5 hrs to upload it! Ack!! i will try again when I get on campus, where internet connection is must faster and more reliable.



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Edit [11/5/2010 ; 4:05 p.m.]

Ok, so second upload didn't work. So, I uploaded it to YouTube. Here it is. I really wish I could render more frames, but I'm not sure how to. Three seconds doesn't do this animation justice and I want to sea more!

Lighthouse - with lights

I tried to recreate a night scene where there are two spotlights on the ground that illuminate the doors of the lighthouse. I also wanted the inside to be lit and the top to emit a light. I couldn't figure out how to render out a spotlight type light coming out of the top. I wanted a beacon! But I think it won't render without objects for the light to bounce off of.

Here are the renders:

Lighthouse - Textured

My lighthouse exterior is composed of only one polygon, so it was mighty time consuming putting on the textures to the individual faces. I mostly used blinn, because the photos of lighthouses on google images made it look as they were just painted (and not made of stone or wood or snow or anything). I tried to give the door a metallic look. And the interior cylinder a wooden texture. My favorite part is the window. It is so cute.

Here's how they turned out:

Finally, sometimes, when I would try to put a texture onto one face, it would change the texture of other unrelated unselected faces. Why would something like that happen? Because of this, Maya frustrated me like no other this week.

Also, I'm still playing around with the textures for the framing around the door, for the roof, and for the banister around the top. But because of the aforementioned issue with maya, I just placed my existing red/white blinns on them.

I'm also having this issue where I put on a white texture to a face and it renders out red. Why is this?????

Scene: Lighthouse

So I totally switched what I was building. Instead of a minaret, I decided to go with a lighthouse (I just wasn't feeling the minaret). So, I did. I mean, I worked on this a great deal and once I started getting going, it was kind of fun. I did a lot of extrusions to carve out details in the door, for example, but beyond that, I was kind of stumped in how to go about further creating detail.

Inside the lighthouse, I placed another cylinder and a sphere on top - this is the "light" part of the house. And I made the faces to part of that cylinder transparent so that you can see through it.

I added windows as well. That was pretty fun. I wish I could've added a staircase inside, but that seemed too difficult for me at this point.

Finally, I created an ocean using the Create Ocean tool on Maya. Talk about too high leveled! After having created this, I wasn't able to move my camera or anything. Good thing I had a back up file. I wish I had made a cliff on which my lighthouse could stand. Because right now, it's just a lighthouse in an ocean (how strange).

Ben - I didn't get a chance to post my scene onto transfers. I will do that next Monday.

Minaret update

Check it.

I laid out my polys. And then I started forming the little banister things. It took me so much longer than I thought it would. Now the only things to do (I guess) is to make the little spire on top, cut out the windows, make some guard rails, add texture. Ahhhh! Brain feer rike its going to exprode.