Ice Cream

       Who doesn't love ice cream? Except for those who are lactose intolerant, everybody does! For those of you reading my blog, here is some ice cream that I made. This was actually a simple project to do in Maya. All that you really need is a few simple shapes and some color.

       For starters you need the basis of the project. In this case it was an ice cream parlor, with a bowl and a cone. Next you have to make all of the basic shapes, which includes several spheres, a cone, 2 tori (otherwise known as the ring), a background, floor, and a table. The floor, background and table are all made of stretched cubes. In order to make the bowl you first need to take a sphere and cut it in half using a thing called difference. This means that you cover about half of the sphere with a cube and then go to Boleans then difference. That basically just cuts the sphere and gives a basic bowl. If you want a bit of an edge to the bowl You need to extrude the top a bit inward to make it look like a rim. For the ice cream scoop do the same exact thing but then add a cylinder to the middle. For it to actually look like a scoop you may need to use another sphere that fits in the scoop and then  use difference again and get rid of the part of the handle that sticks into the scoop.

       For the actual ice cream you just need to make spheres of different sizes and then use the 3D texture cloud to give it that texture. You can also add other things to make your favorite, for instance I made cookie dough. We also had to make a cone with ice cream in it too. I decided to have a little bit of fun and turned it into a neapolitan snowman. For the record, yes, I did want to build a snowman (Frozen, the movie). It was actually pretty fun making this project and I had a lot of fun doing it. When making the cone all you need is the cone shape and simply add a yellow color to it and add a bump map which gives it the pushed in look. I guess that is all I have for this project.

Until next time, this is Jake Smith.

Real Or Hoax

       Another day, another project finished. This time I have made a website depicting myths and legends that may or may not be true. This was actually pretty fun because I have always liked stories that sound almost too much to be true. When I was younger I had multiple books about those kinds of things and to this day still have them with me.

       My favorite story was one about this woman who was driving home very late at night. She saw an elderly woman holding a grocery bag and decided to help the old woman. She pulled up next to her and asked if she needed a ride home, the elder woman simply grunted her address and got into the car. As they were driving, the car stopped at a stoplight and was waiting. As they were waiting another car's headlights filled the car with light. The woman driving looked over and saw various knives and other sharp objects inside of the elderly woman's shopping bag. She then got her first good look at the old woman and saw that the old woman was actually a man. She continued driving until she reached a part of the road out in the middle of nowhere and started faking that the car had suddenly died. She told the man, who was completely unaware that she knew his secret, that she had a spare battery in her trunk and asked if he could go and get it. As soon as he stepped out, she tossed his bag on the ground and sped off. The next day she looked at the newspaper and was shocked to find the man's face on the front page, saying that he was an escaped convict. She quickly notified the police and told them the address that the man had told her the night before. In the end the criminal was never seen again.

       When I started the project I began to make all of the boxes of various colors that you can see by following a helpful video. All that really needed to be done was to make multiple div tags and then apply css styles to them. One of the easiest parts was making a css style sheet that would apply to all of the pages of the website. In order to make all of the pages, I simply copied all of the coding and pasted it into a new file and just changed all of the wording. After having my work double checked, I was told that I forgot to add headings and to put them into an unordered list. Next I decided to go with a sort of vintage look and used Courier New to give it that old typewriter look.

       After that I was able to finish with some time to spare, so I then made my own logo for the website instead of the default logo. When I was making the logo I wanted to keep it close to the original but also make it better than what it already was. I started with the words "real or hoax" and added a little bit of color to them. I used the old trick about blue being the color of truth and then proceeded to put a scale next to it because it is the American symbol for truth. Also it is the Candor symbol in Divergent, because candor means truth. It's nerdy I know but also funny if you think about it. Anyway, the next thing I did was make the hoax part of it. I made it look kind of like a fail stamp kind of thing and put the Loch ness monster next to it.

       It seems as though i've pretty much explained everything. If I could do this project again i would definitely spend some more time making the text itself look better, to me it seems as though i just kind of slapped it on there. I would keep the basic parts and colors of this website if I did do it again. I will soon have another post depicting the next project.

Jelly Bean Bros.

Finally, the time has come and I have made an entire animated story. When I first had to start thinking about this video I wanted to do something fun and just a little bit childish; so then the idea for jellybeans with faces came to me. For starters a story board was made where I made the basis for the story. After consulting with an expert, some things unfortunatley needed to be cut out of the story due to time issues. Basically, the story is about two jelly beans who get lost from their box away from all of their friends and family and they are trying to get back. The easiest part was making all of the components in photoshop where the sets and characters were made. As you see in one point of the story, the beans are on top of a magazine picture of Tanks Monthly, I had an entire other side to it that would have made that scene make more sense but it somehow got deleted and I unfortunately did not have time to remake it.

Next came the actual animating process that took a really long time. I had imported all of the things that were made in photoshop and finally brought them to life. I thought it was fun actually giving the characters emotions and I actually learned to do it on my own. It was hard trying to keep track of several mouths and getting the eyes and eyebrows to move exactly when they needed to. I also learned after the project was finished that if you keep a character set to certain settings it will completely disappear. Thankfully I had some help to correct that. I now have a little more respect for the people who do this for a living, because it is very hard to meet deadlines, especially when you have so many things to do within the animation.

If I did something like this again I think that I might do some things differently. I might make less scene changes because that was one of the most difficult things trying to switch between scene after scene. I wouldn't completely change the way I did things though because some of the stuff worked out great. For instance, even though my characters didn't really talk I would keep the way the emotions were made because it seemed really easy once I figured out what I was doing. I am glad to have done this project and now I can take some of the techniques I learned and hopefully apply them to later projects.

Until next time readers,

Jake Smith

Halloween

In web design we have been making a halloween themed web page. Not only that but we also added in some animations that made the page look even cooler. Here are the animations we used.

Using photoshop we simply made two different versions of the words "It's Halloween!" then put them both into an animation with frames in the middle to make them blend. Then for the pumpkin we used different shades of a light colored gradient and made it look kind of jerky to look like a flickering candle.

Website About Me

(Besides the blog, of course...)

      In my latest web project I had to create a seamless background, then the teacher kept adding more and more to the project until we made a basic site. So now the project is a bio about us, what our job is, favorite color, what annoys us, etc. In order to make the website look like this we were told several new types of code in order to do it. First we went into photoshop with an image of concrete. Next we needed to make the image seamless so that it would show up as one big image instead of hundreds of small images. Then we were told to change the color, I decided to go green and make it look like grass. After that we took the image into Textmate (the program we have been using for code) and used it for the background. Then we had to make a Div tag which is the semi-transparent box you see around the text. Its main purpose is a way to group certain amounts of content and you can change everything to the same look because of the Div. After that we were told to put a picture of ourselves on the website.

      It was not entirely smooth sailing throughout this project and I did run into a few problems. The first thing was we had been given the project on a Friday and by the time Monday had rolled back around I had forgotten some of the important code I needed, thankfully someone I was sitting next to was very helpful and showed me what to do. Another problem I had was with the font style, for some reason only half of my text would change to the font I wanted and the other half stayed as the default. Eventually the teacher came over and helped me out and things were back on track. I was very pleased with how the picture came out on the website. For that we put the picture of ourselves on to photoshop in order to lighten it up so we didn't look like we had grey skin. For the most part it worked pretty well and I was able to eliminate most of the background.

      One thing that I think still needs work is the color scheme that I put on the website. In class we had talked about C.A.R.P. (Contrast Alignment Repetition Proximity) or the four basic rules of web design. I would like to change it because my colors are all over the place, I have green, orange, blue, black, and white. It just seems a little sporadic to me even though it is pretty good contrast, next time I will probably change it though. I would also like to align my pictures better next time because of the way the second picture is hanging off the edge of the border. It just doesn't seem like very good proximity.

      It was fun though because of the way we made this project, usually there are two types of code in Textmate that we use on the same page: CSS and HTML. HTML is usually more of the basic stuff where you put in the text and all that, CSS is more of the style type of code. In this project instead of using them together we used them seperately and at the very end connected them together by telling the project to follow the rules of the CSS styles. All in all in was a fun project and I am still glad that I chose web design.

Plausible Impossible

Donald Duck Version

The plausible impossible is all of the things that make a cartoon fun. Like having an anvil fall on your head and then walking away without a scratch. Things that can happen in cartoons that make it seem all the more realistic even though it doesn't really happen.




1. It is plausibly impossible for it to sound like a bell when hitting someone on the head.

2. It is plausible impossible for someone to eat a huge sandwich and then have a sandwich shape go down their throat.

3. It is plausibly impossible for peas to follow a trail across a table by someone sucking them up through a straw.

4. It is plausibly impossible for an eaten hot dog to start barking.

5. It is plausibly impossible for someone to leave an exact person shaped hole in the wall just by smashing through it.

Space Animation

Throughout our newest project we had to make multiple layers move together to make it look like a moving scene. Throughout this I learned that when layers move at different speeds they will still look like a single landscape moving. Another thing I learned was that this was the process that Disney used in some of their movies. Lastly I also learned to make a realistic background just by using a single part of a photo and turn it into a different scene.

Statue Man

In this project we had to come up with an original character and then animate then to life. My character is Statueman, I wanted to make a superhero that had a power nobody else had come up with. So, as the name implies he turns into a statue.


















Next, we had to make our character walk across the screen using Adobe After Effects. With the design of my character the only issue I had was that his legs are bent and it looked a little weird while he was walking. The only issue I had with the keyframes themselves was when I first started moving the legs and I made then go backwards instead of going forward. To make the character walk I first had to create a new composition inside the composition(like Inception) where I made the legs move back and forth. Next I had to put in all of the points of where the character's legs were going. After that I had to time the positions correctly so that one legs was moving foreword and one was moving backwards. Lastly I then made the legs attach to the body and made all of it move across the screen.

During this project I learned how to make all of the parts of a body stay together and make it look like an actual person, I also learned how to make one part of the body move while another part needs to move differently, and lastly I learned how to use a composition inside of a composition. If I could redo this project I might actually show that he has super powers. I feel like I did a pretty good job on the animation, there could be some things I could have touched up some things but overall I feel really good about this project.

Here is the finished product after our critique on Friday, the only thing I really changed was fixing the buildings and making him walking on the building look more realistic.

Inchworm

In this project we had to create an inchworm that would move across the screen. We learned to use new tools like the puppet pin tool and the parent function tool, which allowed certain objects to follow certain commands. I really enjoyed this project because it was my first living creature animation and I felt like I did pretty well on it. I did find it difficult to use the puppet pin tool because if the points were not put in specific places, the entire creature looked like it had been squashed. I did find it easy though to actually move the creature because all that I had to do was put one point at the edge of both sides of the screen and let the inchworm just move from one point to the other.

Photoshop Bounce

In this assignment I had to make a ball bounce across the screen. What I first did was make the ball in photoshop where I made it look 3D. In order to make it move I had to create keyframes in each of the arcs of the ball, I found making the frames easy but getting them to flow was very difficult. I had to make the ball curve in every single bounce and every time it hit the ground i had to squash the ball to make it look like it was bouncing. The timing was probably the hardest to do because if the timing was off by one frame it completely messed up the flow of it. We also made small animations in photoshop but it seemed smaller compared to the whole of photoshop. But in Adobe After Effects it was more focused on and more of the main point of the program. this was very fun and I can't wait to do more.

Color-wheel Project

During the color-wheel project i used a new program called adobe illustrator. I found it to be a lot like photoshop except for a difference in some of the tools. Some of the tools I did use in Illustrator was the shape tool in order to make all of the shapes, I also used the text tool so that I could label the colors, and I used the coloring tool so that it would actually look like a color-wheel. It was very helpful that Illustrator had guides to help me line up the shapes on the wheel. It was fun to use something new and I enjoyed doing it too.