The MAYA Tools

Hello dear readers,

       In this post I am going to go over all of the tools we have learned about in MAYA. During the first project, the Polything we learned about how to light an object  in order to show the most of it. Usually it doesn't just take one light, most of the time at a minimum you need to use two or three. In this particular project I used three lights. Two of them were directional lights that simply work just like a flashlight, just point it in the direction you want and behold, you have light pointing in that direction. The other light was an ambient light which I placed in the center of the Polything. The ambient light is just a ball of light wherever you put it.

       The next project we did was make the hammer. During that we learned how to extrude certain parts of an object and make another shape come out of the original. That was used to make the claw and the blunt part of the hammer. We also used the cut face tool to make the certain polygon shapes that we needed. The bevel tool was also used on the blunt part in order to make it look round after shaping it from a square.

       After that we did the ice cream project where we learned the bump map tool in order to make an object look 3D using a 2D texture. Another thing was to make a looping animation so it looked like the ice-cream was spinning around and around. In this particular project I decided to have a little fun with it and made a snowman on top of the ice-cream cone. Later when we were actually animating it I made him wave when he came near the screen.





       After that we made couple of bouncing spheres to sharpen our animation skills and get timing on keyframes correct. We also used a graph editor which is basically just a timeline of the animation itself. We used that to make things more accurate and we could place the keyframes exactly where we wanted them.

  

Next was the cups that we made, during that we learned about NURBS. NURBS stands for Non-uniform rational basis spline. Instead of using a polygonal surface on the 3D objects we used the NURBS instead. We had to use them in order to use the revolve tool. The revolve tool lets you take a line that you have shaped and revolves it around a center point until it makes a complete 3D shape.










Finally in the latest project we made salt shakers and in that we used a circle and simply shifted some of the points to get a basic shape for a salt shaker. Next we used lofting where we took a couple of the same shapes with different sizes and then put a skin around it. This is called lofting, where you make the curved part of the inside of a shape. The idea of it is basically just like a skeleton.

Until next time readers,

This is Jake Smith

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

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.