Abigail Gelston

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. – Albert Einstein

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Posts about Semester Two Portfolio written by abigailgelston

My portfolio for this semester :)

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Attempting some poses with the Joe Daniel’s floursack.

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Experimenting with materials/reflections and rendering. I really love the first material, chrome, and the second, copper. It was a fun task and conann went into detail on photography and how we should be looking at lighting and understanding it more to be able to work with it in maya. 

Bokeh- sharp blurred effect (dreamy effect).

Aperture- size of light coming in.

Shutter- duration of light coming in.

ISO- measurement of how sensitive a digital camera’s sensor is to light. 

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In class we were also taught how to create a simple cabinet and to rig it so that we could open the cabinet door. We also had to set limits to the rigged door so that it couldn’t close past the inside of the cabinet and could only open to a certain point.

I found this really fun and this class made me feel a lot better about modelling and rigging in general towards our belfast building project and the final animation. 

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We made an awesome apple in class! I was so proud of myself afterwards. I think everyone was. We were introduced to the soft selection tool and how to create really interesting textures with gradients or simply adding multiply to others.

We were also shown lattice deformers and were shown how to create images onto planes to help with our building project (2d trees). 

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My first scene with lighting! I had fun in today’s lesson but it was easy to get a bit lost. I placed my objects differently and had a different angle of light so it bounces off some differently. The last is with ambient occlusion which is a must have for scenes because it look amazing!

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I replaced my ball in my  happy ball bounce animation with the goblet i created, like my lecturer taught us. It made the goblet a character and made me think of beauty and the beast.

It isn’t great quality.

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This week we were shown how to use the nurbs curve to create a goblet. I found the exercise quite fun. The second image is only of the goblet smoothed out.

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The final Jonas Jump following Conann’s tutorial. I had fun and learnt a lot working from the graph editor.

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Following the Jonas Jump tutorial. Video 1.

This playblast was taken to show that the recovery is too fast and that the hang time needs to be corrected, as well as the stretch at the beginning of the animating.

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Jonas

We were asked to follow a jump tutorial for my lecturer’s rigged lamp called Jonas. I learned a lot from it about animating and what we should be framing first.

I’ve learnt to animate on the Z Axis, that we should animate the length of time needed for the anticipation and jump (we can change this as we work), to then find the lowest and highest height of the lamp, to then get the feet off the ground and finally fill in the squash and stretch after timing is fixed up.

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My Sad Ball Bounce for Maya.

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My angry ball bounce in Maya.

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My happy ball bounce for Maya.

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Although i tried to follow this and it was different in maya 2015 and i couldn’t keep up… I think it will be useful for when we learn enough about rigging to use the directions to stretch etc within certain limits. This tutorial looks decent enough.

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I was looking for happy animation ball bounces but I found this and thought it was quite fun. I like how the animator made the ball more real by expanding him to give the feeling that the ball was breathing… (out of breath after the obstacles).

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Ball Bounces

This week we were shown how to rig a ball in Maya and were told to animate three ball bounces with the rigged ball: a happy ball, a sad ball and an angry ball.

A quote from my lecturer on Maya-

Conann: “Knowledge is like swiss cheese; everyone has holes in different places.”

First I had a look into expressing emotion with body language as the balls don’t have faces.

A screenshot from the Animator’s Survival Kit:

Through my own knowledge of emotions and studying animation, I know that a happy ball can show its emotions through many different jumps but I wanted it to be energetic and fun. I had some song ideas for it but the ball bounces were to be short. My sketches towards the happy ball:

I decided on a simple bounce as our ball bounces are only to be around 60 frames. I thought the twirl would make the ball seem happy and give it some emotion.

To show sad emotions I thought the ball should be quite limp so wanted the ball to have a roll or a ‘pathetic’, heavy bounce.

Final bounce idea:

The angry bounce was quite fun and my initial thought was a head-banging ball to some rock music but the bounce sort of turned out like that.

I had the idea of having it spin in the air to create suspense before it slammed against the ground, like Sonic the hedgehog.

Williams, R. (2001). The animator’s survival kit. London: Fabe