Final: Special FX

Special Effects Final        

         For this project my group created a scene where josh was abducted by a UFO and taken to an alien planet. We filmed against a green screen so we could replace Josh's background in After Effects. Although the lighting could have been a little bit brighter, filming went well. Sierra was upstairs working on the UFO you see in this video. She used Maya to make it:

After filming, we took the footage and created a mask around Josh so he would blend in with the surroundings. There were a few problems encountered due to overexposure on Josh's face. All we did was trim the video and lower clip white to fix the problem. From there we just placed Josh in each scene. Sierra added a lights and a beam to the UFO to make it look like he was being transported into it. All was had to do from there was fade josh out as the light shone on him. During the shot where the spaceship was flying, all I did was have the background move while the saucer was in one place spinning, It was really simple to make and it turned out really cool.  Matt took screen shots of planets in Space Engine to provide us a variety of  backgrounds to choose from. We ended up going with this one:

The other backgrounds we used:

After that we touched it up by  adding sound effects and then we added a key light on Josh. This was an easy and fun project to make.  We could've done a little bit more with effects such as having Josh beamed down, but overall I am very satisfied with this project.

Project Tools

SaltShaker

To make this saltshaker, I used the create circle cool, and I created curves by selecting  the corner vertex and pushing then inwards. Then lofted, which is using the same shape to create a 3D version of the shape to create the altered circle, and created the body of the saltshaker. From there I gathered my basic skills to make the cap of the shaker. 

Polythingy

I created this polythingy, and used all of the different lights to light it up. I used the spot light, point light, area light, source light, and ambient light to create this beautiful work of abstract art. I placed them all accordingly to create the shadows.

Ice Cream

To create the bumps on the ice cream and cone I used something new that is called bump mapping, which is using a different texture We used the bump map Cloud to create the bumps. To animate the lazy Susan rotating I looped it using keyframes so that it would constantly rotate. 

Hammer

To make this hammer, I used the cut face tool, the bevel tool, and the extrude tool. The cut face tool allows you to select vertices from the shape and cut them from the face of the shape. The bevel tool expands a face of the shape into another smaller face that is similar to the face that you expanded from. The extrude tool extrudes a face from another face so you can create an endless row of faces :).

NURBS Cup

To create the glass cup, and the pot, I used NURBS. I used the curves tool to draw out one half of the cup and the pot, and then use the revolve tool to revolve the drawing around the y axis and make the shape 3D. I had a little trouble using this, sometimes the cup would come out too short or the base would be to sharp.

Bounce

For the bounce project, I watched videos of a tennis ball, a bowling ball, and a golf ball bounce, and I recreated it in Maya. To animate them, I set key frames of them bouncing up and down, and used the graph editor to make it smoother and more natural. 

Character story

For this project I used all the skills I gathered in After Effects, and I made a 2D character story animation. It tells the story about a blue bear named Blueberry, and his struggle to climb a tree and get a bee hive full of honey. I had to first storyboard the story and grab the whole idea and concept of the story, I drew it out, and then I scanned it to my computer. Using photoshop I was able to color in the bear and trace over the sketch to give him life. I made the tree, the beehive, and the background. Then I placed all of the layers into After Effects and started to animate. I learned how to make compositions into scenes, and I also learned how to reuse keyframes. I learned to scale objects to make medium and wide shots, and I used null objects to my advantage as well. I had to sort of rush this project due to deadlines, but overall it came out pretty well. Next time I would probably add more shots but I would make them short shots. They would be one or two seconds to add a little more flare and plot development. Now that I know how to compose a project like this, it would take less time next time, and I would have time to go back and make a couple of adjustments in the animation to make it a bit more fluid. Time management would be better next time as well.  For next time, I would keep the bear and just keep using the skills I've learned the same way I've been using them. For my next experience,  Im going to learn from the problem I had with laying out keyframes, and place them into a composition I can reuse to save time. In conclusion, this project came out pretty well. I think its the better project I've made.

Plausible Impossible

Here Donald's cousin, Gus, flips over the mailbox with ease to match the paper he received. This is stretching the truth, and you wouldn't be able to flip over a mailbox like that without breaking it. You maybe could tilt a loose mailbox, making it plausible, but you couldn't flip it completely over making it impossible. 

Here we have Gus eating a lot of sandwiches. He ate so many of them without chewing that his throated formed an accordion shape. This is plausible because you maybe could put several sandwiches in your mouth, but not without chewing them, making this impossible.

Here we have Gus dipping a piece of bread into coffee. The bread absorbs it at a steady rate, and the dark area increases as if it was a thermometer. This is plausible because bread can absorb a liquid, but impossible because bread cannot absorb a liquid evenly and all the way up to the middle without touching liquid.

Here we have Gus sucking in peas using a straw. The peas go in a "S" like shape and slowly move into the straw. This is plausible because you can suck in peas using a straw thats big enough, but impossible because you can't suck in peas from all the way across the room.

Here we have Donald and Gus trying to suck in a pea from each other. Donald is just using his mouth while Gus is using a straw. The pea is held in the air for quite sometime while the two try to suck it in at the same time. This is plausible because you might be able to keep a pea in the air for a small amount of time, but impossible because you can't keep a pea in the air for a period of time. This action defies gravity.

Multiplane landscape

For this project we worked on making a multi plane landscape. I had the idea of making a decent into an island. The animation came out okay, it was a little too fast and with the animation being a limit of 10 seconds, I really couldn't do that much to fix it because of the way i designed it. I learned how to merge layers, and how to make some layers move faster than others,  and how to directly drag in an image in photoshop. I also had the challenge of drawing in photoshop (whichI'm not very good at.) I feel if I had more time this would've turned out a lot better, but overall I learned a lot from this projects.

Character Animation

My character is a flying elephant
I wanted to make an elephant, but a regular elephant is boring so i decided to make it fly.

My goal wasn't to make my character walk, but to make him fly. I did have quite a bit of trouble  making the wings flap properly, but i eventually got to make them flap as best I could. I also encountered a problem with keyframe spacing, but that issue was quickly resolved. The way I made my keyframes was by pre composing the legs and the wings, and then parenting each object to different layers so the elephant would move all together. Then I added a null object to make the elephant move all together then I made the keyframes by dragging the elephant across the screen. i made the clouds move across the screen by adding one keyframe at the beginning and one at the end.

With making my character walk i learned the efficiency of pre-composing, how to hide layers that are not going to be changed, and I improved my timing and I learned how to parent objects together as well. One issue I had with making  my elephant walk was the timing between the actual movement and the wings, at one point they were off sync, and it looked really sloppy. If I could redo it i would definitely make it longer and not as rushed. I feel pretty good about my animation considering all the bugs and problems I encountered. It can definitely be improved.

Inchworm

For this project I made an inchworm animation. This animation allowed me to learn how to use the puppet tool. It was fun to play with but a little bit tricky to learn how to make the movements natural.