The single ball.

Unfortunately, this is my 3rd attempt at the bouncing ball. The first was lost when my laptop had Maya issues which till now I could not solve. The second one was erased within the school system. This is my third attempt hence it's appearance and its well thought out timing. Without further ado:

3 bouncing balls

Backtracking, here is my 3 bouncing balls which i have done guided and based upon my friend's work. I originally had little issue with my balls till i stumbled upon the timing and the force issues where it did not drop properly. After asking my friend to guide me every step pf the way, I ended up with this.

All in all, I learned the importance of timing and that one must be meticulous in handling the timing.

Crane Animation

It started out with a crane and a box. And this this what happened.

part 2:

The last part of the animation

What was really complicated and fun to use was the parent constraint that tripped me up many a time. I quickly learned after redoing my project once that you had to keep checking to make sure that it was placed properly. Another issue that I faced at was the smoothness of the timing due to the readjustment of a few new actions that I included in my animation. All in all, I learned much from this assignment most of which would be gauging the various timings for the emotions that i wanted my crane to have. It was a really fun and challenging assignment.

Animation for the crane (Draft)

This is the latest project that i have for the crane. I was supposed to make the crane 'perform' certain actions. most of them are listed in the draft as shown below.

For some of the more obvious timings in the animation, clear instructions have been decided and written in the panels. As this is my draft my original was fitted towards it but has minor timing issues as seen fit at that time.

Back for the next half.

I dont really know if this will be used for this half of the semester but I will keep posting if I have time. Okay yesterday we had our first Pencil lesson. Yes, we made it to another software (even if it is just learn animation). To start, we taught a ball how to bounce. FRAME BY FRAME. Most of my classmates just smack in 30 - 40 frames and finished it but poor me decided to be smart and create an animation where a cannon ball (yes a cannon ball) smacks right into my ball and detonates, hitting my ball right into the sky. It took me round 70 plus frames to get it done this morning. Now we work on our next animation, the SEAWEED which i will find time to post a few pics, most likely (if ever) below. My ball pics or the SWF file will be there too so look forward to it :)

Texturing the dollhouse.

 Well the texturing was pretty simple with most of the textures in a plastic material and the images easily taken and adjusted. However came the horror. My window (yes THAT window) could not properly accept the texture and thus created this

Horrible. But due to the lack of time, I could not redo the window and as such I had to submit like thisin the end. but all in all i was pretty proud of what I had done. Here are the final images.

This concludes my first ever project for IN3D. It was a hell of a time creating all this. Maybe I will post more if I am still doing Maya after the hols. :) Cheerio!

The BIG ONE Part 2

With that out of the way, here are some before-creation sketches.

does not look much huh, but i guess thats the best i can do in art at the time. Okay, lets start the creation process. First up was the base and the main walls.

First sign of trouble is when you mess up at the beginning which was what I did. God forbid but I forgot how to fully use extrusion and thus started trying to make a frame for the walls when i could just extrude a cube to form a box as above. It took me an hour to realize that and I deleted my tediously made box in favor of the new method. I dont have the pictures though for this one as i was moping over my stupidity. I resolved to always remember any and every method after that. Next up were the roof.

Trust me you dont want to get me started on the roof. Extrusions face by face after much consideration for the number of inner loops I had to put on my object left me simply aching and sore. But even then it was still manageable as compared to the next few parts of the dollhouse.

Meet the killer of my object. This simple looking window really made me feel that i was ready to throw in the towel, kill myself or crush the com and/or do the above all together. This was the reason.

"I could not do the window panes but this was the solution I had found with loads of help from my teacher." was what you were looking at. My teacher solved the issue by asking me to use polygon panes as the window panes and i followed. However, with that method came another issue. I for some strange reason, could not place the panes properly on to the window. This was due to there being extra polygons in the object itself. as seen in the above pictures and how I was taught a simple solution instead of painstakingly trying to merge EVERY SINGLE VERTICES. It was no joke you know, There were round 300 of them?  I dont know. All I knew was that my eyes were going to suffer from all that straining. However, after that was the end of my major problems. Here is the second window made with ease.

The door as well (oh i am particularly proud of the door knob)

The megazoid of sorts (the first combine/ putting them together)

The lower half combi

and here is the finished product (oh i need to add textures so dont go away)

The BIG ONE Part 1

And we have reached my first big project which I have really painstakingly created. This truly tested my IN3D skills to the limits but it was pretty enjoyable despite all that. My project was to choose an object in accordance to the story about a rat driving around the racetrack. It will be a pain to leave you like that so i will first tell the story about my object, the dollhouse.

The rat, well let’s give him a name. For this story, well, we will call him Pat. You see Pat was a hot shot driver among his friends back at the “Big One’s house”. There was a race coming up that was known as the “Fear Drive”. People in the community will gather for this event. It consisted of driving all around the kitchen of the ‘Big One’ while him and his family were still around. No one had ever been caught yet but there have been serious injuries making it the most sought after title should there be a winner. But for ol’ Pat, it was like a walk in the park. After all, he was not the ‘King of Fear Drive’ for 3 whole seasons (a new record). But I digress. Back to where Pat was today, cruising along a small racetrack in preparation for the big day. The track was stable, his ‘Trapper’, a heavily tuned Mousetrapper G80 was gripping the roads fine, and the ‘Big One’ was not at home, meaning no sudden disturbances. It was then that the accident happened. The winds picked up hard and fast, overturning the racetrack, flinging Pat across the room. If you think Pat’s luck was bad, it gets worse. You see, Pat did not realize that the ‘Big One’s mum’ was still home due to a fever. She came running up the stairs to check what the sudden noise was. Poor Pat had only seconds to hide but with his ankle twisted there was no way he could get away quickly. As fate would have it, there was a dollhouse nearby and Pat took the precious seconds to enter into it. Once inside, he relaxed as the ‘Big One’s mum’ took a quick look and left. Gazing at the dingy room with all its posters and nick-knacks, Pat recalled how he had spent many a time hanging out inside when he was younger. Feeling the old rugged table and fingering the spines of his comic books that he had left behind, Pat began to recall each and every memorable thing that occurred. From the time he nearly blew up the kitchen trying to do his chemistry homework to the time he spent healing his broken heart after being rejected by a very lovely spider (she had wanted someone with more legs). Feeling better, he hoped back into his car and drove off, promising to come back some day.

Revving the engine

Racetracks here after a few days of other work (I had personal issues and as such could not post them even though they were a few months late). Strange thing was that this is pretty easy even with all the extrusions and other design tactics which we were to practice with. The only problem was the bottom connector which I did not understand why till I realized we were modeling a toy race track. But all in all it was a very interesting object to model. I could imagine a full racetrack with loops which would be extremely fun to do. :)  But I settled for modeling a death curve instead so here it is, I present the Death Spin MK 280 *clap clap*

Oddly enough robot sketches

There were to be robot sketches but somehow i decided i was not going to draw them but rather to show my understanding of the robots as a whole and as a structure made of primitive shapes, I made them in Maya. Note: this was before I learned difference, merge and all the other higher leveled skills so the robots may have bumps where there are none and useless and unneeded vertices and faces.

the first robot done but before that, here is the original:

ok now on to the second one:

and finally the original:

to be honest i was rather proud of there two models till i realized after learning difference and union that it could be further improved. But still i felt it was a good effort on my part and i have gained much experience doing this.

Cheers,
Marcus

Blocks and Trains

It is to my greatest apology that i have taken so long to upload all the rest of the exercises that i have been doing for the whole of IN3D (data disappeared - an excuse, i know, but if its an explanation...). The next exercise was the most troublesome for me. It totally delayed the rest of the exercises and forced me to catch up. The exercise was to form a few blocks and then make a train. Simple enough? It was till the horror show started. My data did a MIA on me (i did do it, i swear) and then when i tried to redo the assignment i saw weird forms and faces that i had no idea what they were (scared me but i later found out in my project 1, the LAST exercise, that those were nothing). Ironic huh? Having a problem but only solving it at the end. Well it is all part of learning Maya i guess. So without further ado, here is the blocks... is what i like to say but i forgot to take screen shots of them and Maya is not working on my com due to registration problems... well at least i have the train:

and with that, danjo (inside joke or if you like, search on youtube)!

Cheers,

Marcus

The Robot

Yesterday was our second lesson. This proved to be more of a challenge than I thought. I was tasked to recreate a robot (very much detailed) using the skills I had learned the last lesson. The robot proved to be a very stubborn object. I concentrated very much on the accuracy of the placements and as such took longer to accomplish it than intended. Or nearly actually. My robot lacked both arms and a shoulder. My head, torso and lower body was completed before the lesson concluded. I had also saved it onto my hard drive but to my horror the data went MIA. As such I am now attempting to recreate the robot from scratch. As for the photos of the robot, I intend to upload them in the evening if I am able to complete it. In review of the lesson, I am safe to say it was a lot tougher than expected comparing to Tuesday's lesson but I am happy to say that I had fun in that lesson.

The First Lesson.

Today is the 26 of April and is the class's first IN3D lesson. We had our introductions and a cover view of what we were expected to do in the following weeks. This is similar to the previous lessons that I have so far so it was all usual. What alerted me was the warning given that we had to work more on our own with guidance. This does not bode well. It actually sounded like they were going to throw us into the deep end of the pool to watch us drown... Well it is still the first lesson so i guess it is normal to be so apprehensive. Soon we got down to our first lesson practice. We used Maya to learn how to create and manipulate objects and the task was to recreate an object given to us. I managed to achieve the desired object relatively quickly and was surprised to find that my classmates were still doing them. (quick learner? talent? well i can hope for the best in my studies i guess) However, I was quickly proven wrong.I had failed to give my object accuracy in putting them together and was deemed by the teacher as an inaccurate piece. (It had gaps and such) It spurned me to really concentrate and I was more than happy to be meticulous in adjusting my piece. On the whole and in summary, I have found it to be a very rewarding and fun lesson and I cant wait to do more.