Run Cycle

Run Mike run

My run cycle was animated in Maya. Overall very simple running animation in a constant speed. I gave it a sense that the character is tired as an added touch. I first started by opening up Mike in Maya. Next I took a look at Mike the character rig to see how he works, I like working in FK when it comes to the arms, this way I'll have better arks as I animate, the character also its much easier for this situation. There is a time for FK and there is a time for IK. This one calls for FK since its a running scene. The next step was to go to the right view and imported an image to the scene. The image was a running guide from the book The Animator's Survival Guide, a highly recommended book for animator's.

Before I started animating I customized Mike to my liking, I took off his mustache and changed his clothes. I first set up the scene by making it 24 frames per second and also making the scene only 13 frames, since the scene will be only half a second and its also going to loop. I started animating by copying the key poses first then the in between. I was essentially copying each pose I saw and made Mike, the rig, mimic that pose. Its important to first blocking in the key poses in the graph editor. Its good to keep an eye on the graph editor as you animate. Once all my poses where blocked out perfectly It was time to go linear and focus on the graph editor more. I made sure that the keys made proper arks so to have no odd movement. I also made sure to add animation principle by adding back and neck twists as well as an up and downs on his back. Then I worked in the arms and here is where I added the Arm on the chest to make it seem like he is tired. And finished off by adding a tired face in mike.

3D Lighting

Project Outside Lighting

The idea for this one is heavily inspired by the last one, which was the indoor Lighting project. I stared off by setting up the scene, I tweaked the house I downloaded original to my liking. I adding a garage and remodeled the walls. All the furniture that was seen in the old project, is gone of-coarse. Then I added a plain for the house to be on which will be my ground, I made sure to make it big enough and pulled some vertices for hills in the background. After I got everything set up; house, ground, walls, bench, rocks, and the garbage can, I created a camera and animated it panning in front of the house. The next step was to add the textures for the house the walls the ground and hills in the back, followed by also bump-maps, I collected assets on Google of these. The Mia physical sun and sky can be tweaked and edited. I changed the sun direction which actually changes the time of day already. For the night scene I added area lights to the windows for a glow effect. I tweaked some other settings after that, like the blue to red ratio, and have to have a morning noon and night scene. The next thing to do was to add lens blur effect to background by going into the camera assets and tweaking the near and far clip plain, to give it a more realistic feel. I rendered 100 frames for each scene which are 3, a morning, noon, and night scene. They are all pretty much the same scene with the same camera animation, but the lighting is different. Each scene rendered the master beauty and an ambient occlusions. After extensive rendering sessions I opened after effects and imported the footage, and added some finishing touches.

 

Indoor lighting

Project house realistic lighting. I started off by Collecting Models and textures I can find on the web. I went with shiny wood floors, a leather couch, table, TV, desk, computer, and picture frames. I added some subtle bump-maps on the walls and furniture. Lighting it was the next step. I looked at a couple of digital-tutor videos for the lighting,which really helped. I sized it too real house size for the lighting. I put a MIA physical sun and sky and 4 lights with a special IES file that simulates realistic lighting, that's why it was important to size the room to a real size. At this point It still looks dark then I set the intensity of the lights to point two. It still looks dark but this time I will not increase the intensity. I go to the camera controls and go the lens shader to increase the gain on the camera to make it brighter then added area lights to the screens on the computer and TV screen models to look like there on with there own glow. I use mental ray for rendering and I'm also using final gather. I set the gain to two after seeing what looks best. I do tweak the shadow to make them softer in certain areas, though this does take a toll on top an already long render time. I think it came out OK, 3D in general is not my specialty, but I am open to learn more.