YACHTS!

New Start...

      It's the start of a new year at Olathe Northwest high school. With a new year beginning, which will also be my last, it also mean that this is one of my last in school projects. With this new project, I wanted to start a project that doesn't leave my boundaries of what i'm capable of. I thought about doing a 2D drawn animation or something involving After Affects or Photoshop but I decided that I wanted to model in Maya but models something a little different, and also model something that would still challenge me. So with those boundaries, I chose to model yachts, not just the exterior but the interior of the yachts as well. All of the yachts would be different because not every yacht will be the same. I also planned on adding a moving water affect near the end of my project to give it a little more of a real look. With this idea, I knew it would take some planning and a lot of browsing through videos to figure out new tools and shortcuts to use that would better my experience. 

First Yacht...    

   
     I started by pulling out different polygons and morphing them to fit my expectations. For example,  I would simply place a square block, which comes pre-made, then if I needed a triangle (not a pyramid) I would add subdivisions, put the object in vertex mode, then adjust the various points to form those triangle like edges. After finding the achieved fit, I would then put the object in face mode and delete the extra faces that still made the object appear square like. After deleting, this would leave an awkward hole in the object which I could fix by going to edit mesh and selecting the fill hole option. So basically the example above represents most of what I did to create my yachts. Obviously it took more than just moving vertexes and deleting faces but go through step by step would be exhausting. After finishing the difficult task of finding the right yacht shape, I then combined all of my polygons and came out with my first partially finished yacht.

     

Second Yacht...     

   
     With my first yacht finished, I then began my second yacht. I mean, an ocean is not just going to have one yacht floating on it. Like the first yacht, I began bending, stretching, and minipulating polygons to fit my style of yacht. The only thing different about this yacht compared to the first yacht is it's style, or in other words body shape and exterior, and this yacht required more extruding and subdivision work. I was more free to sort of play around with the style of this yacht and kind of do random things till it feel right. 

Conclusion...

   
     After having created my first two yachts, there was still more work to do, the interior. I knew doing the interior would be the hardest part or one of the hardest parts of the project. Thinking of where to start became difficult and had me sitting in my chair staring for quite some time. Due to the staring and my brains creativity flowing in all different directions, I decided to keep my yachts but instead of modeling the interior, make a cities for my yachts to chill at...I had wanted to do a city for sometime now and this was an opportunity I didn't want to waste. This city wasn't just going to be some normal city you see today but a futuristic city. So I continued on with my last thought...and my city has yet to come to life...

Reflection (Animation)

The Year is Coming to a End!

   
     As the end of the year approaches, and by approaches I mean...2 half days are left. So with the Junior year ending and Senior year approaching, I would like to take time to reflect on my fantastic school year in animation. In a short summary, I could say that I learned a set of several new skills, those being in Maya, Photoshop, After Effects and etc...Not only animation skills but skills needed to survive adult hood as I go on my own and search for my first job. For example, communication and collaboration skills, interview skills, time management, how to fill out a resume, the appropriate way to dress at events and lastly, I learned networking skills. Even though I learned a handful of skills that do require hard work and each individual to be hyper focused...I also learned what it means to make friendships and have fun while doing what you love the most. With this summary, you can really see what a year spent using every minute of time will do to help develop a person. Now I will go more in depth and explain the little things to connected to these skills and how they benefitted me this year.

Beginning the Year w/ less experience: 

   
     I've already basically summed up the things I've learned, now I would like to explain how I learned those skills. It can be seen as obvious by many that the animation skills were developed through the practice of modeling objects and using the application Maya to make my creations come to life. 

The Fishy:     

Scanned drawing

Own fish texture design

     
I remember at the beginning of the year, I was assigned with our first real project, the fish. Now, coming from past years like my Freshman and Sophomore year, I already had some experience using the applications Maya, Photoshop and After Effects but this project was way more on the upper level. So in my mind, I'm thinking "okay...I like a little challenge entering in to the beginning of the school year." I had decided to go all out with this fish and became competitive with the people around me. I wanted to make the best looking fish in the class...but as days went by, I became weary and grew tired. I sort of lost my motivation but don't mistake my tiredness for giving up. I did finish the project and realized that I would need to manage my time better. Through that project, I didn't just learn about time management and how to stay motivated but I also made some friends along the way. With the friends made, I knew I could then compare, ask questions and get help from them. The fish model gave me a lot of freedom with design (how I wanted my fish to look) both body wise and color wise. I learned the wedge tool which was used to make the fish fins. The wedge tool basically allowed you to wedge the fin after extruding it, kind of like a wedge of cheese. I also learned a new technique that I had never thought of before which involved scanning in the drawing of the fish, importing it into maya, creating a cube  polygon and adding subdivisions, then switching to vertex mode and selecting each individual vertex on both side and stretching the polygon to match the shape of the fish.

Middle of Year:

     
     After the beginning of the year slowly fading and the start of quarter 2 coming by, each individual was given a little freedom to kind of explore their strong suits and figure out their weaknesses. We were each to create a project, any project, whatever floated our boat. So of course everyone was stoked and happy to truly figure out what they were good at doing. So with a little thought, I decided to work on some modeling, mainly because I enjoyed modeling in Maya the most and thought of it as my strong suit. 

The Castle:

     

Untextured castle

I decided to model a castle in Maya. During the long modeling process, I ran into the struggles of the usual Maya crashing which caused me to restart but at the end, I was truly glad it happened because it taught me that problems WILL happen and sometimes, you just have to figure out a solution or find your way around the problem. But most importantly, you CAN'T GIVE UP! During the modeling of the castle, I learned not use the boolean differencing and union every time I wanted to form a new polygonal shape otherwise, it will cause major lag and create even more polygons that aren't suppose to be there. I got to explore the different tools in Maya while figuring out how to spice my castle up (add detail to make more appealing). With the helpful tips and ideas from the people around me, I was able to finish a model of the castle without a texture. Then, I put in those little objects to give the castle that blah bling. The finished castle looked great and was a good challenge for me. At the end, I definitely figured out that my strengths involved modeling and having a good mind for working around problems but I struggle with time management. I see a great idea in my mind but I also need to keep in mind of how much time will be absorbed during the creation of the project. 

Gummy Bear Stop Motion:

     

Toothpicks used as weapons...pretty creative right?

My last project that occurred during 3rd quarter was a stop motion project. This project was by far my favorite experience and i'm excited for the upcoming Juniors to get to have the same experience I did. So enough talking about how much I enjoyed it and i'll get down to the details. So during the quarter, me and 4 other people in my class were grouped together. We were assigned to for the next few weeks, work together and create an amazing stop motion. So...we got together and blurted out ideas on what the story needs to be about. After a lot of discussion (not really) we finally came up with a permanent plan..that plan being to do a stop motion about a gummy bear village being attacked by a giant bionicle creature. We all brought in supplies like candy, frosting, lollipops, animal crackers, gummy bears, cardboard...I think you get the idea, and we used those items to create the set. Then we got a camera and one by one moved the gummy bears and the creature for each shot. the moving and shooting process took awhile. Then the images had to be connected together through editing. We managed to finish the project, leaving great impressions on our faces and the peoples faces around us. After that final 3rd quarter project...4th quarter then came around the corner.

End of Year:

   
     With the first semester and 3rd quarter pretty much done, I had the freedom to really start on anything else I wished or anything that didn't waste time. So with that, inspired by my car needing new rims, I decided to create some sweet rims that I wish I had. 

Nice Rims:

     

Rendered black and red car rims

I used the application Maya to start off with a simple open holed cylinder and used that as the tire that would later be the foundation for the rims. I began to just add on and form different shapes till I found one that looked like real rims. After I finished, I textured the rims. I made them match the color of my car which is the color red and black. 

The Planet:

     

Render of finished planet (Planet name: Platuni)

After the creation of rims, I then decided to randomly make a planet. I originally made it as a tutorial for my next blogpost but it also counts as a project. I took a torus shape in Maya, also known as the donut polygon, and I switched from object mode to multi vertex mode and began to stretch it outward. The stretched outward shape created a cool ring design that you usually see on the outside of planets. Then I created a sphere and applied a lava space rock sort of texture and double applied it to create bump mapping or in simpler words, give it that 3D bumpy texture. And as simple as that, I had a planet. 

Photoshop Designs:

     
My next project was to create something fun and different in photoshop. I wanted to explore the paint side or drawing side of animation...so I decided to recreate a dream I had in photoshop using paint and brushes. I also pulled objects from other sources and made them my own. To finish it off, I added a quote that linked in with the image I tried to portray. I enjoyed that project so much that I decided to create a puppet control scene with a quote embedded in the image. I also created many other things in photoshop that were mainly created just to experiment with the different tools and effects you can use in photoshop. I really like the way they all turned out and figured out that I have so many ideas in my mind that sometimes, I just need to start drawing to really get them all out. 

Other creation

Other creation

Overall Experience:

     All of the events lead up to now...me writing a blog. It can easily be said that I learned a lot of different things. But with the senior year coming, It was time to think about what I would do with the things I learned. And my plan for the summer is to work with real people in the entertainment industry to really get a feel for how real life jobs in this strand will be. I am also going to continue to learn more and strive to fill my brain with the most knowledge possible because in the end, you never get better without lots of practice. Overall, I wouldn't change a thing except for my time management because time  ticks by and people have places to be and things to do...so when I have clients, they won't have all the time in the world for me to finish a project for them. They instead will have a set date and I will need to learn how to meet their expectations. Other than that, I feel that all of those events and occurrences happened for a reason and those experiences are things that I will remember for years to come.

In-Class Stop Motion

A Beary Bad Day

Stop Motion Animation

Stop Motion Animation

What is a Stop Motion?

   
     A stop motion is an animation that involves the process of taking several pictures while at the same time moving the objects you are using in your scene. Once you have captured all of the pictures you will use in your scene, you can then combine the several photo's taken to form a video. Anyone with a camera and props can create a stop motion, but it will take time till you have your final product but in the end, your final creation will be worth it. While stop motion might be tricky and require lots of patience, it also requires a lot of thinking if you want to come up with something original and creative. You have to know your boundaries, what you can and cannot do. So I will share with you what process my group and I had to take in order to create our stop motion.

Coming up with an idea:

The three main gummy bear heroes.

   
     The first steps my group and I had to take when creating a stop motion is coming up with a plan. Everyone needs an outline or some sort of idea in order to successfully start and finish a project. So we each had one day to come up with a few ideas to share the next day. We met up and shared our lovely ideas while group members agreed and disagreed. We got stuck on two ideas and then broke down which idea was and wasn't possible in the time we had and the difficulty. After all of that hard decision making, we finally agreed on one. Our idea was to create a scene made out of candy, almost like a miniature set, and have our main characters be different colored gummy bears that had to fight off a giant creature that had invaded their homeland only to cause pure destruction. Obviously we knew that this task would not be simple but we were definitely going to put a challenge at our hands and fight through it, just like we planned our gummy bears to.

Beginning of process:

   

Creature coming to destroy gummy bear territory.

     The first step we took to begin the process was to assign each group member a role. In order to make this happen, we needed lots of candy, a camera and cardboard. All of these items played major parts in creating our scenery. After gathering all of the required item, we then began the set building process. We had to make three gingerbread houses, which brought back childhood memories, then we had to make a background behind the houses and grass. We decided that the best gingerbread house would be the main characters house and the rest would be the extra gummy bears houses. We used colored construction paper for the grass and the sky. Building the walls of the set were tricky because you had to angle the walls to where it would let light pass through so when the photo process began, you could see the set and what was going on on the set. We then finished up the set by applying dum dums (lollipops) in the ground to act as trees and taking gum drops and sticking them to the ground to act as bushes. We set up the gummy bears in their first position and gave them toothpicks to act as weapons. Now the photo process can begin.

Photo process:

   
     The photo process was by far the most nerve-racking part of the whole process. You couldn't make one mistake or you would have to restart whether that meant accidentally knocking the object over or forgetting to move another object or etc...but good thing luck was flowing around us because there was not one mess up that happened. But before taking photos, we had to plan out how many shots we needed in order to make the video look the least laggiest possible. So we sketched out storyboards which allowed us to see what actions where going to happen, when they were going to happen, where they were going to happen and what type of shot was needed in order to make the scene look decent. After capturing tons of photos of our gummy bears and giant bionicle creature, we went into photoshop to connect the photos together and edit any weird color contrast differences in each shot. We also had to create credits and of course add in music for suspense and emotion.

Conclusion:

     

Gummy bears fighting off the creature to save their land.

     Given a finished product, we then got to have enjoy eating the left over candy an fun destroying the set. We were proud of the individual work each group member contributed to help end the project with a great project. We got to share our final product with many others while they showed us their creations and gave us feedback, the majority being positive. For my first stop motion I can say that it was a very fun process and I hope to one day do it again but a little more advanced so I can have a new challenge for myself.

Final product: