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.