Term Project 1: Mid-term Project

This idea for this Joe Walsh video has been in my head for years now. I was able to flush out some ideas about the timeline and storyboard. Each of the shots would blend into each other. The cars blend into puddles that blend into buildings and etc. The theme of the video is illusion and the sub plot is losing the quarter. I was able to get our Professors permission to use Maya for a camera and video. This allowed my control of the environment and animation. I was able to put the camera in weird positions. The only down side was the rendering in Maya. I’m still rendering and updating the video as I write this. It’s over 5000 frames to render. This deadline I wasn’t able to complete the finished video but I’ll keep working on it. This is also my 3D Animation assignment. I was only able to get the storyboard last week and final rig for animation. The storyboard and animatic was important to get what was in my head into a physical vision representation. The transitions I still need to map out and visualize. I expect to be finished on Friday the 24th of March.

Scene Assembly

Models

Animation

I started with a basic walk cycle and scaled it down to 24 frames to follow the beat of the song.

Also from this animation I was able to add a coin flip. The next step was to use the Time Editor to export and import the animation and mix, blend, and repeat the animation.

The singing animation was made using Motion Builder. The blend shapes are made with the phonemes shapes. This is plug in into and audio tracks that takes each letter pronounced in the song and the rig makes the corresponding phoneme shape.

Lighting

I made a high dynamic range image from a spherical camera. This include a basic aiskydome light with an empty field and I placed my buildings in the scene. This allowed me to get the reflection of the buildings and sky with quicker render times. I also used light linking on the 3D character to help the character to show up in the reflection.