Ice Cream Animation

The Project

For this project we revisited a previous project where we modeled a scene inside an ice cream shop. We made a cone inside a cone holder, a scoop and some more ice cream in a dish. We came back to this project after the pen and added a lazy susan that would spin in our animation to display the tasty ice cream.

What I Learned

In the first half of this project I learned a lot more about how to add textures and bump maps to objects. For the ice cream, cone, table and floor I applied a blinn or lambert texture and then added a bump map to them. The ice cream was made with a cloud bump map, the cone with leather, the table with wood and the carpeted floor with gravel. The other objects like the cone holder, scoop and dish had a blinn or phong E material added to it to make it look like shiny metal or glass.

On the second half of the project, we learned how to make keyframes and animate in Maya. First, we had to select and group all of the ice cream and the lazy susan into one group. Then, we opened up the animation settings and made a timeline that had 120 frames and would run at 24 fps. We set our first keyframe at frame one by pressing S on the keyboard. Moving over to the 120th frame, we set another key that had a rotation on the y axis going around 360 degrees for the selected group on the table. By right clicking on key all in the channel box we created another keyframe, if we pressed play the lazy susan now spun all the way around, displaying our models. Our final step was to remove the ease-in and ease-out on the animation so it would play seamlessly. We rendered it and exported it into a QuickTime file in Adobe After Effects. 

Overall, this project was a lot of fun because we have started animating our 3D creations and I can't wait to see what else we can do!

Pen Model

For this project, we were asked to choose an interesting and complex pen to make a realistic model of in Maya. Above I have included pictures of the real pen that I chose to model. In Maya I used the NURBS Curve tool and revolved it to create the shape of the body. After that it only needed a little resizing and manipulation to make it look correct. I used a cone and sphere for the pointy end of the pen. For the clicker end of the pen I used a taurus, cylinder and a sphere that was covered in a lofted material that was a kind of clear plastic spring. The final step of modeling was to create the clip of the  pen with a NURBS Curve that I duplicated and then closed with a planar surface. To make the polka-dotted material on the body of the pen, I had to make it myself in Adobe Illustrator and then import it into Maya which was very interesting. Finally I threw in some spotlight lighting and paired the pen with a piece of paper. I was very satisfied with the way this project turned out because it ended up looking a lot like the real pen. The only thing I wish I could change was the end of the pen was not as rounded at the real pen, I had originally used a cone and pressed 3 on my keyboard to give it a more rounded view but it did not stay during rendering. Next time I would possibly try a revolved NURBS Curve for the tip of the pen.

Telephone Music Video

Our first video of second semester and the beginning of our entertainment unit was the music video. For our music video we chose the song Telephone by Lady Gaga. The story follows a girl who has just experienced a breakup, her friends are there for her and throw a girls' night to cheer her up. By the end, she has regained her confidence and she moves on from the bad relationship. The theme for our video was uplifting and overcoming to show that you can move on from hard times and even become a better person from them.

Pre-Production 

Our pre-production stages consisted of storyboarding, beat sheet preparation, song choosing, location scouting, and casting. We first had to decide what song we wanted to do. Our three songs we were deciding between were Fireflies by Owl City, Party In the USA by Miley Cyrus, and Telephone by Lady Gaga. Then we planned out our story, we were originally going to film inside/around outside a store like Target or Walmart and use a payphone in different locations all around town. We had issues with getting permission to film in the public spaces so we brainstormed our next idea which became our video. One of our final steps before we began filming was choosing and actor and setting up a date to film that would work best for them. One of my group members knew a girl from another high school that would be a strong choice for our main character. We got to know her before casting her, and we filmed the next Saturday in the basement of my house.

 Production

While filming we had a few issues with getting a variety of shots because of the limited space and time we had to film in. Another obstacle we found out later was that some of our shots looked a bit yellow because of the lighting in the room, next time we are going to pay more attention to this and make adjustments accordingly. It was easy to get off track and distracted since the environment we were trying to create for the film was similar to a party scene. If I were to film another video like this I would try to steer clear of any party-like environments because they prove to be rather problematic. In the end we had plenty of shots but many of them couldn't be used due to actors looking at the camera and low quality.

Post-Production

Many of our mistakes from the production stage of our video carried over into editing and post-production and made it a bit difficult. Our original ending for the video did not make sense with what we had envisioned and we had complications with finding a time to reshoot with our actor. We decided to end the video with a flashback type of edit in which all of the previous shots were played in reversed order at a sped up speed and closing with a shot of our main actor smiling. During reedits we are going to revise this and make sure it isn't as abrupt of an ending. I believe we did the best we could with what we had and it turned out decent. I consider this project to be a major learning experience for all of my team and we are hoping to treat the next project with a more serious and professional attitude.