Breakdown:
Heist
00:05:20
Heist was a short film project for the class, Character Animation I, which was done in collaboration with my classmate, Juan Garzon. My role included, modeling all of the environment and several props using a combination of Maya and Blender. I also took care of rendering with Mental Ray and compositing with Nuke, as well as some of the animation. The characters were provided by the professor. The animations in these particular shots were done by Juan.
Man Spider
00:08:25
Just your friendly neighborhood Man-Spider! Character I modeled in Modo and rendered using Maya and Mental Ray. Turntable composited with After Effects. More…
Cave
00:13:04, 00:53:04
Drexel University’s Main building has a huge atrium in the center of it, with a lot of neat architectural elements. I thought it would be really cool to take this building and turn it into a ruin, buried in the earth. I shot live action plate with a Sony NEX-FS100. Then, I tracked them with PFTrack. The scene was reconstructed and extended in Maya. Compositing was all done in Nuke. The Ivy was procedurally generated with the IvyGen plugin for Blender and the rocks were sculpted using Blender’s sculpting tools.
Journey to the Blarney Stone
00:14:23
One summer, I took a course called Digital Storytelling, and helped make a short game involving the Blarney Stone, Liam Neeson, Bar Fights and a Kraken. My role was to create all of the environment, as well as a couple other art assets. I wanted to create a hand painted look by projection mapping 2d paintings onto geometry. I also modeled and animated the Kraken, plus animated the ending cut scene.
Marvin the Paranoid Android
00:17:15
For my Animation II class, I had build a robot model, but I found that it was mechanically limited. For this project, I set out to create a robot in the same style, that would be better able to utilize human like motion. I decided to base my concept on the android from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, after a discussion with a professor, who didn’t like the design from the 2004 movie. His argument was that the fake engineers that built him, wouldn’t have set out to create a depressed looking robot, because the depression was an unintentional result of Marvin’s personality. Modeled in Blender, rendered in Maya with VRay. Turntable composited with After Effects.
Checkmate
00:21:28, 00:46:15
Checkmate is a short film that I helped create for a class on visual Effects. There were two shots with human sized chess pieces, that I worked a lot on. I textured and shaded the chess piece using Mudbox to generate maps and VRay for Maya to render. I was also responsible for all compositing tasks, including camera matching, rotoscoping, environmental reconstruction and integration using Nuke.
Airlock
00:26:08, 00:31:03
Airlock was a project I created for Animation II, which involved two robots arguing in an airlock on a space station. The space station was something that I had been modeling in my spare time and was very complex. The robots were identical except for color. I wanted to stay away from the ball and stick approach that a lot of simple robot designs use and attempt to create a complex machine.
Tempest’s Gate
00:33:27
After doing a couple paintings using gray box renders as starting points, and making Journey to the Blarney Stone, I wanted to try the effects on a larger scale. I made a couple rough forms in 3d, scattered a bunch of trees and houses and then rendered them from a wide angle with simple shaders. I then used Maya’s projection mapping tools to paint textures on to the objects in Photoshop in the normal way. I painted all of the lighting information into the textures and rendered surface shaders in Maya’s hardware renderer.
Mess
00:39:15
Mess was my final from Animation I. It’s the story of a neat-freak vacuum cleaner, who just can’t stand the messes created by it’s pet Trash can. Eventually, they reconcile!