ANI210 - Week 01

First week of Trimester 3 and I'm blogging for my Studio unit, ANI210.

This is a very interesting unit and I don't want to make any presumptions, but it might just be my favourite class yet. I say this because it seems to resemble a real life business scenario? We have deliverable nearly every week but they're bite sized as opposed to the larger assignments we've been used to. In this sense we get to play around with different things more regularly than concentrate on one thing for a longer period of time. I'm not sure which I prefer, but this change of pace is something i'm looking forward to.

There are two deliverable coming up. The first, is an exercise due in Week 2 where we're to teach ourselves and then implements 'dynamics' within Maya. As per the brief, I stayed away from the legacy workflows and opted to use the "bullet" plug in.

To start with, I took myself to YouTube where I began to learn just what 'dynamics' were in relation to Maya. The fact that there used to be an actual Menu item called "Dynamics" in editions prior to 2016 made this process a little confusing, however I quickly realised that it has since been altered to 'FX' and was on my way.

I began by creating something all together different from the brief so that I could play around with the engine.

Active and Passive Rigid Bodies!

The ball drops in to attack the blocks

And the blocks put up a paltry defense!

Once I had this done, I felt confident that I could go ahead and begin working on my chosen topic, as per Jody's suggestion, the Jenga tower.

Because I always try to show off, I decided to texture my polys with an actual Jenga block texture (you can't really make out the wording on the side, but it says "Jenga"). Additionally, there are 20 rows in a Jenga game, so hopefully those who used less will be penalised! MUAHAHAHA. Jokes.

I then started to play an psuedo-real game of Jenga...against myself. Of course this was easier within Maya because the tower would never actually fall as I removed the blocks, but for the sake of my movie, I wanted to make it look as legitimate as possible.

The horrible truth behind every Jenga game: So many block-lives lost in the pursuit of fun.

Finally, we had to create a "Playblast" movie which was another concept completely foreign to me. But that was easy enough to GoogleFu my way through - I really like the idea of Playblast actually in that you can have a movie of your animation so quickly! Prior to this concept I had always tried batch rendering my animations (For Tri 2) in really low quality so that my PC would finish the frames quickly so that I could then look at my work, but now I can playblast 300 frames in about 10 seconds! Technology!

*NB* I've tried to embed my Playblast movie in this blog but apparently WIX doesn't like that. So you'll have to check out the Google Drive link for that!

Moving onto the Assignment - Tribute Room.

I'm partnered with Evan for this Assignment and we chose (finally) to go with a room from the fictional universe of Stargate. Specifically, we chose the Stargate Portal Room.

I already wrote an entire brief on this room, the decisions behind it and the components we'll be concentrating on, so here are some shots we've used for reference.

The first thing I did was begin modelling the room to abide by the dimensions set in the brief/Jody. You'll notice that there's an alcove in the north side of this room - this is to align with the reference image and so that we can sit the Stargate portal inside.

The dimensions for this room measure 7.5x7.5x4.

Between Evan and I, we decided that she would design the Stargate Portal and I would design the ramp leading up to it.

I've tried to remain as faithful to the source material as possible however, I still have more modelling to do.

An Expanded view of the room and the ramp.

Note: The room to the NE was a model version of the actual room to the W of the ramp.

Evan put in some serious work for the Portal and it looks wicked!

She's also designed a floor plan and highlighted the necessary assets.