The major assessment for this course requires you to produce a short film to showcase the skills you’ve learned. As the following list illustrates the final project is open-ended and allows you plenty of latitude to explore areas of interest to you. It may even be possible for you to work with a partner on a jointly conceived project.
Though the project is still some way off you should be giving some thought to your possible interests. Remember that your project could take as its focus the teaching of knowledge and skills. In this way all sorts of possibilities are opened up. For example:
- You could produce a walk-through to explore a complex historical 3D environment. This could be a historical scene familiar to you from one of your classes.
- You could study the anatomy of animals or humans by modeling their skeletons.
- You could animate microscopic biological processes such as the inside of a cell.
- You could make a character (animate or inanimate) and use it to educate people about a charity or cause you care about.
These represent a few of the many options available to you. Alternatively you could just opt for the default project, animating a story written by a student in the primary division at SAS. Regardless of the your choice you will need a character to be at least part of the focus of your animation. The character can even be an inanimate object. The point is to give the viewer something to identify with.
As ideas occur to you share them with me and we can add them to the list on this page.
Visemes: A viseme is a generic facial image that can be used to describe a particular sound. A viseme is the visual equivalent of a phoneme or unit of sound in spoken language. In its simplest form, there are two distinct motions in speech:
- Open and closed motion of the jaw
- the narrow and wide motion of the lips.
They don’t necessarily occur at the same time, nor do they go all the way back and forth from one extreme to the other. The open and closed motion generally lines up with a puppet motion of the jaw, or the flow of air for almost any sound being created. The narrow and wide motions have more to do with the kind of sound being created.
Getting characters to walk is one thing; adding personality to a walk is another. The series of tutorials posted to our shared folder will take you through the basics of walking in Maya. The aim of this assignment is to try and produce as realistic a walk as possible using either one of the rigs (Emma or Walter) that are provided.
Once you have completed the second bouncing ball animation (see previous post) our next assignment is modeling an egg and cup with NURBs. The tutorial files can be found in our shared Google Drive folder. No animation required but you will need to post a screenshot of your final creation. Don't forget to add materials, textures and colors.
This second bouncing ball assignment requires you to create a simple obstacle environment for one of your balls (as in the examples shown above) that allows the ball to drop vertically. This time however you'll need to add squash and stretch to your ball to give it a more realistic bounce. Don't forget to assign materials and/or textures and you cannot use a motion curve.
Obstacle courses are I hope a familiar idea. To finish this first section of the course I would like to assess your skills by asking you to create an obstacle course through which an object of your choice moves. At a minimum the obstacle course animation must contain.
- A sound file that lasts the duration of the animation
- A background image
- An object that moves (flies, moves, rolls) through the obstacle course. This can be something simple you create yourself (ball, cube etc..) or you may wish to download and import something such as the submarine or space craft.
- At least 10 different obstacles to negotiate by going through, under, over or around
- At least 5 different NURBS or polygonal primitives.
- Evidence that you are able to work with the graph editor.
This site will be our primary method of communication. Look carefully and you will see links to various documents and resources that you will need. Listed below are a number of things you will need to do to get up and running in the first week. It is an expectation that you will subscribe to the RSS Feed to receive all updates to this site (see the right hand link 'follow by email'). This will be easier than manually checking the site for updates.
BLOGGER
All SAS students have an SAS blog with Blogger that automatically hooks into a teacher Google dashboard. However, to be visible in this dashboard blog your posts must be tagged with a unique Blogger class label. The label for our class is “3d”.
If you don't have an SAS blog you'll need to create a new site with Blogger and send me the URL. The URL for your blog must be sb-sas#####.blogspot.com (where ##### = your SAS ID number).
BOOKMARK THE CLASS SITE
You will be using this site regularly please make sure it is bookmarked on both your laptop and the iMac you have chosen to work from.
SOFTWARE
IMacs using the latest version of Maya 2015 are available for use in the lab. If you prefer to work with your own laptop the software can be downloaded free of charge from Autodesk. You will need to create an account using your SAS email address.
