Chronicles of the Past: Part 3

Well now I would like to thank everyone for sticking with me so far, in this series of posts, but this will be the final entry in the Chronicles series. After this post I will be all caught up for my saved school work, and I will be able to post my newest work, and you'll be able to get live updates as I go through them.

As far as this post goes, i'm going to be covering two different classes, but fear not, this will be a rather short post. I don't have as many files that document my work over the course of the classes, so YAY! haha

Visual Effects 1

Alright I'm going to start off on my "strong foot" here, and show off my very first Visual Effects project. Unfortunately it was the only one that I was proud of, because it was the only one that I was able to render within the allotted time. For this assignment in particular we had to do a rigid body simulation using the Maya Dynamic system. I think it was a nice introduction to all the different tools that are presented for us, and taught me a lot about problem solving certain situations. We were provided the Maya scene, where all the Geometry was set up, and we had to implement the Dynamics in order to complete the Rube Goldberg machine. It was fun not only to work with, but to see how a lot of the effects could be used to create some of my favorite scenes from major films. I swear the more I learn about 3D the more I ruin the magic of movies haha

 I'll be honest with you I had a lot of fun learning about the Maya Dynamic system during that month, but I just wish I had more time to play with it... We only had around 4-6 days to complete each of our 3 assignments, and I don't feel like it was enough time to get everything done to the best of my ability, but it's Full Sail so what are you going to do? At least we have the pleasure of having Visual Effects 2 in a few months time!

Character Animation 1

Along with Visual Effects 1 I had to juggle going through Character Animation 1. This was not the first animation class I had gone through during my time here, I had Fundamentals of Animation a few months before. That class covered basics of the Graph Editor, and the Dope Sheet and trying to get us to implement the 12 Principles of Animation to our work. For Character Animation we focused on completing the Basic Walk Cycle. We had to to this twice throughout the whole month. The first dealing with just the legs of a human, and the other replicating everything we learned about the legs and adding in the upper torso to it. Above was my final walk cycle I submitted. There were a lot of new concepts that I learned throughout the month, like how to add Foot Roll, creating Anticipation, and plenty of others that I didn't learn in previous classes. 

Overall I think this class opened my eye to the fun of hand animation. I know a lot of people in my classes aren't fans of the animating process, but as of right now I think it's the path that I want to go down, for my Major. We will see if it changes, though I think it is unlikely at this moment. 

Well that's it for my "Chronicles of the Past" posts, now I will be all caught up with my current classes and can do updates on all the new things as I learn!