I lied

I know I said my next post would be about HOW to do ambiant occlusion... but I wanted to put something up from what i've been working on. Here are some movies... do enjoy. they are from a class project we've been doing in 3D Animation Studio:

Ambient Occlusion

What is it? How does it work? Why am I asking you?

At this time last week I had heard of AO (Ambient Occlusion) but I had never used it... nor did I know how to apply it to my renders in Maya. I didn't think anything of it, and honestly, because I did not know what it was, I did not think I needed it for my renders. I was wrong. AO adds dimension to a render, and makes something simple look amazing with a few clicks. I was working on a class project with a friend (Bewsii, I'll add a link to his work once I find one), and I was showing him my renders and he said "Hmm, looks good but it also looks flat, why not add an AO render to the mix?" Neither of us had any clue how to do that in Maya (He models objects over animating, and as such uses 3DS Max for his work). I hopped online and looked for a tutorial, I found a couple painful and annoying tutorials, of which I pieced together a working method to add AO to any Maya scene.  I will share my method in my next post, this is really just an overview, also, I'm long winded, so I figure I'll do all the talky stuff here and for those of you tl;dr folks out there, you can just skip ahead.

So what is AO, and what does it do? It is the process of gathering information among a scene to add shading in places where objects meet, such as creases corners, indentation and such. Yeah, I don't make with the explaining things properly... So please allow me to show you. Here is a scene in Maya, everything in it is just shiny Blinn material with color, and one area light. I left the shadows off for this image:

Shiny :D (but not so pretty)

So I used my method for AO and rendered it and got this:

Pasty... this is a really good way of showing what AO is... So, adding them together is simply a matter of taking both images into a program with layers and adding the 'multiply' function to the AO layer while it is above the diffuse layer. I'll show how to do that in my tutorial, but here is the final result:

The file got squished in the render, I'll fix that before I make the tutorial. if we compare the two images side by side we get:

it looks so much better with a few simple adjustments... You can even do it to animation!

As you can see AO adds depth to the room. It takes a while to render, but in the end it is well worth it.

First post!!!

Okay, yeah, so I doubt many people will be spending much time here, but I wanted to thank anyone who reads this for doing so. Any suggestions and advice you have would be appreciated, as I am simply a student looking to improve. For my first post, I wanted to share a few (hopefully) things I've finished this quarter... starting with a sneak walk cycle I made in 3DS Max 2010. I used key-frame animation and animated it straight ahead. I know it's a little jumpy, and I am working on fixing that as I progress in my understanding of animation and 3DS Max.

So... there is that. I'm pleased as punch with it, simply because I was going for the feel of the old Disney sneak... the kind you see Mickey or Goofy do while looking for ghosts in some of the old animated shorts... I really liked that sneak, and I always wanted to try and animate it... So there ya go.

Yet another random post is my first reel of pencil tests. These are unfinished animations... roughly animated to get timing and spacing down, as well as a feel for how the finished work should feel. These were done on a light table with a pencil and paper. Then I put them into a "lunchbox" and there were digitally saved for me. I did these for a class, projects that taught me the fundamentals of the 12 principles of animation... Enjoy:

That was almost as much fun to make as it was to watch... But I think I'm enjoying it more simply because these are my first true steps into the world of animation... and seeing something you've drawn come to life... It is simply an amazing feeling.

The next bit I'm going to post here is my first attempt at using the sculpting tools in Mudbox. I used a Wacom tablet, and the base head shape that comes with mudbox. The assignment was to make some form of man-lizard. Alas, nothing I made ended up cute and cuddly, so we end up with the monster seen below:

No matter how much I see him, he still creeps me out... but hey... What can you do right? Sometimes, the "clay" forms itself...

Alright... last thing I'm going to post here is an animatic (moving storyboard) for a project we are doing in my digital ink and paint class. The assignment was to draw a story board for a script we were given. The script had no refrence to indicate what happened before or after the 15-30 second scene presented to us... only that there was a male, a female, the lines you hear, and an object. There was no blocking, no camera angles, no cues as to what was going on. We were given prerecorded audio that we had to cut together and use for this project. This animatic/storyboard is my idea, of a couple of zombie hunters getting into a tiff over a poorly placed shot:

There will be more from this project as we go... including a finalized character turn (if you notice, these are REALLY rough) an animation of him passing the gun, and another animation of my choosing. I'm thinking of having it be the apology (needs to be a part with dialogue so I can animate a lip sync. ) There will likely be more, considering the entire class is based on this one script.

So yeah... this is who I am, artistically. My final goal in this whole mess is to become a rigger / animator for a prominent animation company, and eventually come back to another of my life's dreams which is to teach.Wish me luck and I'll see you in my next post.