My final ... a rough --

Well, here is my final for my 3D animation class. It looks a little rough due to compressing the file down to size, but when I have to upload it to the school's server, I have to keep it small. So this is still my rough, but it is not due until next week. Hope you all like it!

To answer some questions from my brother, I have just completed my my 6th term out of 15. I will complete all of my classes in July of 2011. Hopefully by that time I will have a nice portfolio put together and can find a really decent job with this degree.

Anyway, it is time for bed.

Grades and Next Term

Well, here it is in week8, and have 2 more weeks to go until I am done with Term #6 of 15. Wow. Where does the time go?

So, my grades so far are:

College Writing I: 466/500 (93.20%)
3D Modeling and Animation: 1102/1250 (88.16%)

College Algebra II: 663/730 (90.82%)

For my animation with the mouse, I got a 405/500, which really dropped my mid-A to a high-B. I don't mind much getting a B in my math or english class, but as this is the tool that I will be using in my newly chosen career, I want to do well with it. I do not agree much with his grade, as he docked me points because of the way I compressed it. As we never really went into great detail about compression, I used the same format as 98% as the people in the class used. Everyone but one person had large files that were uploaded that ranged in the 20mb-50mb range, and that last person had it down to less than 1mb. So, I now jsut have to work harder to get that grade back up to an A. The last project, which is worth onl 100 points, will be a teddy bear running across a floor and bumping into a glass table (see the attached picture). Why the last project is worth only 100 points and the midterm one was worth 500 is beyond me. After all, you know more at the end than you did at the beginning and know how to use it better, right?

Anyway ...

For next term I have three classes. One of them is my second English class. My other two are:

Cinematography
This course provides students with an overview of camera dynamics. Topics include camera placement and movement, scene composition, and lighting. Upon completion of the course, students should be able to analyze, identify, and apply cinematic elements in games.

Sequential Art and Visual Narrative
This course covers in depth the elements and techniques of sequential art. Topics include story boarding and scene layout, graphic arts publishing, pencil tests and animatics. Upon completion of the course, students should be able to create dynamic and effective narrative content for a variety of visual media.

Don't they sound exciting? I cannot wait for these class to start!!!

So, that's about it for right now.

Character Posing

This week we took our first steps towards Character Modeling, and that was posing. We were given an already made character model, and were asked to pose it in 4 different manners that looked natural. I played around with it and turned in two sheets just for kicks and giggles. I am happy over all, but think that perhaps I could have done more witht he hands, especailly on the first sheet with the four poses. But I won't know until a week from Monday when I get my grades.

So, here is my mouse project. I had to compress it and so the quality isn ot that great. You can still see everything pretty good except for maybe the fur detail. I am quite happy with my overall finished product. Out of about 12 of us, I think 3-4 people did a better job than me. Everyone else did as little as possible when it came to animating their mouse. They would move the entire mouse and not animate it at all so it looked like it was gliding or flying. I cannot wait until next week when I get my grade back for it and find out how I did.

Enjoy!

Alrighty, then ...

Well, I have a new picture of my mouse. Pickles was finally cooperative and let me take some pictures of her fur. Also, here is a lesser quality rendering of my bounching ball. I hope you like it.

Since I have posted, but I have been pretty busy. I am finding that I made the right choice in picking what I wanted to do in school as me 3D Character and Animation class is extremely exciting. And to think, I thought about going to school to be a chef!

So ... let me say that I am learn a LOT about 3D animation. I earned an interesting lesson the hard way the other day when I tried to render (or finalize) part of my project. I have to make a 30-60 second animation, and as a test, I thought I would render just a small part of it to see how long it would take. I sat at the computer for about an hour watching and waiting, reading a book, watching some more ... and after about an hour of thinking that surely it must almost be done ... it was only on frame 3! Yikes ... My project will be about 900 frames long, and after doing some quick math discovered that it will take about 2 weeks for it to render! OUCH! So, I was up until 3:30 A.M. reworking my mouse. It seems I had too many hairs on the lil guy. So at the current settings I have on him, my project will now render in ... 24hrs. Not TOO bad. If I leave his fur off, it will render in 3hrs. So now I have lots of choices to make. One of the choices that I have is trying to use a picture of fur instead of real fur. Let me tell you that Pickles was not being very cooperative with me when I tried to take some pictures of her fur up close.

Anyway, another thing that I had to do was animate a ball bouncing through a room. I am not quite done with it, but I will post it here for you to see. Not bad for my first try at 3D animation, huh? Erm ... it is too big to load here right now. I will have to try a few things.

I also redid the room that I first posted, trying to make it look more realistic.
Well ... Grades so far, although imcomplete (why do teachers take so long to post grades?!?!?), are as follows:
College Writing I: 157/170 (92.35)
3D Modeling and Animation: 369/380 (97.11)
College Algebra II: 209/230 (95%)
So, that is about it ... will post more when I have it!