Thanksgiving Blues

Hi guys!

Wow, Thanksgiving was great and as usual, went by pretty quickly. I was up in San Francisco with family and it was nice to see all of the relatives again.

Fun as it was, I can unfortunately say that I accomplished nothing major in terms of my senior thesis. I was instead spending the majority of my vacation time writing papers for other classes. Thankfully, I just got finished turning in my final entrepreneurship paper for class today and spent an all-nighter trying to finish it. I have WRIT 340 to take care of as well this week and papers to revise...But after next week, it should be open roads for me. And I'll then begin to start finally animating my characters!

I got a little work done. I started some basic skinning of my astronaut character and also finalized payment issues with my riggers. My alien character should be finished by this week as well. That's pretty much it.

Rigging Update

The facial rig for my astronaut is now completed! Ryan Chen was nice enough to complete the rig and do so in a timely and efficient manner. Overall, he did a fantastic job. I am completely satisfied with the expressions and emotions I'm an able to convey with it. As of now, the entire body rig is now being tweaked by one of my other riggers and it should be good to go by tonight.

At this point, I've ultimately decided to go ahead and perform the skinning on him. For those who don't know, skinning is when you connect the skeleton to the geometry of a character. I will be doing this by 'painting' influences on the geometry. Influence on a vertex is the amount the vertex is controlled by a specific bone.

Maks Naporowski was kind enough to provide me a tutorial and the tools involved to get the deformation looking right. Although I am not familiar with the process, I'll try my best to learn and get it done as soon as I can. Once the skinning is completed, I can finally begin animating him!

New Animatic for Grad Critique

Here is the newest animatic that I'll be presenting to the grad-level students on Wednesday. Overall, I changed a few scenes and added one at the very end. I also added a few more sound effects and made several scenes a little clearer. At 5:20, it is longer compared to my previous animatic but will most likely be shorter after the critique. Let me know what you guys think!

Spaceship Interior Pictures

Hello!

Here are some pictures of my spaceship interior progress. Still deciding what to put inside.

Although I already uploaded an animatic earlier this week, I'm preparing a newer one for the grad presentation on Wednesday. I'll upload that when I'm done.

New Animatic!

David Fain was kind enough to look at my previous animatic and provide copious notes on ways to improve it. Based off of his suggestions, I cleaned up a lot of issues with regards to timing and shot placement. Overall, it's a vast improvement over my previous version and it's now 45 seconds shorter. Enjoy!

Spaceship Update

Hey guys,

So my alien is finished and was sent off for rigging this week. I had to tweak some edge loops and added some where the joints will bend. I also made some proportional changes where needed.

I'm still debating whether to use The Face Machine for the rigging of my astronaut face. The software itself would cost around $60 and it would be a very easy learning curve. Unlike Face Robot for Softimage, this would integrate more easily with Maya. Either I do the rig myself or possibly turn to someone to do it for me. A link to the website:

Homepage

Anyways, here is a modeling update of my spaceship. I'm currently working on the hull and should be finished with that this week.