The second, of 6 terms, at VFS are complete and you can see some of the major assignments I completed in the video on this page. Some of the assignments not included in the video are:
– life drawing: I might post individual drawings later, but once a week we had a 3 hour class with a nude model. It was a great addition to the other course work to understand posing and volume in form.
– Visual Storytelling: we were given a very basic animation in Maya, and we were delegated into groups of three to create an interesting short film from a rather bland animation by putting the camera where we want it (it’s 3D after all so we can do anything with the camera, but that doesn’t mean you should . . .) and editing. We used a lot of Hitchcock films for reference in our editing and camera angles.
– Classical Animation: not included is a weight lift animation of a farmer pulling a very large beet out of the ground. It’s not included because it was stolen by a crack head, seriously. I went to see Sucker Punch and left my school bag in my car. A crack head broke the window of my car and stole hundreds of pages of drawings for my classical animation class, and everything else that was in my school bag they took. (I know he was a crack head because he dropped his crack pipe right next to the broken window of my car). The biggest loss was 4 months worth of notes I had.
– 3D modeling: female sculpt
– 3D texturing: a semi truck that I textured with an American theme . . .
– 3D lighting: we had several in-class exercises to light a set
So even this short video doesn’t encompass all of the work that was done over the last two months, but most of the big assignments.
I think I’m going to create a separate post about the Woody model I did to show the evolution of it’s creation if I find time to take screenshots of the files I had saved along the way. (I save a separate file each time I save in case one file gets corrupted then I don’t lose everything, only until the last version of the file before it).
But he’s special to me because I spent a lot of extra time on him. We were only supposed to model a ‘super hero,’ but I really wanted to texture, rig, and animate him as well. So I did. I also didn’t include the extra animation I did with him just because it’s not very polished. But it took quite a lot of work to do the texturing and rigging of him.
Funny story: For any project, animation or modeling, we always use reference. I found many photographs of Tom Hanks and many caricature drawings of him as well to use to help meld Woody and Tom together. Of all the caricatures I saw online, I found one very useful more than the others.
So I emailed the artist of this caricature to let them know how helpful their art was in creating my model. I received a reply from this artist I found online a day later. They could have been any where in the world for all I knew, Thailand, London, Argentina, any where! He responded to let me know he is down the hall from me in my same exact building in Vancouver, enrolled in the Classical Animation program at Vancouver Film School. That is one of the more bizarre things that have ever happened to me. Here is his caricature that I found so helpful as a reference for my model: