Paper Windmills

Looking at Low Poly art and it seemed really cool and sort simple so I wanted to give it a go making a little scene. I thought it’s be really cool to try and recreate a origami windmill.

(fig1)

I then thought about building a small scene and having multiple windmills spinning in the wind, so I looked at some artist who created low poly trees, pretty sure I wanted one as part of the scene and it was interesting to see the different approaches people took to it.

 By Jeremiah Shaw (fig2)

(fig3)

By Chris Cam (fig4)

It was difficult to get the lighting to work at the start, I wanted the scene to have a warm almost sunset feeling to it.

To make the heads of the windmills move I used locators.

 

references

fig1-http://www.dltk-kids.com/world/japan/morigami-windmill.htm

fig2-https://dribbble.com/shots/1861070-Forest-bits

fig3-https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?322436-BLENDER-Tutorial-Low-poly-forest-assets!

fig4-https://www.artstation.com/artwork/V11aR

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Through the Loop

As well as revisiting the bouncing balls we had made in class, I also wanted to try animating a ball jumping through a loop. Trying to make the Ball a bit more animated and have some sense of character.

I tried keeping mind anticipation having the ball jump forwards then backwards like it was trying to gain the energy to make the jump then having some celebratory  jumps after achieving it.

I think it was successful fr what I was trying to achieve and I enjoyed the process of doing it.

 

I tried to add in some textures to my objects using the Arnold Material Library, and also following this tutorial which really helped explain how to apply it. Although I still did find the process to be slightly temperamental.

 

Bouncing Balls Revisted

With hitting Christmas break and having free time now to go back over our work, I wanted to revisit the Bouncing Balls I did and see if I could improve them, even just slightly.

One of the first things I did was sort out my rotates, I’m not sure what I was trying to do that made them turn out negative the first time so I just went back and started again.

It was said that my bounces were a bit too mechanical, so when editing them I mostly messed round with the values and trying more to eyeball the paths to see if it was following a more natural path.

I know their still not perfect but I felt like I had a better understand of what I was doing and how to manipulate the balls better. I feel I just need to practise more to keep improving.

Tennis Ball

Super ball

Bowling Ball

Angler Fish

Thinking back to the Fish world that I was worked on and the angler fish character that we had, I wanted to attempt a low poly model of one.It actually turned out a lot better than I thought it would, i like the simplistic style of low poly models and it makes you rethink the characteristics that are important and inform the model.

Room Model

We had to model a piece of furniture from our house and Conánn gave us the challenge doing it in one day. Which seemed quite daunting for still being quite new to MAYA, but actually turned out alright. For my model I actually modelled something we have in our flat which we call the Mega-couch, we’ve pushed both our couches together and have a quilt on it so it’s like a cosy lounging area.

the rectangle on the side is supposed to represent a person to give you a sense of scale. It was after I had made this that I found out about n-cloths from a second year so I could of made some more realistic pillows. Though I feel that it represents the Mega-couch pretty well.

Then because we had modelled this in a day we had the next of the week for which we could just experiment with modelling more furniture. So I decided to dismantle my Mega-couch and continued on modelling the rest of my flat, using references pictures from the letting agents website.

It was really interesting trying to model all the different furniture, each was difficult to do in it’s own was though I felt I was getting a clearer idea of how I should be approaching making the objects. It was also hard trying to get the scaling right and fitting each room together like a piece, i had to re-adjust the the walls and floors multiple times, the door the bathroom was awkward as it is at an angle.

I’m quite proud of how the bathroom turned out, since the furniture toilet/sink/shower can be quite odd objects in shape. My sink model isn’t the same as the real one since it has a more decorative design. Also happy how my staircase banister turned out it was complicated getting the turn and for it to all line up with the actually stairs.

references photographs from – http://www.finlaygrahamproperty.com/unit-2-18-canterbury-street-botanic-belfast/325362

Diver suit

Still trying to get used to working with MAYA, I started modelling this character inspired from old sea diving suit and the “Big Daddy” character from Bioshock.

(Fig 1)

 

(Fig 2)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m going to try and add in some tubes and other small details, this what I have at the moment. I tried getting render views of Arnold though they turned out pretty dark so I’d need to go back and mess about with lighting, although I kinda like it, it gives a very dark underwater feeling.

references

fig 1-https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/336714509610488015/

fig 2-http://bioshock.wikia.com/wiki/Big_Daddy

Bouncing Ball Review

Michael said a problem with my animations is that they’re too mathematical, they look like they’re are propelling itself upwards instead of of bouncing. I need to feel the bounce more than just being mathematical about it, this goes down to the values I used for squash and stretch there was too much of a pattern to them rather than it changing during it’s path.

Also looking into my graphs the rotate turned out to be negative in some cases when it shouldn’t be, this is why my balls seemed to float in the air.

My bowling balls path needed to be higher up and fall straight down, it’s when it rolls tapering off that gives it it’s real sense of weight.

Another point was that we shouldn’t get too caught up in making it completely realistic and try to make it more fun. Maybe then if I have some time I might go back and try something different with the bouncing balls.

Bouncing Ball Outcomes

These are my outcomes for the Bouncing balls

Tennis Ball

Super Ball

Bowling Ball

I tried my best and I think they came out alright, there are elements in them that I know don’t look quite right but at this point in learning MAYA I don’t really know how to fix them. Which is slightly frustrating but hopefully I can get some feedback and go back and tweak them.

Bouncing Balls

Last week we had to animate a bouncing ball, now we’re making it a little more complicated and we have to bounce three different kinds of balls, a bowling ball, tennis ball and super ball (bouncy ball). So it’s all about getting the right feel of the bounce that demonstrates the weight and bounciness of the ball. Conan provided us with an already rigged up ball that we could use as a base, it has three locators put in as parents of each other and control the movement (x/y translation) of the ball, the squash and stretch and the rotate of the ball respectively.

It took me quite a bit of time to get used to it and a lot of messing with values to understand what was having an effect on the ball and even then it was sometime difficult to tell what had changed.

I looked at these slo-mo videos by Florian Knorn on youtube to try and gain a better understanding of how much the balls actually squish when they hit the ground.

(fig1)

I also looked at photographed paths of some of the balls when they moved so I could try and replicate something similar.

fig1 -https://bouncetennis.wordpress.com/category/coaching-tips/page/2/

videos-https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy9iltY8LAOXk5Hk5CIVv3Q