New Senior Thesis Assist Project

I have begun to help two senior's at my school with their thesis project. Here is some information on this project.

Project Description: This is a 3D animated short film. Here is the tag line for the short: When Carl’s wife asks him to clean the fish bowl, chaos ensues. This will be presented in a stylized animated style. It will be finished by the end of this academic year.

About the Client: I am working for two fourth year animation students named Piper and Katie. There work is very good and seem to be leaders in their animation students. It will be interesting to work with them as I find the ideology between our two majors is different.

My Understanding: This project interests me because it is the type of stylized animated project I would like to work on someday. Although this is a small scale project relative to a professional project, I am sure it will emulate professional projects I hope to some day work on. I hope to learn many things about working in a larger group project with others who are in different specializations with me. I hope to add some design ideas and an extra layer of visual complexity to this project.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Update #6

So I finally got to work on the seat geometry. I would say I am 80% done with making this geometry; I have laid out the topology correctly but it still looks a little simple, so I'm gonna finish this up by using Maya's sculpt geometry tool to make it a little more dynamic.

I think adding this sculpting will make it look a little more "puffy" and realistic. I am a little worried I am adding a lot of polygons. I'm not sure if I want to stick with the assignment of building everything out of geometry, or start to deviate and use displacement maps and such. 

I have also started seriously thinking about texturing. I started creating groups of objects that will be textured the same. This started to make me realize that I will need to break the geometry apart more. 

Just as I removed the seats before, I need to do this elsewhere. For instance, I need to separate the tire from the rim of the wheels. I know I could make layered textures and use other methods instead of separating the geometry, but I just think not only would it make texturing easier, it would be better in general for the model. Come back next week to see more progress on the model.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Update #4

I am arriving at the end of my school quarter and thus my work load is increasing significantly. So unfortunately I was not able to make changes to the seat like I was hoping to. However, I did manage to make a turntable of one of the older versions of this model. I am making a general reel for myself and this will be a part of it.

Hopefully I will be able to make the additions to the seats this week, but I will probably only get more busy.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Update #3

I decided the next thing I would work on is the seat cushions. Originally when I created the seats, I built the cushion into the geometry as a single piece. This week I worked on separating the cushion geometry.

This accomplished 2 things. First, it allowed me to clean up and simplify some of the topography because it now has a simpler shape. Second, it will allow me to build in detail separately from the rest of the car, while keeping the form of the cushions that I already crafted. Next I will model in a more complex texture. I found this reference image for what I want to do:

Check back next week to see my progress on adding this texture to the cushions.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Update #2

This week I worked on the wings of the car. They took much longer to make than I thought, because I had to consider the deformation of it folding up if I ever get to rigging the car.

I feel like the wing matches the rest of the car stylistically. It fits in well. I think the next thing that will really pull this all together would be to add more detail to the seats.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Update #1

Although I had quite the busy week, I did manage to get some work done on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

I worked on the back end of the car, filling out some details there. I also built the picnic basket for the back. I still need to finish adding the frame that holds the basket though.

The original assignment this project was made for had the goal of building all of the geometry details out without the assistance of textures. I know it probably would of been easier to just modify a cube and assign Maya's native weave texture, but I thought I would continue with the goals of the original assignment.

Come back next week to see more progress.

Welcome!

This is the first post on my blog; how exciting. Anyways, here is a model I recently made of the "sweet and adorable" Chitty Chitty Bang Bang:

While I feel it is decent overall, there are many addition's and improvements I would like to make. You can check this blog to see the changes I will be making to this model, as I will be documenting different stages of my progress.

There a few things I would like to improve on this model. First is i would like to add more detail to the back. I left out things such as the picnic basket on the back and adding that will really pull the model together. I also need to add the floor pedals for the driver so it can be viewed from the top. Making the seats more dynamic and adding the wings would be some other improvements I would like to make. Check back to see what I do!