Second piece of my Chess Pieces render series. Zoom in. Modeled in Maya 7.0 and rendered with Mental Ray. Render time: 24min.

I wish I have a faster computer.

For my Maya 3D Final Project, I decided to go the easy way out and do still renders instead of an animation. I experimented with caustics and lathe modeling of the glass chess set. I’m trying to simulate a macro photographic shot with that depth of field. See the 800×600 version here.

(This rendered piece has not been photo-manipulated before)

In my latest project, we were tasked to do a skeleton rig, make it walk up the stairs and open the door. I decided to embellish it with a few fancy moves for the fun of it.

A pity I only read Keith Lango’s article about “animating forces instead of forms” after I created this scene. The key is with the arcs in the motion curves.

As we are presented with some of the most amazing effects and CG in the movies, do we actually know which objects in the movies are real and which are just one of the most realistic CG ever?

I just tried this ‘Fake or Foto’ challenge quiz and failed miserably! See if you can discern reality from CG better than me!

Take quiz round 1. And then round 2.

For the latest project in class, we were given a room with a number of primitive polygons like a tube and a box, and we are supposed to color it up with textures and shades. Alot of people tried rearranging the objects to create the best looking room possible. I decided what the heck - lets drop the room and do something more interesting.

Here’s my composition piece on a scene in a sewer. The lighting contrast is bad, but what do you expect from a sewer anyway. Enjoy! Here’s a bigger version.

After a full day’s of edge and vertex pushing work, here’s my first shot at modeling a head. No particular reasion modeling Jackie - it’s just easy to find reference photos of him. One of these days, I’m going to try modeling him doing some kung-fu moves. The model still looks very raw and unfinished. Pretty much like a clay model without any color. I haven’t put any texture or color to the model yet. Hah- I haven’t really explore that yet. Also I think his nose looks a little odd from this angle. But for a first head model, I’m quite satisfied for now.

Thanks to Computer Arts UK for this wonderful head-modeling tutorial! Tedious but useful for a good start!

A few things I learned from this exercise:

1. I am a control freak.
2. Use good sketches with the SAME scale right from the start.
3. Save often. (Darn the computer crashes!)
4. Use edge loops for facial modeling. They mimic facial muscles very well. (Also kudos to Maya’s “Split Edge Ring Tool”!)

—
Previously related: Sketches for the Model

Check out this new trailer of A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater’s highly anticipated adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel! This is the director’s second film that is digitally animated using an advanced interpolated rotoscoping process. The actors are filmed live and their movement are traced to create the digital animated effect.

I’m really curious why he chose to produce this film in this manner. Experimentation doesn’t seem to be on his agenda, since he used this method once in Waking Life.

The winners of the ‘64 Second Film Contest‘ have been announced! This film contest is sponsored by AMD to challenge filmmakers’s artistic and cinematographic sense in creating a 64-second long film on the theme of ‘Waitlessness‘. The range of ideas were amazing across the pool of 28 finalists!

It’s amazing how the creator of the winning film, ‘At a Glance’, shot the entire film with a Canon SD400 still camera, and animated all the stills into such an amazing masterpiece. My personal favorite is the second place film, ‘Change’ by Steve Bastyr.

I just recently stumbled upon an old animation I did 4 years ago. Looking at it now, it’s really kinda cute. Took me a month to create this 11 seconds of motion.

The bee is certainly flying in a very weird manner.

We are learning to model a head in class today. So I made quick sketches of the front and side profile of this pretty well-known actor. I guess for the first assignment, it’ll be good to model someone with very distinctive features. We’ll see if that’s true.

It’s quite obvious who this is, isn’t it?