SEMESTER 2 WEEK 2
In our Animated Narratives lecture this week we were shown 4 different presentations to help us understand how to analyse the short films we were assigned better, With Henry — we went over the use of colour in film, backgrounds, and the hero’s journey and how it applied to films such as Sleeping Beauty and Spider Man: Into the Spider Verse.
Then later, with Aodhan, we looked into the Adult Swim show ‘Primal’ and were shown examples of character design aspects and colour being used to make the audience think and feel a certain way about the characters and the world that inhabitied it — as well as the use of different camera shots to evoke a certain reaction.
After this we got a lecture form Yuan about how the use of camera angles in shots and films, different edits of scenes and transitions makes the audience feel a certain way. We were also made aware of how the audience makes their own assumptions of the movies and stories they take in and has a set expectation of the stories that they want to be fulfilled, and you can make them feel a certain way by either giving them what they want, or throwing that expectation on its head.
The last presentation of the class was once again by Aodhan, and this time focused on sound and how it can be used to add more to a scene, such as notes lining up with a characters footsteps, or orchesral music being used when around certain characters to show the audience that they have an important air about them.
In regards to the group presentation this week I offered to edit together all of our presentations, as no one else had the software or had internet limitations. I asked that my group members have their slides done and audio recorded and sent to me by tuesday night so I had Wednesday to edit it together to be sent in. Everyone in my group was lovely and we all communicated well and succiently with each other, and all of them sent in their parts earlier than they needed to – and helped me a bunch when it came to time in that regard!
I focused on the Hero’s Jounrey and the Narrative structure, as well as a little bit of editing in my part of the presentation, as was given the area of focus in the short animaton from 3:00 – 4:30. A lot of the action in the animation went down in my time of focus so I was in no means short of things to talk about in relation to the narrative, and I think I made good points in my script and slides, but if I could change something I would’ve focused more on the editing, as there are only one or two quips about it in my audio.
My slides were laid out very visually orientated, with mostly pictures and very little – if at all – words on the slides, all of the words I want to say are in the audio that accompanies. I also took the liberty of creating some sprites of myself for the presentation to add a little more visual interest and make it have more personality. Here are two:
The YouTube link to the presentation:
This week in our 3D literacy class we were given a lecture by Alec about Modelling Concepts and constaints, and went through the modelling pipeline, modelling against references, object history, and an overview of the grids, pivots and snapping tools in Maya, as well as how to reset and freeze transforms.
We went through the process of conceptualising assets, breaking down the object and how to model it in phases (which is big areas first, medium areas second, and small details the last thing to go through) as well as being introduced to UV mapping, texturing and rendering in maya and game engines you can import assets to.
After this we were given a lecture on topology and assigned our modelling assignment for the week.
We were assigned to model a table, and this was significantly more difficult to do and more complicated than the vase we had to do last week – which was basically just a glorified cylinder. We were given a reference to work from and I set to work.
This took me around 4 hours to do, and by far the most challenging aspect of it as you probably expect was the detailed chair legs, with all sorts of notches and curves we had to very carefully go in and model.
The base of the table was simple enough to do as all I had to do was make two cubes and reshape them and connect them together into one mesh, but it was with the table legs I had a whole heap of bother, the multicutter tool was my best friend throughout this process, and I worked very carefully to try and make it as close to the reference as possible.
When I finally finished the leg, I copy-pasted it 3 more times and moved them into the place of the other legs, as I wasn’t about to foolishly recreate a chair leg 3 times. I finished my model and went to upload it to Sketchfab and this is where I encountered another problem – the legs were detached from the model in the 3D Sketchfab space! This had me scratching my head for a few minutes and wondering if i’d done something so wrong the entire model was broken, but it turned up in Maya just fine so I knew I could fix this somehow. I remembered that the legs were still 4 different objects and connected them to the base of the table thinking maybe that was the thing causing the issue, and it fixed the issue! Overall, I think I did not a half bad job at this table, looking back on it now I could’ve beveled the corners of the table so the edges weren’t so sharp, and I think the legs are a little bit too long for the table compared to the reference image as well, so in the future I’ll try to be even more careful when modelling and make my objects as close to the reference image as possible. But I’m happy with how it turned out all in all, I think I did a decent job at replicating the details on the table legs.