Creating Stereoscopic 3D Images

Overall, this was a pretty fun assignment. It was actually kind of exciting to test it out and just mess around with the images. Here's another one for good measure. I used my old personality walk from last semesters ANI51B class for this.

Recreating Cameras and Lights in Maya

Original

Copy

Copy II - Different View

Extra Credit: Lighting a Scene in Maya

 

One-Point Lighting

Two-Point Lighting

Three-Point Lighting

Building A Scene in Maya

Special Effects in Animation and Live-Action

My first two term paper scores were 85 and 95; I will not be writing a third term paper.

Outline for the Third Term Paper:

Introduction:

• Rain in a very common special effect since the beginning of video games.
• Often in video games, rain is used to create a feeling or frame a setting. 
• Effectiveness of the rain has drastically evolved since the 16-bit era to the current generation of consoles.
• As the benchmark for graphical prowess increases, the standards for rain effects rises as well, or else the immersion for the player is broken.

Body Paragraphs:

Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Super Nintendo Entertainment System,1991)

• Rain effects are present at the onset of the game as Link sets out to free Zelda from the dungeon.
• Due to graphical limitations from the era, the game has extremely basic rain effects.
• Rain is a cycle of pixels in "rain line" shapes going across the screen with the occasional lightning flash.
• Rain does not interact with the environment at all, and appears to be more of an overlay over the game screen rather than an effect that is integrated into the experience. 
• However, at the time this rain effect was successful at creating the environment despite its primitive nature. Just because it was obvious that the rain is stylized does not detract too much from the game's experience.

Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag (Playstation 3-4, 2013)

• Rain effects have improved significantly over the 21 year gap and has become more dynamic compared to before. 
• Capable of randomly occurring in any part of the game, further enhancing the realism of the world by simulating the changing weather of real life. However, this effect is most notably present during the storms while the player's boat is sailing at sea. 
• Has "dynamic ripple shader" which causes the rain drops that hit the floor to react to the intensity and direction of the wind.
• Has better randomization of the rain effect, so the cycle is not as blatantly obvious as before.
• Rain now causes the ground's specularity to resemble that of a real wet surface.
• Rain can now interact with the 3D character model. (i.e. splashing on the characters model)
• Very effective to creating a mood for the environment in present day video games. 

Conclusion:

Advances in technology has now given video game developers the power to create almost life-like rain effects. When compared to the primitive rain effects of the 16-bit era, it is hard to believe the leaps and bounds the visual effects industry has progressed in a relatively short time. The advances in special effects technology helps immerse the player in the world as intended by the developers.  

Stop-Motion Character Animation

I worked in a two man group with Kevin Truong to make this Stop-Motion animation. Both of us provided one figure each to play as the main leads in this short. Initially, we drew out some storyboards of what we would roughly like the short to look like. However, we made the common mistake of over complicating the scenes, and as a result many scenes had the characters in incredibly unbalanced/exaggerated poses that just weren't possible to maintain with the limited equipment we had (the flimsy stands that come with the toys that often moved out of place or dropped the character during posing). Therefore, we cut down or simplified many of the scenes and broke the short down into the key story ideas only.

 I was in charge of posing the figures, and Kevin took care of the snapping the photos. After the shooting was completed, I compiled the images into a video in Quicktime and helped Kevin queue the audio to end at the same time the animation ends. 

Overall, stop-motion is definitely the most challenging form of animation because there are so many factors that can go wrong (such as the figures falling over). However, there is a sense of accomplishment when one see's their toys come to life.