Sean
Purser

During the second semester we were given this project which would be brought from concept through to completion. Out of the choices we were given, I choose an animated short. The animated short is based on an old Donegal folk story of which I heard when I was younger, where a young man pick up a young woman who mysteriously disappears when they reach thier destination. Throughout the project we learned how to project manage, model various characters, texture various characters, character animate, lip sync, lighting scenes & renering on a large scale.

During our workplacment we had a meeting with managment of Qubizm the developers of IZAK9. During this meeting we had a conversation on how we could develop assets for their 3D animations such as a newsroom or studios for the existing characters. During the placment I developed a hover chair and a newsroom studio for the existing characters.

During this project we learned how to rig a character, weight the character and animate a character interacting with a ball.

In this project I choose the cartoon styled vehicle to concept, and styled it on a hotrod-pickup. During this project we learned how to draw and render in 3D orthographic views giving the 2D imagery a sence of depth. We then had to present the image on a background which would used as a sales shot.

In this icebreaker project we were asked to design 3 simple crates for a game enviroment. During this project we learned how to texture a simple box which consisted of 6 polygons which would be ideally used in a game. This project showed us how to make a simple shape look visually more complex by the use of textures.

During this project we given choices of three different styles to follow. I choose to the Four Horsemen to concept. During this project we learned how to concept by the use of hand drawn techniques and photoshop techniques to generate the final concept. We also created a model using super sculpy which gave us a better understanding of how to model our characters within a 3D modelling package such a Mudbox.

The Brief for this project was to texture and render two robots which were given to us by the lecturers. I choose to base them on a crash test dummy and an automated police robot, the idea was loosely based on the film "Chappie".

The Augmented Bots projcet was a follow on from the 'Robot Texturing and Rendering' project where we were asked to package the textures as a UV set of textures and the model in the DAE format. This gave us the understanding of how to export our designs for use by other designers and also gave us the understanding of how augmented reality worked with our models.

During this project we were taken through the process of how to model a head. We were asked to model an alien head of which we would then export from Maya to Mudbox to texture and sculpt. Once textured and sculpted we would then import the model back to Maya for rendering. During this project we were shown how the flow of topology and edge flow needed to be correct to create an organic head and how important it is to keep the polygon count to a minimum.

During the concept to finished model project we were asked to create a low poly model of our design we created in the project "Soft Body Conceptual Art". When modelling we would have to observe the polygon count and the Topology of the model making sure that the polygon count remained low and the topology had a good edge flow. Once we had the model created we were asked unwrap the UV's of the model for export. We then would export the model from Maya To Mudbox for sculpting and textuing using the various tools within the Mudbox Software and then export the model back to Maya for rendering.

During this project we were shown how to model from our own designs. We would design the model to our designs, ensuring the topology & edge flow were correct. During this project we would learn how to use our skills to build our designs and how to future plan how limbs would move in the model during animation and how to correct it if necessary.

During this project I come up with two ideas of which Paul McGettigan could use to promote his business at a boxing match or online. These were short stings which could be inserted into boxing match footage or on digital displays at a match.

This project started off with just a spoon which then had a bowl added then a table then the floor all of which was completed within one hour. This was a self test of speed modelling, which will be carried out in the future to speed up my modeling skills.