3DSFX Project 2 - Time Finesse

Storyboard

Final Video

My group's final project is about traveling through time. It may seem slightly hard for some people to understand the story, that is why we added the dates at the bottom of the video to show which date the main character is traveling to. In this story, the main character is actually me. Hanani is the calefare, and the person who rode the bicycle and hit the main character. And, Xueyuan is the one who acted as the classmate. 

For the After Effects, I did the Harry Potter Lumos Effect, the smoke effect, the Jumper Effect, and the Earthquake. The Harry Potter Lumos Effect and the smoke effect was done at the starting part of the movie when I found the box. The Jumper Effect was at the scene where Hanani rode the bicycle and it hit onto me. Finally, the Earthquake effect was done at the end of the movie after I read a note on how to break the spell.

It is not easy to think of how time traveling could be implemented in the movie because we have to make sure that the viewers could understand. But overall, we did had fun videoing and editing the movie. :)

3DSFX Project 1

Final Video

Storyboard

This is my first project for 3DSFX. I took a long time thinking of kind of story I should do. And finally, I decided to make an introduction video of nature. The references for After Effects that I used were from video copilot. The 3 tutorials that I used were called, "Moving 3D Lines", "Elegant Slideshow", and "Text Blur Titles". These tutorials were categorized as motion graphics.

"Moving 3D Lines" were used at the beginning of the video. It creates flowing light streams by using the fractal noise. Also, the tutorial teaches how to add 3D particles like as though they are coming out from the light streams and, adding camera move for a 3D rotation. But I did not use the camera move effect because I think it was not necessary to add in.

In the middle part of the video, I used the elegant slideshow effect to arrange the images in sequence using After Effects. It also has the dissolve effect after an image is shown for a number of seconds. 

As for the text effect, I used the text blur titles tutorial. It teaches me how to animate the text in a different way together with the blur effect. A lens flare is added to enhance the animation.

Initially, I had this idea of doing motion graphics for vector design. But after looking through the tutorial on YouTube, it is actually quite tough to do because there is a need to draw the vines part by part and animate them. Also, it requires a lot of time doing it.

Week 3

Warriors Way - Flashback

For the first video, I had to change the color to an orange tone.  

Warriors Way - Showdown

The second video I had to change the color to blue-gray like color.

Pope 

Red Flag

The videos on the Pope and the red flag I only need to make the red color less striking so that it does not overpower the rest of the picture. This is because red is a warm color, and it is the most outstanding color.

Simple Bleach Bypass

This tutorial is also quite easy to do. It teaches me how to add color contrast and brightness of the picture.

Children Color Correction

Landscape Color Correction

For the 2 videos on the children and the landscape, I just had to apply the same technique as the previous tutorial. I managed to adjust the hue, saturation, lightness and contrast.

Overall, the whole exercise was quite enjoyable and easy to manage.

Week 2

 Fringe

It took me a short while to do this exercise. I just had to apply the tracking technique which I've learn from the previous tutorial and finally, I replaced the monitor screen with another video.

Track Matte

This was an easy exercise. I did not have any problems doing it because it was just like the basics of After Effects. Overall, I find it fun to do.

James Bond

This exercise was very difficult to do. It is actually quite interesting to do this because it teaches me more about designing graphics and creating an illusion reality in a creative way. But I had to spend long hours doing this tutorial and it was quite tiring to do.

Week 1

Faucet Drops

Light Bulb

Recycle Bin


Blood Splatter


Motorcycle


Sky Replacement


Set Extension


Orchard ION


Halo Reach Launch

Reflection

This is my very first exercise on After Effects. There are quite a number of things for me to learn. It was quite complicated to do at first because I had to do it step-by-step. Some of the video tutorials are very long when in fact, the steps to do After Effects is quite short. It took me a while to complete an exercise. The things that I have learn so far were animating and compositing Basics, key-framing, masks and mattes, creating transparency, motion tracking and replacement. I did the replacement of text, and how I could adjust the speed of animation. These are similar to Flash. Masks and mattes are used in green screen post-processing. From my point of view, masks and mattes are something like replacement - to replace a certain object with another object. Also, I have learn that motion tracking allows the insertion of computer graphics into live-action video with the right position, scale, orientation, and motion relative to the photographed objects in the shot. It is used to track camera movement. Overall, I still find After Effects interesting if only I'm able to do more than this.

Final Project

Storyboard

My Character's Poses (In Sequence)

My Character's Animation

In this final project, it's an animation of 2 characters interacting through actions and dialogues. Although the animation must be at least 10 secs, it is not that easy to do. I need to do the key poses / blocking before I could animate the character. One of the problems that I faced while doing this project was that I did not really know how to use the graph editor to smooth the animation. But I managed to figure it out myself by using the move tool to adjust the gradient of the graph and select the particular timeline that I want to edit. Another problem I had faced was how I should do the key poses. It is quite tough to think of a good key pose just for the character. The audience must be able to tell what the animation is trying to portray. But overall, this project requires time and effort and at the same time, it can be interesting if the animation is good.

Week 3/4 Scripting - Ex 1 & Ex 2

 Ex 1

Lesson 1:

For the first lesson, I have actually learn how basic MEL scripting commands work in Maya. It teaches me how to:

- Write basic MEL creation commands to bypass the Maya user interface.

- Use flags at object creation time to specify the attributes for the objects.

- Edit the attributes of objects using a command in conjunction with the edit flag.

- Observe the history created in the Script Editor and then copy and paste it into the Script Editor to create your own scripts.

Lesson 2:

Rendered Cube

Creating the Main Lighting, the Rim Light & the Fill Lighting

Things that I've learn in Lesson 2:

- Copy history from the Script Editor history section to create Shelf buttons for easy navigation.

- Save multiple commands as Shelf button.

- Type basic MEL creation commands (to create a polygon and adding lights to stage).

Lesson 3:

Things that I've learn in Lesson 3:

- How to declare, set and use variables.

- Perform mathematical operations to edit the value of a variable.

- Implement dynamics using MEL commands.

Lesson 4:

In lesson 4, I have learn how to create a user interface from an existing MEL procedure.
- Create a window
- Create user interface controls in a window
- Use conditional statements to check the existence of a window
- Use a built-in Maya procedure
- Modify a user interface to add functionality
- Access elements of an array
- Query and edit user interface values
- Save and source a script

With the help of MEL scripting, I could actually create a customized  user interface.

After trying out lessons 1 to 4, it seems to be manageable for me. It looks hard to do but actually it is fun to see how codings actually work in Maya.

Reference:

http://download.autodesk.com/us/maya/Maya2012_Getting_Started/index.html

Ex 2 

Human Walk

Human Run

Zombie Shuffle

 

Final - Creating a User Interface to display Zombies & Humans

The zombie exercise was actually interesting to do. MEL scripting has the ability to do anything to objects. It is able to create user interfaces for users to control the object by pressing the button, etc. I'm sure there are a lot more abilities that MEL scripting can do it's just that we need time and effort for everything.