Week 3

Animating Cameras & Lights

The first exercise focused on animating the camera using the Depth of Field (DOF) effect. The camera stays in clear focus on the UFO as it hovers through the city.

The next exercise focused on animating light. I created a Daylight system in the scene. What that allowed me to do was create simulated daylight for any time, day, and geographic location. The book gave us the time to use, July 4, 2002, and the location that I chose was my hometown of San Bernardino, CA. 3ds Max has now calculated the daylight according to the parameters that I input. Now for the animation. On frame 0 the time of day is 4:00am, and at frame 100 the time of day is 10:00pm (or 2200 hours since a 24 hour clock is used). The result is a time lapse photography effect.

Christmas Wishes

Santa Clip Art courtesy of  VintageHolidayCrafts.com

Christmas eCard

This was just a simple eCard I put together. I wanted to give it a vintage feel, and the first thing I found was the clip art of Santa Claus. It seemed perfect, except for the fact that his beard was cut off on the right side along with the snowflake pattern in the background. Using Photoshop CS3 I completed his beard and modified & extended the snowflake pattern. The Merry Christmas text was also done in Photoshop, along with the red background. The holly was done in Illustrator CS3, with some finishing touches done in Photoshop.

Holiday Cheer

So I'm kind of obsessed with the television show Fringe and, for fun, I decided to create an eCard using Photoshop CS3.

The Observer enjoys this time of year.

Original image.

Week 2

This week focused on what are referred to as Constraints. There were two lab exercises that I did that covered three of these constraints: The Path Constraint, the Look-at Constraint, and the Link Constraint.

The Path Constraint, and the Look-at Constraint

The first exercise covered two of the three constraints. In it we follow a roller coaster (and if I do say so myself, it looks to be a rather dull ride indeed!). 

So the first thing I had to do was to put the car on the track. Fortunately nearly everything was already pre-constructed, including a path around the tracks, so placing the car on the tracks was a fairly simple task.

Constraining the car to the path causes it to be placed on the tracks and follow the path. This is Path Constraint.

After using the Path Constraint for the car, next I had to do a Look-at Constraint with the scene's camera. What the Look-at Constraint does is allows the camera to follow the car as it moves around the track while keeping it centered onscreen.

Keep in mind that these exercises were only concerned with getting us familiar with Constraints not the physics of roller coasters.

The Link Constraint

For the second exercise I had to animate a crane with a claw moving a teapot.

By connecting the teapot and the claw with a Link Constraint, both are in sync as I rotate the claw.

Week 1

These are the first two projects for my Animation I class. In these exercises I learned basic animation in 3dsMax. 

For the first exercise I had to animate a ball falling down a flight of stairs.

The quickness of the animation, and it's short bounces on the ground gives the impression that the ball is heavy. I also have the ball bounce off of the corner of the last step that it hits, which is why it appears that the ball is thrown out farther than its other bounces. And then, when it hits the ground, I have it roll off-screen and gave it a couple short bounces rather than just have it come to a stop.

In the next exercise I had to animate another ball, but this time through an obstacle course. 

This Lab exercise only gave instruction up until the ball came out of the pipe, so that's all I have done. However, I am currently working on finishing the animation so that the ball completes the course. When the animation begins, rather than hug the ramp during its decent, I have the ball fly out just a bit. This approach looked better to me because I was able to make it look like a more natural bounce when it hits the track as opposed to having the ball hug the ramp and then all of a sudden leap up before the first tire. Then after it is finished with its jumps, I gave it a small bounce on its approach to the curve. Also, in addition, I added a camera to follow the ball rather than having just one stationary view.