House Model

Modeling House Fun

This past semester I have been mode modeling a house. This house has taken me a long time to create and I'm still working on the texturing and some other rooms. This house has taught me to be a patient worker, a model doesn't just "poof" onto my computer screen.  It has taken me lots of time and effort to put forth theses rooms in this house.  I mostly worked on the inside detailed parts of the house, but there were a few outside elements, the detail in the garage and also the front porch.

Building and idea off of paper

This is one of the couches with the front door of the house in
the background

My idea started with just a simple drawing that I drew in my sketchbook. I was the living room. The living room consisted of a TV, 2 couches, 2 end tables, a coffee table, and a TV stand. That drawing I was almost identical to the model in Maya 2016. Once I took the idea into Maya, I made a flat plane and the two walls that were my living room. I started with making the two couches, which were probably my favorite because of the butt print I made on the couch using soft select. I made the tables with drawers and made a cool little effect on having the drawers open in a lot of the modeled items. After done withe the tables, I added the TV to the model. The TV consisted of a lot of extruding and shrinking faces to make a good frame on the TV. The last and probably most time consuming thing I modeled was the lap top. There was lots of extruding in that as well however I like to put detail into things so I made the keyboard pretty detailed with the arrow keys being put out correctly.

Finishing the outline of the House

Once was done with everything in the living room, I decided to finish of the outline of the house.  I had to figure out though what kind of house I wanted it to be, trying to decide between modern or Victorian style. I decided to go more Victorian style because I just like the way they are shaped and the way they look. I made a rather larger outline which eventually I shrunk down a little. But I had it well mapped out where and what I want every room to be. I wanted there to also be a basement and a second floor, I haven't gotten to them yet but I have both entryways done. Like I explained I have it all mapped out and ready to go.

Modeling the Kitchen

Modeling the kitchen was probably my favorite part so far of this project. There is just a lot of things you can add with a kitchen. The sink, stove, dishwasher, toaster, fridge... The list goes on. I started with the cabinet, getting a fresh full layout of where the stove, dishwasher, and fridge would go within the cabinets. I also added cabinets above the main cabinets to give a more finished off kitchen look.  After I got the main look in the kitchen I started to add details to it, like the fridge with the water dispenser, which was  just a lot of extruding. I also added pretty detailed stove, that was probably my favorite thing to make in the kitchen, just because it took a decent amount of time to make, but in the end it really make the kitchen stick out. I also made a window in the kitchen that looks off into the living room making a good eating space between that wall. I also added a great little island in the middle of my kitchen which really just binds the whole kitchen together as a whole. Problems that I ran into were I need to save more often because Maya hates me and will crash a decent amount of the time.

Texturing 

Texturing was the very last thing that I did so far with this house. I saved it for last because texturing is not my strong suit. I  just don't get colors to work as well as I wish I did. I used lamberts and, blinn and, phongs. I haven't quite finished my texturing yet within the house, I am still experimenting with the floor and what color I should make the wall. Some problems I ran into were mostly in the texturing, like just simple things like figuring out what the color should be for the walls, floors, etc... The picture to the right you will see that the table has a nice dark granite counter top.

Overall

This is definitely my favorite most challenging project yet. It tested my ability for how fast I can work, which is not very fast yet. I just like modeling houses in general, or any interior of a building, I would say that is my more stronger suit, especially when it comes to adding detail to the model itself. I will still definitely keep working on this, when it is 100% down, it will be on here.

Beautiful Fish

Since school has started I have been working on a 3D animated fish. It took me roughly a month to get this fish modeled, rigged, and animated. A lot of this project showed me how much work has to go into just one little animation. It made me realize why it takes a long time to get an animated film done. I wanted to do this project because I was anxious to learn how to rig and animate the fish. Last year we never really did much animation, it was more move a ball, which was good for starters but didn't excite me very much.

Pre Project and Maya 2016

I started with a drawing of the fish on just a piece of paper. I wanted to get an idea of what the fish would look like. I took my drawing and put it on the scanner and scanned it onto my

computer. I then took the image and put it on Maya 2016. I made a cube and made it x-ray to the image in the back and started moving the vertexes to align a rough outline of what it looked like. If you click the number 3 button it smooths out the fish and makes it not look boxy.

I started the fun process of rigging and  painting weights on the fish. I honestly did not mind the process. Painting the skin weights is there when you start to move the joints and some other weird part would move that you don't want to move.  Like if I wanted to move the fin of the fish and the eye starts to move. Painting the skin weights gets rid of that problem. If the weight is white where you don't want it you get rid of that wight and turn it black to get rid of the white. i ran into some problems, one of the weights on my fish would not go away at all. I just kept messing with the skin weight settings and eventually it finally worked.  Sometimes weights would come back and I would have to erace them over and over again. Once all of you skin weights a good and ready to go you can start animating your fish.

Final Part

Texturing the fish was a pretty easy process. I used a new window editor called the UV editor. The UV editor has the fish when it is unfolded. If you unfold the fish you can see you fish almost perfectly in 2D. If you take a screenshot of the uv editor fish and bring it into Photoshop you can start coloring it. Once I was done coloring it I just added a favorite material phong and set it to an image of the UV editor I took and colored on.

The final piece of the puzzle is adding a simple motion path on the fish.  I just did a short little circle motion path, to attach it you just go into the outliner in the window tab and click on the locator and curve, and the go to the constrain tab and add to motion path.

Conclusion

This project was my most favorite I have done in animation class. I enjoyed pretty much all of it. There were some things that I could have probably done better. The way  I did my fin was I did extruding on the side of the fish. It just made it more annoying to get the type of fin that I wanted. But in the end I love the way that my fin had turned out! I think if I made my fish a little more fat and not as skinny as it was the fish would look a lot better.

This year I have had the opportunity to learn tons about web design. I have learned how to animate through web code. That was of the harder of the projects.  I have had a fun time in this class but I will end up going to animation next year for my junior. Although I will still continue to learn lots about web design, because web design binds everything together.

http://eravensonline.net/students/402jmt24/

We started in fourth quarter uploading some of our better websites to the internet. It was called our index. The index holds some of my best webpages that I made consisting of some of the animations, the past present and future websites. I plan on going to many royals games this summer.  I think in eComm next year I would do more focus on animation.

Animation Blog Final

These past couple of weeks we have been working on a final project in our animation class. I was in a group with Alex Gabel, Saif Jasim, Erick Vidal, and Brandon Daniels. Alex did the key frames for Erick, Saif helped with the finishing touches, Joey (me) made the 3D ship the video, Brandon drove the car,  Our project is about a car that drives by and someone feels the need to blow the crap out of the car. The video does a quick freeze frame when Erick Vidal snaps his fingers and it freezes, then a missile comes and blows up the  car. In our video we added an explosion sound effect, a snapping fingers sound effect.

We started with a storyboard, our original idea was to make a freeze frame before we got hit by a car.
But we wanted to be able to add more effects and more sound effects. So we did. After we came up with the idea of the video, we all went outside in the Olathe northwest parking lot. We spent about an hour outside recording. We spent about the next week on key framing our actor Erick. The picture below show a picture of the key framing Erick, if you look at where it says mask one those are all those keyframes we worked on with Erick. We had to do a moving mask which is where all the keyframe came from.

Adding the sound was a fun process, we had to find different exposition sound. It made us laugh listing to the different sounds the internet had. We listened to so many different sounds, we eventually found the perfect sounds for our video, the missile sound effect, the exposition sound effect, and the snapping of the fingers sound effect. We edited the wavelengths in each of the sound effects. We turned down the sound of the exposition, turned up the sound of the snap effect. In my opinion the sound effects were the best part in the video. It made us laugh a lot and it gave the video layers, just made it hilarious.

We learned lots on this project, in particular I learned a lot about key framing, since it took 100 years to do it, haha.  We needed to work better together, we can sometimes argue in our group, but in the end the we made it a pretty okay project. Our experience in this field was pretty good. Even though it was not our best project, we still have experience of effects that we can use for our next project. 

Responsive Web Design

Responsive Web Design

A responsive website is a great way to make you websites comparable with any user.  they way it works is the website fits the way is should on a certain size screen.  If you view a website on a phone and it is not responsive, it will be pretty hard to navigate.  If you went on a website that was responsive it would make it easier to navigate through.  Responsive fits a website on any screen size.  Responsive web design is one of the most important thing in web design because a huge amount of people use mobile phones and tablets and all sorts of stuff.  Not too long ago people had desktops there were no such thing as a "Smartphone".  Now that there are smartphones you need to have websites compatible with the screen size.  You use things called media queries to give characteristics to a picture.  It helps a picture change size depending on the size of the screen.  The breakpoints debug the code to make it work on the website.

Here is my example of a really good responsive website.

http://morehazards.com

Mobile and Desktop Users

Mobile and Desktop Users 2012 - 2015

From the years 2012 to 2015 the percentage of desktop users went down 5%, it doesn't sound like a lot but but that is 40,000 less people that logged into it on a desktop!  The mobil sessions on the same website went up about 22,000 sessions through the years.  There are still though more users that check this website out on a desktop.  But I would say by the end of 2016 there will be more users on the phones than the desktop.  

I looked up what a bounce rate is, the definition that I found was a bounce rate is the percentage of viewers on a website who left the site after viewing one page. On the Olathe Northwest Ravens website the bounce rate was always the highest on the mobile site probably because they just need one thing when they go on mobil, like an address, or a phone number.  We are on the same track as the rest of the country mobile phone wise.  

Most of the websites that I have found say by this year there will be more mobile users than desktop users on websites.

http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing-analytics/mobile-marketing-statistics/

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/opinion/2353616/mobile-now-exceeds-pc-the-biggest-shift-since-the-internet-began

http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/28/technology/mobile/mobile-apps-internet/

Changes to the Blog

As you can See I made many changes to the blog.  I made the change of changing the header rom the default to my own.  I changed the favicon, to my logo.  I went in to the CSS and changed some things.   I made gadgets to go on social networks and follow me.  You can look at the banner I made to go into the blog.

Tools in Maya

Maya Projects

Theses pass 4 to 5 months or so I've been using the program Maya, Maya is a rather complex program with hundreds of tools maybe even thousands!  In theses past months I've learned about quite a bit of these tools and what they can do to make any model or animation even better.  I have made a series of projects that used different tools in general.

The Hammer

The hammer was one of the very first projects of mine that actually looked like something, not just a whole bunch of random shapes in it, it was also probable my favorite on as well.  Modeling the hammer had me use a series of tools.  It started off with the extrude tool which was a tool the essentially add faces to the rectangle so I could have a head for the hammer.

what I did then use the cut faces tool, well to cut the face that I needed to cut in half.  Cutting it in half made it so when I would extrude it out next it would back it look like what a back of a hammer should.  The next thing was to add the head of the hammer.  All  I did there was extrude on the opposite side of the back a couple of times.  I shrank one of the faces in to actually make it look like a head of a hammer.  The final tool that was used was the edge bevel tool.  What that did was basically round out the corners of the hammer so that way they weren't bad sharp looking edges.  I'm not really sure why I liked this one a lot, I think I just like the way that it turned out.

Ice Cream

The next project I work on was modeling some ice cream in a bowl, cup, cone, container, and a scoop.  It was all made on a Lazy Susan that I animated in Maya to spin around 359 degrees (I'll explain why not 360 degrees later in the paragraph).  I started out by modeling some rather simple shapes like a cone and spheres.  Although ice cream and the cone is not all just the same color.  You have to add different colors to it.  Well what I did for all the ice creams is I made a separate lambert for each of them and made one the color of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry.  Ice cream also has some textures to it as well.  I made a bump mapping and found the cloud bump map which actually gave it a very nice ice cream look to it.  You can mess around with the bump mapping so that way you can get the texture placed just right.  I did essentially the same for the cone except instead of adding a color to the cone I found a texture online that I could use for the cone.  The bump mapping made the cone able to look more realistic by adding bulges that go inward to make it look more like a cone.

The animation part of this project is pretty simple.  Before you start animating the Lazy Susan going around you need to make sure that the textures are grouped with the object or else the texture will move with it.  You will see in my first example that I ran into this problem.  The next thing you would need to do is add a key at key frame 1, then I went to frame 120 and rotated it 359 degrees, I did not do 360 degrees because then the object would not have moved. Then to make it to a look you go to the graph editor and changed the curved line to linear and it is in a loop and you are done.

Bouncing Balls

Animating the bouncing balls was similar to animating the Lazy Susan.  Like using the key frames to animate each of the balls bouncing.  If you watch on the video when the balls hit the ground it squishes down to give it the more natural effect.  You also had to go into the graph editor and change the curved lines to linear lines.  It makes it so that way when the balls hit the ground it would make it look more real.  If it had the curved lines then it would look like it was gliding off the ground instead of bouncing.   In my use of the graph editor it has been very helpful to almost get more control of your animation, it enables you to have more freedom in animating.

The Cup

The cup was a pretty simple project in my opinion.  It had you work with more different tools in Maya in order to make it.  The term is NURBS modeling.  It is a lot different from polygon modeling because you start by drawing something 2D then making it 3D.  You start buy going into front view in Maya.  Then you go to the curves tab and draw out something, in this case I drew a wine looking glass.  Ne
xt if you select the 2D shape you made and click the revolve tool it makes it become a 3D shape.  I made only half of my 2D wine glass because that way it is symmetric all the way throughout the shape.

Saltshaker

The saltshaker is very similar to make like the cup.  You still do nurbs modeling.  The difference is that you use multiple shapes to make the saltshaker.  You draw a circle nurb
then you can make a second one move it up and make it smaller and the use the lofting tool and you have a different shape.  You can essentially add as many shapes as you want.  The lofting tool is similar to the revolve tool except it uses actual shapes.

Polything

The polything is an interesting project of mine.  It involves lots of lighting.  The polything is basically a sphere with holes in that you difference a cylinder in different places in the sphere.  There are four types of lighting that you use in the polything Spot, Point, Area, Ambient.  Spot light is well a spot light. It shoots the light in the direction you point it.  You can have three point lighting which is putting 3 different types of lights that help make the scene tell the story better.  Ambient lighting is light with color in it.  Area lighting is similar to spot lighting.  It's could be used as maybe a street light or a lamp.