Software and Hardware Particles in Maya 2015

This was an exciting new world for me. I have always used maya's native particle system nparticles but never had I ever used the hardware particle system inside of maya. What I learned from this was the basics of what most particle systems consist of in most other programs.

In this project My goal was to create a scene that used multiple avenues of software and hardware particles. I mostly used sprites with creation expressions as well as animated instancer geometry.

First For the smoke effects and exhaust effects I used a basic volume emitter with sprites as the render type. After cycling the images that the sprite would use it made for a very believable result.

Second for the rain effects I created another volume emitter but instead of using sprites I used a multi streak render type. The great part of this effect was having the particle interact with the car and the ground, I've even added particle collision event to have the rain droplet create a splash on impact.

Below is the finished product. ( there is sound )

Visual Effects 1 - RigidBodysimulation and Particles

This month I've been exposing myself to all kinds of new techniques for creating interesting and somewhat realistic animation via maya's dynamic simulations.

My first project was of a Rigid body exercise create active and passive rigid body's to elude to the audience that everything in the scene is actually interacting with each other. Underneath is a playblast of the animation that I came up with.

Character Animation - Lip sync Blade Runner

Here is a short lip sync I did outside of class last month for fun. I used the Max rig for Maya and used school assets to populate the scene. I had this clip on my hard drive and had been planning to do something eventually so the time seemed right. I also lite and rendered this for fun. Enjoy!

Character Animation II Lip Sync Exercise

For the next two weeks Im going to be animating to a short sound clip. This assignment is currently in the blocking phase where I'm trying to create dynamic storytelling poses that will help let the character's emotions read.

First blocking Pass



Second blocking Pass


Updates soon!

Character Animation 2 at Full Sail University

I wanted to take a second and post what I've been doing recently in maya and at Full Sail University.

This month I'm focusing on strong animation body mechanics and acting. In the first exercise my class and I were tasked with creating a short animation based on a given scenario, by showing the characters full body and with the help of strong storytelling poses I believe I was able to achieve a comprehensive representation of my scenario.

Scenario: "You are impatiently waiting on the bus and are excited or relieved to see it arrive, only to have it whiz right by. You must walk 3 consecutive steps in this scene."

Below is what I came up with!

Next post will be about the next project. Lip Syncing!!

Character Animation 1

This blog post is dedicated to the projects that I have been working on for my Character Animation 1 Class at Full Sail University.

In the first project we explored a basic walk with a leg rig called eggy. 

here is a playblast from the final project turn-in.



For the second project we were tasked with creating a series of strong poses that would suggest a specific emotion. In this video you will see each pose one after another all while in a silhouette format.



For the third project the stakes were raised and we were given a fully rigged character.
This walk was still more on the basic side of things but with having to move the arms, head, body etc... This project became a little more intricate. A turn around was also required but this time we had the articulate the character acting towards the end.

Advance rigging and shot finishing

For this section of my blog I wanted to cover some more advanced full body rigging.
This past month or so I've been developing a rig that has sudo muscle systems using nDynamics in maya. For the stomach and pecks I created a dynamic system that manipulates the geometry to get a realistic "jiggle" to emulate the way skin might slide across the muscles.

This rig also has a fairly basic joint based facial rig with SDK's that control the emotions and eye blink also the nose and ears have abilities to be animated.




Here is a playblast from one of the final shots. Below is an image of some added fur detail that was also attached to a hair system letting the fur be manipulated by dynamics.