Recreating Cameras and Lights in Maya

For this assignment, I had to recreate a scene in Maya using a photo. I had to replicate the camera placement and the lighting. Although we only needed to do one, I decided to do two because I thought they would be fun and challenging.

Here is the actual photo of the first scene:

And here is my recreation:

Here is the actual photo of the second scene:

 

 And here is my recreation:

I think the second one was much tougher to do because getting the shadows and reflections to cooperate was much more difficult than in the first one. It was a fun assignment nonetheless. Perhaps I will continue working on it another time to see if I can make it match the photo better.

Extra Credit: Lighting a Scene in Maya

In Maya, I created a scene with a floor, a wall, and my initials. I applied three-point lighting to the scene to make it more interesting.

First, I applied a strong spotlight as my key light:

Next, I used an ambient light as the fill light:

Last, I used a directional light as a rim light:

Building a Scene in Maya

For this homework assignment, I was required to create a scene in Maya using a floor, a wall, and the initials of my name.

I wanted to have the letters interact, so I leaned them on one another as if they had lost balance and were holding each other up.

I later added lights and created a scene with three-point lighting.

Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination

This weekend, I visited the Star Wars Exhibit at The Tech Museum.

There were a lot of great things to see. They had models, props, maquettes, and costumes on display, and some behind-the-scenes videos as well. They had some stations with activities for children to have a hands-on learning experience, such as changing the wheels on R2D2 to suit his terrain, how to design a robot walk, and how to effectively build a moisture farm on Tatooine. Despite the very cold temperature inside, I stayed until they were closed. There was just so much to look at! I would have stayed longer if the staff hadn't told me to leave.

I was so busy looking at all their displays, I almost forgot to take a picture of myself at the museum. Luckily, I remember just before leaving!

Special Effects in Animation and Live-Action

My first two term paper scores were 95 and 85; I will not be writing a third term paper.

Stop-Motion Character Animation

For this assignment, I collaborated with my classmates Edric Yamamoto and Catharina Sukiman to create a stop-motion animation of a character. Originally, we wanted to animate some Transformers solving a Rubik's cube, but when we realized how complicated that would be, we decided to look for a simpler idea.

We had to think about what other kinds of interesting "characters" we had access to. After sorting through many ideas, we thought about shoes. We realized we had easy access to little boy's shoes because of Edric's son. I also happened to wear my boy's sneakers that day. We decided to use Edric's shoes, his son's shoes, and my shoes to show the age of our character. With that concept, this is what we came up with:

In preparing our set, we tried our best to have good lighting with clean background.

We taped paper over the hanging lights to diffuse the lighting and to prevent it from creating a glare on the hard wood floor. These lights acted as fill lights. To the right of our set, we placed a tall lamp to be our key light. We set up a step ladder and clamped a plank of wood to it. We then clamped the iPad to the plank of wood, and in doing so, we created a large downshooter. With tape, we marked off the edges of the camera's view. We also used tape to mark the x- and y-axis positions of the shoes to make sure they didn't stray too far from their starting points.

We each took turns animating, directing, and taking pictures so that the workload was equal. When there were multiple characters on the set, we each took charge of one character each, and Edric's wife was kind enough to take the pictures for us while the three of us animated.

We shot parts of our animation on 4 frames per second and 6 frames per second. We animated the four walk cycles for each age we showed (little boy, boy, teenager, adult). We did our best to animate the contact, passing, up, and down positions for each walk cycle. In order to lift the shoes, Edric made wedges and blocks of varying heights out of cardboard and tape.

When we were done filming, Edric composited all the sequences together while Catharina and I tried to find music for our animation.

This was a very fun assignment to work on. Thank you for giving us this assignment, Professor Garcia! I found stop motion very enjoyable, and I plan to play around with some more stop motion in the future.