Over the past week or so, we’ve been quickly trying to get everything we can together to animate, decorate, and finish up the animation. So far, we might be off on what we originally had planned, but we have gotten a new idea on what we can do in order to complete the animation.

Right now, we’ve gotten all of out props finished and in place. On top of that, I have finished animating the entire end scene, and it is currently rendering as I write this. The end sequence we have is the camera falling into the “Backrooms”, hitting the ground and cracking. After a pause of silence, except for the sound of whirring florescent lights, a plate falls and shatters in front of the camera, acting as a jumpscare.

This week, I have been able to complete multiple different object sin a short time span, a few in which I’m proud of, the Knife Holder is not one of them however. To start, I was able to quickly finish the plates, which I was close to finishing anyways by this point. Then, I created a simple fork and spoon, to go along with the knife. Unlike the knife, the fork and spoon are just basic and simple silverware you can probably find over 20 of in anyone’s drawers. After that, I worked on and completed the ceiling lamp. This one turned out nicely, and it consists of two objects put together, the lamp itself, and the lightbulb. Finally, I decided to make a quick knife holder for the knifes we would use in the scene. This one was very simple and quick to make, but it doesn’t look as good as the knife slots a made look very odd. Now that I completed all of those, I have started working on a flower pot to add more decoration to the scene, however I have not finished it yet.

Throughout the last two weeks, I have been working on three total objects. If I wasn’t absent the first week, I would have more, but regarding the ones I have made, I am super happy with their quality.

Because of the Toon Shader we are using, all models show up as gray until we render them, so I’ll try to provide renders that showcase their detail and colors.

The first model I made was a knife. This was made since it was a object that didn’t need completion immediately, so I started working on it before I left school for a week.

Next, I created the fridge. For this, I needed to add a bit more detail than just a box since we were also gonna have the fridge be opened at points in the animation. I didn’t add any detail to the back to save time, since the back of the fridge wouldn’t be seen any time soon.

Finally, I am in the process of working on plates for the animation. These are most likely going to be used quite a bit, either for animation or decoration. I am making shattered version of the plates, hence why there are duplicate copies. The plates are not yet currently finished.

This week, I have continued to work on modelling more objects for the Cooking Show Final Project in Maya. During this week, I was able to finish up modelling the fridge and got it functional. I’m really proud of how it turned out, I think I got the details down very well with the sticky notes and even the lights within the fridge.

After I finished that, I began working on some plates. While not done quite yet, my plan is to make a circular plat, and square plate, then a version of both that can be split into pieces. So far, everything is done except the broken version of the square plate. These were super simple to make, and will probably be the easiest things I model in the entire span of the project.

Last week, I started working on the models for our Cooking Show Final Project in Maya. To start, the first model I planned on doing was a Knife. While that sounds like a weird first choice, that is because I was gone for a wedding the week prior, so I didn’t want to take up the slot of any important object we needed done quickly.

Once I completed that, I started work on modelling a Fridge. This item, unlike the Knife, was extra important, since it would need to be opened, animated, have items stored inside, and a bunch more to fit the kitchen setting. At the moment, I have not completed the Fridge model just yet, however it is my goal to complete it before the end of this week, textures and all.

For the past few days, while other kids in the class were at a SkillsUSA competition, I have been working on a basic little scene with 5 models.

The first model I worked on has to be my favorite. When I first started the assignment, I wanted to make a lamp for whatever reason, just for practice. While making this, I decided I wanted to make a little scene on a round table with items including the table being apart of my 5 needed models. For modelling the lamp itself, the only issue I ran into was getting the lighting to look good with the lampshade, which luckily I was able to do in the end.

Next, I modelled the table. This one was the easiest to make out of all the objects. the table was made very simple, since all that would be seen is the top, and maybe a little of the legs. With that, I still did model the table based off of a reference of a similar design, so a table like this would in fact stand and work in real life.

When that was done, I took a quick little break to texture the objects I have created so far.

After that, I made a glass of water. This one was really easy, only being cylinder in a cylinder. The only hard part in making this model was being able to see it. Since it was made out of glass, it often showed up as invisible in the Maya render view.

Next was making book models. This one also wasn’t hard, just a smoothed out square with subdivisions and extrusions. What was hard was the texture, since I decided to make a bunch of tiny lines in a texture to represent pages.

Finally was the pencil. This one was also one of my favorites. I used an actual pencil I had on me to base the model off of. I feel like I went a bit too intense on the detail, especially with the metal, but at that moment in time I just really wanted to model a pencil.

Then after I was done with the models, I rendered it! There’s still improvements to be made, but I think it came out pretty well in the end.

Today, Seth, DJ, and I completed our two week animation project with the prompt “Dance Off! It all comes down to a Dog hoola-hooping and a Break Dancing Cat! Who will win??” Our project was rushed near the end, mainly with the positions of our characters, the fact that the dog is floating, and how almost everything we had on our storyboard wasn’t in the final animation.

The part I worked on for our project was everything related to the dog. One dynamic we thought was funny and wanted to keep is have the dog modelled based on a 2nd grade drawing of a dog while the cat was modelled after an actual cat. This was something we decided on after we were done with the storyboard and luckily we pulled through with that models wise. Textures weren’t exactly as realistic as we wanted, but they still got the job done.

One thing I wanted to give the dog was ear physics, but unfortunately I had to get rid of them since they were causing some issues that weren’t possible to fix from the student’s and teacher’s knowledge. The first issue is that they didn’t exactly behave like they were supposed to, not being affected by movement or rotation and still drooping the same way each time. Another issue, the one that caused us to remove it entirely, was trying to mess with them in animation caused the program to crash consistently.

I’m extremely happy with how the animation for the dog getting the hoola-hoop and holding it up turned out. I tried showing and explaining it to the teacher, but she ended up walking off while I was still talking, so that was a bit unfortunate. I think my favorite part of the animation is how the hoola-hoop gets dragged with the force over to the dog, and the collision causes the hoop to jiggle and the dog’s arm to be pushed back. Another thing I liked was the use of camera trickery here. From this angle you cannot tell that the arm is actually detached from the dog’s body (as seen below).

Then to end it off, we got all of our animations and work into one scene, where DJ put it all together, put it all in after effects, and then I polished a few audio timings and gave feedback with how it looked. Then we finally finished it and uploaded the video, only a day late!

This is my progress for the third week of our SkillsUSA Project in Maya. For this week, I worked on a more variety of things to add more detail to the main scene, including a Torch Stand, Granite Texture, and a pot, chalice, thing. Making all three of these were pretty fun. The Granite is for the walls of the cave, the Torch Stand is so we can have lighting in places other than just the walls, and the pot will have multiple variations, meant for adding more life to the scene. DJ this week worked a lot more on the cave itself, added a god ray, and is currently configuring the lighting to make the scene not look like it’s on fire.

This is my progress for the second week of our SkillsUSA Project in Maya. After I had gotten the torch done from the previous week, I started work on making a broken, worn down bridge. I enjoyed making this one, and the outcome to me looks quite beautiful. I’m proud of the texture that came from the bridge, as I made the wooden texture myself. Meanwhile, DJ continued to work on and finish the monolith, then started creating the cave area we would be putting all these objects in.

This is my progress for the first week of our SkillsUSA Project in Maya. During this week, me and DJ got all our plans ready for what we want to make. I started by making the torch model seen above. So far I’m enjoying this assignment, we have a ton of time to work on it and I get to make what I want to make instead of following a poorly put together tutorial. During this, DJ started work on modelling an Monolith to be the center piece of the scene.