Soft Bodies - O Hot Dogs

Month 13
Visual Effects 1

Our final project was to demonstrate a soft body effect. I went with a simple theme for this one. I didn't want to show jello-s dropping from the sky like most people, so instead I went with hot dogs.

All I did was create a lattice for each hot dog and set those lattices as soft bodies. I applied gravity fields for each one as well as created springs. I wanted to set the conserve to .98 to make the hot dogs drop a bit more realistically but doing so caused the hot dogs to explode upon landing, so I had to bring the conserve down to .9 despite upping the stiffness of the springs to 50 or so.

In class today, however, I learned that I could have changed the weight as well as the damping to alleviate any issues I had, but in the end my project still turned out well and I'm happy with the results.

Particle Effects

Month 13
Visual Effects 1

Our next project for VEF1 was to showcase three different types of particles. I decided to go with sparks (electricity), fire, and water. I wanted to display them as if they were basic elements of the universe, hence the pitch black background.

I used a combination of fields for this scene, such as vortex for water, turbulence and uniform for both fire and sparks.

The video is just a playblast. I ran into issues during the rendering process. For some reason, the fire would completely disappear during the sequence where the camera moves up close on it. Also, the water effect would've looked much better when rendered. As it is now, it looks like bubbles.

Rigid Bodies - Rube Goldberg Effect

Month 13
Visual Effects 1

This was our first project for VEF1. We learned the differences between active rigid bodies and passive rigid bodies, and made an animation that showed the interaction between the two types. The best way to showcase this was through a Rube Goldberg machine/effect.

The active rigid bodies were the moving objects whereas the passive rigid bodies were the stationary ones (such as the platforms). I included an invisible passive rigid body platform underneath the glass bin. This was to support the bin after the torus lands on it, otherwise it would completely drop due to its own weight. The only field used in this scene was a gravity field.

Barrel and Crate Handpainted Textures

Month 13
Texture Painting and Sculpting

This was our second assignment for TPS. Similar to our first project, we had to handpaint textures using Photoshop and then apply those textures to some geometry in Maya. What makes this particular assignment important was that we needed to be able to demonstrate the illusion of depth of a basic polygon based solely on how the textures look. For example, the crate on the right looks like it has extrusions made for the borders, but in reality the mesh is just a simple 6-sided cube with no manipulations; it's the textures that make it seem like there's depth.

Dungeon Room Handpainted Textures

Month 13
Texture Painting and Sculpting

This was our first assignment for TPS. We were instructed to create four different materials all handpainted from scratch using Photoshop, then laid out in a 0 to 1 UV space and apply the textures to a corner room in Maya.

Dungeon Room in Unreal Engine

Month 12
Art Creation for Games

This was the final project for my ACG class. It's a dungeon room where all the assets were modeled with Maya, textured with Photoshop, and then imported over to the Unreal Engine where the assets were laid out appropriately. The shading and lighting were also done in Unreal. The image above shows a breakdown of some key elements, such as the normals and UV texture layout. Below are bigger resolution images of the beauty shots.

Reusable Textures and Assets

Month 12
Art Creation for Games

This was actually a bonus assignment for my ACG class. I used Photoshop to create and layout the textures in a 0 to 1 UV space, then I modeled the buildings using Maya and applied those textures.  The purpose of this project was to demonstrate that we can reuse the same collage texture to create multiple assets of varying degrees in appearance.