AE Masks and Mattes

Before:



After:



This is two animated masks. The first is on the skyscraper itself to get rid of the sky around it in the image. The skyscraper is also moving in relation to the forward clip (granted it didn't come out all that great). The forward clip has a mask on the sky to allow the skyscraper visibility. Hair and trees were real problems when doing this. This is one time consuming process, but rather fun. I can see how this would work really well on a well planned shot (avoiding trees and hair type problems, etc).

Maya Lights

Ok, this is my project for lights in Maya.  Back to ye ol crappy Superdome model (which feels even worse after playing around with the cab model for the last set of projects).  This has an ambient light that is suppose to be the sun going down, which it sorta does. There is a bunch of of spots running around the outside as well as the ambient.  I tried to make them look uneven like in the picture of the Superdome, but it only kinda worked.  There is also a bright light in the parking garage area where I first tried a bunch of little lights, but felt the one super bright one looked better.  Lights felt a little more controllable in AE, but maybe it will become more natural later.  This was one of those things that actually felt easier on the mouse than on the pad.  It feels like light tends to "seep" through things at times that I wouldn't expect it to do so, but I have a feeling it might be because of my model. 

3D Layers

Ok, I used my taxi from the 3D project with this because I thought it was nice and shiny.  Youtube is kinda screwing me on the quality of the transfer...the shininess kinda looks just smudged on here.  I have one camera that I have moving in and around on the taxi.  I have one light moving around the car (that's not a fade in or something, its the light moving around in conjunction with the camera moving).  The taxi and the background are 3d layers that I'm moving around as well.  I need to talk with Professor Beans with my issues with bringing a Maya layer in (there just seems to be always something I do wrong when I try to bring stuff across from different programs...had the same issue with trying to make a layer out of a flash file).

Maya materials

I have to admit, I got very tired of seeing my crappy models, so I downloaded one to play with materials on.  I found this taxi.  There are several different materials in this one model.  I tried to get this cheap fake leather for the seats and I played around in the interior with different materials as well.  I also tried to get rubber tires (ok, they look like they are really shined up for a taxi, but hey...).  All are Mental Ray materials.  There is even transparent glass in there, although I'm disappointed I couldn't get some reflection going on them.  I tried to different types of glass for all the lights.  The material on the hubcabs and bumpers is the same, where I tried to get this chrome type color.  All in all, it was fun (really wish I could get my modeling skills to this level though).

Joy of Particles

This is my particles project.  The text moving across a particle using a text layer for the particle was a test for what I'm planning to do for the final project and I didn't want to forget how to use the text layer that way.  I included it because its just cool to me that you can do that.  On the elf, I have 5 different particles all working together.  The first is on the crystal ball in his right hand, where I wanted it to look like it was activating for combat (yep, I've played way too much Evercrack).  On the staff, I combined three different particles on the spear tip in an attempt to look fire-ish with a little smoke puffing around it.  I also have a particle emanating from the jewel below the spear's tip that's supposed to be smoke discharge from the staff.  Hope you like

Superdome Model

These are my final models for the Superdome.  This is much harder than I thought it would be, mostly because of dealing with the bazillion menus in Maya.  I attempted to make it have an orangish hue like the photograph.  I used a curve to make the middle part and then revolved it.  The top is an oval that was placed inside.  Then there is the square base of the field and finally the parking garage on the bottom.  All were added together to a single entity so that inside is just a big cavern.  The parking garage was the hardest part by far, because of the angles and trying to get it to extrude correctly.  It seems so simple looking at it now, but took me many hours to do.

Moving Text

This project was to animate text.  I'm using this as a practice for part of my final project as for that I want to make some spiffy titles to the eggscape project (the first blog entry).  I have my name floating across the screen with a drift fx.  I am also using a fade in/out fx as the text enters and exits the frame.  The final thing is the shimmery effect I tried to add.  To do that, I used the emboss effect but I animated the angle to spin constantly.  Overall I like it, hope you do too.