midterm proposal

After days of trying to figure out what to do for my midterm I decided to animate a slinky going down the stairs. I've found some tutorials online that will help me with the design and mechanics of this animation. None of these, however, have fully set a scene. The story board is below.

I apologize for the poor quality. Essentially, the scene will open with girls giggling (finalcut addition) and the slinky will begin to propel down the steps. Once it hits the bottom a "the end" sign will show across the bottom of the slinky. 

I plan on using curves for the banister and bars. For the steps i'll make a carpet and rug out of the nurbs plane and importing designs I've made in photoshop. The slinky will be the hardest part but i'm feeling pretty confident that I can complete this in the time allotted to me. Updates on progress to follow....

HW nurb curves model

For this assignment I decided to make a simple tea set using CV curves. I used CV curves for the top and body of the pot. A nurb torus is used for the bottom and to create a small decoration on the bottom of the cup. Curves were also used for the shapes of the cup and the plate. Another torus was created and transformed to make the handle of the cup.

I decided to add a spoon and the appearance of tea in the cup. The spoon was made with a sphere for the top and a cylinder for the handle. I decorated the handle with another cylinder and torus around the middle to complete the design. The tea is made with a plane with a brown color on low opacity. 

I want to play around with this scene a little more in the future by animating the teapot using key frames. I would like to used particles to create water flowing into the cup. I've stumbled across some tutorials to help me complete this idea. Below are the final render views (front and back).

Ball tutorial 2

I decided to make a few other changes to the ball tutorial. To start, I decided to change the texture of the ball by uploading a file. The file is an abstract water color that I found one day online. I also changed the tile colors on the floor in the attribute editor and added an orange ambient light, a blue point light, and a spot light in the back in order to see the whole ball as it bounces.

I also added fire works to go off when the ball passes through the hoop. I added two nurb cylinders on the sides of the plane.  I went to Effects > create fireworks and placed the target so it would appear as if the fireworks were coming out of the poles. 

This is the final render view of the ball tutorial.

Bouncing Ball Tutorial

The first tutorial that we were asked to complete was the bouncing ball tutorial in the Learning Maya book. After a rough start, this was the final result. Due to the book being outdated, there are some glitches in the final product, but overall the animation came out as it was intended.

This screen shot shows the unrendered view in the perspective window. As you can see, a spotlight ahs been setup to highlight the ball's bounce through the hoop. Once the animation is rendered, the flames will no longer be green (they will look like actual flames). The main problem I have experienced was that in the final render the ring was not showing up. When I deleted the ring to start over, the flames disappeared in the render so I decided to undo the delete. I figure this minor problem has to do with the book not matching the program. Either way the ball still bounces through a ring of fire. 

Professor Sanders requested that we complete the tutorial and change one thing. I decided to continue with the part of the tutorial that we didn't cover in class. This part was creating the particles. After the ball has made it through the hoop, some fire particles are supposed to attach themselves to the ball and quickly fall to the tiled floor. This process began with adding friction (geoConnector), creating a particle event, and messing around with the settings (changing number of particles, velocity, and spread). The gravity fields allowed the particles to drop faster to the ground and the render attributes allowed me to change the shape to a streak.