For animation class, we were given an assignment where we each had to pick a random mixed drink name and use that name as the basis of a 10 second animation in After Effects. I picked something called a Watermelon Smash (it contains…. watermelon cubes… and I don’t remember what else). So… here’s a watermelon smashing something!

We were actually allowed to use anything we wanted for the actual animation, the only rule was that we had to composite the final result together in After Effects. I wound up doing the ocean, splashes, and sparks in Flash (with tons of help from Joseph Gilland’s book Elemental Magic) and painting the boat and the watermelon in Photoshop. The watermelon itself is animated entirely using the puppet warp tool in After Effects.

I’m not terribly happy with the sound. That needs some reworking probably…

Here’s a few stills breaking down how the entire thing was composited:

…and here’s some random stills:

This is just a quick dump of recent things I’ve been working on, detailed posts to come later.

I’m done with my character model! Until I can think of a better name, I’m just calling her “Raincoat Girl”.

Here’s a still:

Getting the hair and cloth sims to work right took aaaggggeeesssss. Thank goodness Marissa Krupen knows so much and helped me out a lot.

I wound up cheating on the subsurface scatter for the skin. I couldn’t get it to look right on its own, so I wound up using a layered shader with the subsurface on one layer and a normal texture map on the other layer. I think the end result looks okay.

Turntable!

I’ll post more stills later, but now I really need to study for that Finance final that I’ve been avoiding… I also have to make an environment for my character to go in to, and I still have that final project for 3D modeling to finish (I haven’t even started…).

Okay, I’m close to finished with the face…

I’ve decided not to give her eyelashes. They didn’t look very good. I also noticed that in some Pixar characters, Pixar chose to keep the lips the same color as the rest of the skin… I kind of like that style choice, so I’m going to steal it (read: Karl is too lazy to paint lips).

I’m working on a character model right now loosely based on this sketch. Here’s how the cloth simulation stuff is looking right now:

There is still much work to be done.

I haven’t managed to make any progress on actually finishing this project since my last post, but I have had a bit of time to play with ambient occlusion and z-depth mapping. So… same render as before, but now with depth of field and some ambient occlusion:

…and the z-depth map:

…and the ambient occlusion map. I did the leaves on the trees by transparency mapping the planes where the leaves went on the model, but because of that I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to ambient occlude the trees. So I removed them for the ambient occlusion map:

I actually found an alternate way to render out the z-depth map, but I’m not entirely sure this is as physically accurate as the standard way Maya does z-depth:

Hopefully more soon!