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Video Portfolio
RISQUE
Animations by James Risque
2 - 4 - 20
1) Fractal Solar System
The changes I made to the original:
1) Added Kuiper, asteroid, and comet belts. The comets have realistic elliptical orbits
2) Added a distant space skybox
3) Added orbiting black hole systems outside the Kuiper belt
I also modeled the comets so they would look like icy spike balls, animated each solar system so that it looks like its dancing (bouncing slightly), made the planets move slowly when they are farther away from the sun, and made some new textures.
2 - 18 - 20
2) A GIANT"S TREASURE
A model based on a Late 19th Century (Possibly Martin Maier) All Wood Dome Top Restored Antique Trunk:
http://www.thepirateslair.com/385-huge-all-wood-dome-top-trunk.html
I chose this to base my model upon because it looked good. I also thought the top of the chest that curves in 2 directions simultaneously would be interesting to create.
The treasure added inside the chest was taken from the "King's Treasure" Maya competition.
Click on the Images to make them larger.
I tried to take into account ambient light from the grass and sky when trying to match colors.
3 - 3 - 20
3) Newton's Cascade
My animation features many balls colliding, rolling, and bouncing.
The scene opens with a ball falling onto a table. The fall creates a shockwave that travels through the table, causing the other balls on the table to bounce. After this, the ball that fell rolls off the edge of the table.
Another ball falls onto the table and lands directly on top of another one. The balls wobble and fall over, which disturbs a very large ball, sending it slowly over the edge.
The large ball falls to the floor and displays how its large size sends squash and stretch waves through itself as it bounces.
My storyboards contain more scene than were eventually animated:
Some of the principles I used besides squash and stretch:
1) Secondary action
2) Exaggeration
3) Anticipation
This frame shows the ball breaking "physics-based" expectations by wobbling on top of the other ball.
This wind-up for its roll is an exaggeration designed to draw attention to the improbability of 2 balls landing directly on top of each other (and the instability of this balance).
This Image shows the exaggeration of a squash. I wanted to draw attention to the ball's squash animation.
Classic animation has squash and stretches in response to speed. However, this is not physically accurate. I wanted to try animating squash and stretch based on impulse (m/s^3). (The balls in the first scene show classic squash and stretch)
My squash and stretch for the final ball responds only to force after the first bounce. Look closely and you can see how I tried to make the squashing wave reverberate through the ball.
This Image shows the climax of anticipation.
The anticipation is achieved through timing, as usual. However, Other factors add to this.
The ball's massive presence and apparent weight foreshadow it's fall before it even starts moving.
This image shows an example of Arc and Secondary Action.
The initial thud of the falling first ball creates an arc of bouncing balls as the force travels along the table.
The table also vibrates as the shock traveling through it, a secondary action designed to support the weight and thud of the first ball.
Another secondary action is shown when the 2 balls vibrate as they bounce atop each other.
3 - 25 - 20
4) Horseback Ride
My animation features a horseback ride through a small village around a range of small mountains.
Animation principles:
1. Arcs: the motion of the horse follows arcs. this is true both for the route of its motion and the animation of its joints moving.
2. Staging: the animation is presented with the horse's neck in view. This illustrates riding on the horses back but also forces attention towards the background out of the center and into the thirds of the screen.
3. Exaggeration: the most obvious example of exaggeration in my animation is the size of the sun. There are also other exaggerations, such as the very limited color scheme of the scene, illuminated only by the orange light of the setting sun.
1. Arcs
I rigged and animated the horse completely from scratch. It was quite difficult and was a lot of work but I thought the animation came out looking nice in the end.
Unfortunately, this horse animation was very hard for my computer and made it very hard to animate the rest of the scene. Maybe I did somthing wrong?
2 / 3: Staging and Exaggeration
I tried to render this but It seems my computer is not capable of doing so.
This playblast is all my computer is capable of producing. If I try to create a playblast of higher resolution the file becomes corrupted and cannot be played.
I spent tens of hours trying to render and this is the best I could produce.
This one is done with hardware rendering and the lighting is messed up.
Extras:
The horse was rigged and animated entirely by me. The landscape (mountains and ground) was also made entirely by me. Most of the stone huts were not made by me. I also did not make the rocks entirely from scratch. The trees, also, were not made by me, only textured by me.
Below are some screenshots are taken from frames that were rendered vs play blasted.
The original color balancing for the scene was done based on how it would have looked when rendered. I'm not sure why the land seems to have a slightly different shape in rendered pictures, or why the land's texture quality changed.
Storyboard:
I wanted to do more with this scene but unfortunately, the extremely low framerate during editing made doing anything almost impossible.
The low framerate was also literally stunning, which made it very hard to work on this scene. Good thing I don't have photosensitive epilepsy...
I thought it was pretty fun creating the horse though.
4 - 8 - 20
5) bridge bowling
My animation is one of many dominoes and rolling balls.
Many objects participate in this chain reaction, including but not limited to
1) a stone bowling ball,
2) a mini "marble machine"
3) a newton's cradle
4) hundreds of dominoes
5) wooden levers
Storyboard:
This animation took me a long while. It was very hard to create proper timing due to the random nature of the physics of Maya. Every time I played the outcome would be different. Also, the physical objects kept falling through the ground, so I had to limit the scene by making only a few dominoes active at any time.
Of course, only when I'm nearing the end of my work do I discover the "bake simulation feature"...
Luckily I was able to keep the scene simple enough so that it could easily run in real-time, which made editing much easier. Unfortunately, I had to reduce the quality of the playblast because I noticed that the files will never play when they exceed 5GB.
All the models were created by me. I wanted to put in more complex models, but even a relatively simple one would completely overload my computer and the physics calculations would fail for complex objects. This is why all my models are simple shapes.
This is the Maya software render of the animation. The original render size for the whole video was around 20GB which always broke the avi file.
As such, I had to split the scene into 4 pieces to render it. For some reason, the camera changes slightly between these 4 pieces despite not changing anything in Maya
This is the Maya playblast render. It was rendered in one piece so it doesn't have the camera glitches, but the textures don't come out right.
4 - 23 - 20
6) Distant Fractal Solar system part II
My first animation featured a 'fractal' universe, this animation features a fractal (really this time...) universe/solar system.
The solar system has huge planets and binary planets. The planets also have smaller planets in orbit around them, with moons orbiting around those smaller planets. The moons have small asteroids orbiting them, while the asteroids have small pieces of space dust in orbit. (and deeper, deeper, deeper... atoms and electrons will start orbiting if your computer is strong enough)
My algorithm allows you to create a fractal of whatever depth you want.
If your universe is deep enough some planets will grow planetary rings.
The algorithm:
The algorithm will first ask you how deep you want the fractal universe to be.
I recommend keeping depth of less than 5 (this was all my computer can handle)
The fractal universe is organized like a tree. The fractal depth is the height of the tree. The algorithm will also ask you how many branches per node you want in the fractal
My computer can only handle a binary tree. A higher value will take much longer.
The script uses a recursive function to create the fractal. Each layer of recursion creates a smaller orbiting system and groups it together so it will orbit around its larger predecessor
5 - 11 - 20
7) The umbrella and the parasol
"The Umbrella and the Parasol" is a metaphorical animation about the relationship between two who are very different. The Parasol protects from the sun while the Umbrella protects from the rain. The two serve very different purposes for their owners.
The two characters use their umbrella and parasol to help each other from worlds apart. Though separated, their love is sent through the magic of their portals. Do you know why the two are apart?
https://youtu.be/WrPPWnhwbSs - video link watch in 720p: I recommend watching on youtube, Wix tends to be a little buggy
One thing to keep in mind with this animation is that I forgot that you wanted to limit us to 30 seconds of animation. Oops... Well if you want to grade only 30 seconds please grade (1:45 - 2:15) because this is the climax scene. (Hopefully, you will allow me some extra frames in quarantine).
I hope you like the whole thing though because it took me quite a while to make and was pretty fun.
The animation consists of a fox and a desert traveler. The animation starts with the fox dampened by the rain. Though the rain is heavy, the fox finds happiness by the sunlight streaming through the umbrella from another world. Inversely, the desert traveler is shielded from the intense sun by their parasol. In the end, the fox overturns the umbrella to quench the thirsty desert traveler even if that means to suffer the rain itself.
I hope you'll like it and leave feedback even though this is the final animation.
The music was not made by me, but of course, mixed by me to ensure that it lines up well with the video. I did some texturing using the "Paint 3D" program, which allows you to easily paint textures onto objects (much easier than that UV editor... you can use images but also just paint with markers. The fox texture is one of the textures that is not an image but was painted myself). I learned a lot about modeling by looking at other models and using the Maya sculpt tool. As for the animation, there are some problems I wish I had time to fix, but I think it came out pretty good in the end.
Apparently there are about 5,000 rendered frames in the video. But some of these frames are actually just backgrounds as the umbrella portal is done with a green screen. I'm sure there is a better way to do this in Maya, but I think the way I executed it turned out fine. I had a lot of fun messing with the Arnold textures which I thought came out looking good; I really liked the way the water bubble turned out in the end. Unfortunately, it took very long to render water, so I didn't have any time to fix the mistakes I noticed after rendering was done.
The green screen effects and sound was added in iMovie after the rendering was done. Music was mixed in iMovie. The fade transitions are also done by iMovie. I used ImageJ to compile the PNG images into a video. I used the render sequence option in Maya so there are no "Arnold" watermarks. Most of the other problems I ran into were easily solved with youtube tutorials.
I can't believe it took me this long to discover the "Arnold render view window"...
Have a nice summer!
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