The above images are part of a passion project I started during the summer, the character art I used as references were done by someone for a series on Twitch and Youtube by Something Witty Entertainment. The models were made from scratch/with basic shapes to start with (torus, spheres, boxes, and planes). The hair on the girl is rough/temporary, and the clothing on the boy is in progress.
The above video is a job exhibit project I made for a national organization I was in between Sophomore and Senior year of high school, called SkillsUSA. The organization is meant to allow people to practice and demonstrate skills in fields that they plan to enter in the future, for me being Computer Animation.
I spent somewhere around half of my senior year of high school working on it, maybe longer, and a large chunk of that time was dedicated to learning how to create decent particle physics simulations, how to render nParticles using Redshift, and working on character modeling/rigging. Animation was done very late in the process and thus many obvious flaws were not fixed.
This project is additionally one of the main pushes for me to learn IK/FK switches and more proper/accurate rigging techniques in general. Everything used in the video was created by me using Maya, Redshift, Photoshop, nParticles, xGen, fields/solvers, and After Effects. If I am forgetting any other systems/software I used I’ll come back and add them.
This is a single part of a large group project I worked on while I was still in the process of animating the scene. It was a very rushed project, and since the scene was dark I did allow for some flaws in the movement of the characters that would be difficult to see in the final product.
What I worked on for this scene was:
- Rigging for the plant and person (facial expressions were made with blend shapes by someone else)
- Controls for plant and person
- Modeling (greenhouse, door, glass, broken wooden beam, plant (someone else started modeling the pot that the plant is in, I later added details))
- Attaching textures to the plant and greenhouse (not making them, just attaching them)
- Creating materials
- Lighting (unseen)
- Animation for the whole scene.
This was also the first project where I was able to test out making an IK/FK switch, which can be seen by the legs dangling through using FK controls and the arms moving with IK controls throughout the beginning of the scene. I plan to expand on this in my latest project by also adding in multiple joints for the forearm and upper arm to create accurate deformations and potentially by following a new process I found for the forearm that would make elbow bending movements deform properly without needing two joints at the elbow, though I am unsure as to if I will be able to combine all of these elements into one rig without running into major problems.
Additionally, for the rig on the plant, I made sure to use parent constraints so that it could stretch enough that the animator would have more freedom in how it moved when attacking.
Lastly, one major point that I worked on during this project was learning how to properly make custom looking controls, such as the half-sphere-shaped nurbs curves used on the plant in multiple places. This was done with a simple code that I learned and stored in a google doc, which I am using to store and manage tricks or codes that I discover or learn from different projects for future use. It is small currently but has already been a massive help due to my poor memory and desire to learn as much as I can.
Jackie Bois Website 