Early worksite regimen.

Here is a small vid from the previous project. This was the first concept I came up with. I am overly dependent on caffeine..

Untitled from James Eggleston on Vimeo.

Hummingbird tracking in Boujou

Here is a video of the latest project. I am open to anyone with suggestions. Tracking footage is pretty cool, a lot of troubleshooting but very awesome. Next class is advanced modeling (more zbrush) I am psyched to learn some more subsurface scattering and shader networks. Class is so much more enjoyable now that I have a computer up to the task. Much more to come.

Untitled from James Eggleston on Vimeo.

Edit: this video was slightly altered this morning. I updated some object shadow masks and retooled the audio. I noticed the text was slightly unreadable when compressed in vimeo so I made some more adjustments there.

MotionBuilder v.6

Class is finished,
Tomorrow we start our lighting and rendering class. I will post updates with that. For now, here is my latest project.

Untitled from James Eggleston on Vimeo.

Mobu v.5

I finished my project Monday. I had left my render at school over the weekend. I was messing around in After Effects on sunday and layed out my background image and edited my intro text etc. so that all I needed to do Monday was switch out the new render and output my video in AE. Once I was finished and turned my project into the TS, Otto noticed that my raycasted shadows on one of my lights was pretty distracting. I do agree that it did take away from the animation overall. I went ahead and left it to re render this afternoon. I should be able to quickly swap out the frames in AE and output once more. I finally figured out why my videos were rendering so desaturated in AE. I had to switch the compression to something like jpeg 2000 instead of normal h.264. I don't know if it's practical since the files are pretty big but the quality is far better as far as color richness. I will post my final animation tomorrow once we finish our critique.

Mobu v.4

Before the end of last week, I was finishing up my animation in motion builder. I was having some issues with additive character tracks. I had finished my initial poses and wanted to add in secondary movements. This left much to be desired since the story tab really isn't intended for editing key frames. I managed to get some movements in here and there but the end result is still a bit fast or rigid in motion in certain places. Overall, I am good with the poses and feel that they demonstrate the emotions that my chosen sync exudes. Once I felt happy with everything in MOBU, I imported back into Maya, then applied my color and normal map. I was intending to use displacement but I didn't have time to learn the new workflow in zbrush 3.5 r3. I will start getting that done tomorrow.

MOBU v.3

Last week, I finished up my color map, output a normal map and rendered a few frames in maya to make sure they looked half way decent. Lighting was setup, though, not finalized. I worked at home mostly the entire Thursday finishing the map. I am getting more efficient with layout of maps. Still need to improve technique though. My normal was output of Zbrush 3.1 at school. I was going to use displacement but the workflow changed the very next day since the classrooms installed 3.5 r3 and I believe the process has changed. I will need to get on that soon.