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Evan Torres – “Brobot” (Final)
Artist’s Statement
The initial concept design for the Human character came from a set of chibi-style caricatures that I had recently-at-the-time made of my friends and I. They were very square-shaped in the torsos, and that aspect shines through the most in the finished products since I elected to shrink the head from its initial large size.
Despite the simple shapes involved with the design of the robot character, it was actually the more difficult of the duo to model thanks to the addition of the light-up eyes and the switch on the forehead, both of which I wound up needing to parent to the head itself. I wish I had known that fact earlier, because it would have saved me an hour and a half of struggling with constraints.
The story concept came to me in a sort of stream-of-conscience manner: I began with a blank storyboard template and simply started drawing a story. From concept to finish, the final product wasn’t all that different from my paper draft. The most notable differences was the robot pinning the hero to the wall instead of lifting him up, and the changing of the Human from a generic, pawn-like shape to a man I call Jan. Jan’s outfit, color scheme and overall design closely match a favorite D&D character of mine of the same name.
Finally, the largest difference between the storyboard and the end product was how I orchestrated the fight scene. The draft left the combat period open to my interpretation since I’ve discovered through first-hand experience that I do such scenes better when I ad-lib them, not unlike a real fight.
As a side note, I encountered a strange bug where the Arnold renderer simply refused to do its thing, not even starting the actual render. This problem was local only to the file I was working with, but any attempts to import it to a new scene were met with the same fate. I wound up using the Hardware 2.0 renderer built into Maya.
Credits:
“Battle (Boss)” created by BoxCat Games, used under a CC-BY license. Downloaded from:
freemusicarchive.org/music/BoxCat_Games/Nameless_the_Hackers_RPG_Soundtrack/BoxCat_Games_-_Nameless-_the_Hackers_RPG_Soundtrack_-_05_Battle_Boss
“Tapping, Metal Radiator, A.wav” by InspectorJ of Freesound.org
“Rain on Windows, Interior, A.wav” by InspectorJ of Freesound.org
“Tool Box” sound by NWSP. Downloaded from: freesound.org/s/240743/
“Jump, landing in snow2” by mallement. Downloaded from: freesound.org/s/160604/
Kayleen McDonnell
Meiners_Paul_Project1
My idea for this project came while I was hiking with a friend. We were up in the hills, and we came upon a viewpoint, but when we looked out most of the trees had been removed leaving hills of dirt in their place. I feel like often people don’t realize the potential danger to our forests if we don’t take more responsibility for them.
Rather than take a factual approach I chose to make my PSA more of an emotional journey. I thought this would be an issue where showing would be more powerful than telling. So I came up with a short story about a father taking his son to one of his favorite camping spots, and finding that the location has been deforested. Throughout the project I struggled with cutting each scene down, in order to get the whole video down to thirty seconds. I especially struggled with the text, which has to be on the screen long enough to read clearly.
To animate this project I used After Effects, which was a new experience for me. I would say most of the software was fairly intuitive making animation a simpler matter. The hardest part of the video to animate was the lip sync for the father’s dialog. To do it I made nine different mouths, and swapped them out every few frames to simulate speaking. This was a tedious process, but I am happy with the results. Overall I found this project to be a good learning experience, and I am happy with the final results.
Gonzales_JordanHW1
