B2 Skills & Production

As planned from last time, we carried on with our look development session with a focus on developing materials for a potted plant. Firstly, a quick recap on what look dev is:    “It is the process of designing, defining and agreeing on the final look of 3D CG content in productions.”   Like last time, I […]

In the current lesson, we looked at creating animation in Maya by utilizing the CV curve tool to create accurate curves. We also added an object to a motion path and adjusted the timing, which was the main new skill that we focused on. Otherwise, using curves is something that we have done before and […]

The starter for this skills workshop was a clear giveaway for what we were going to be doing in the lesson. We were asked to describe the look of certain objects to another person and see if they could identify what they were. The goal was to avoid using obvious terms such as ‘device’ for […]

As the title indicates, this 3D skills workshop was focused on dynamic simulations in Maya, more specifically, nCloth. The goal was to explore how it could be used to emulate something breaking or shattering, preferably due to a collision with another object. The approach in this lesson was different from the rest since we were […]

NURBS or polygonal surfaces that are converted to unyielding shapes are called rigid bodies. They collide instead of passing through each other during animation, which is unlike conventional surfaces. Fields, keys, expressions, rigid body constraints or collisions with particles are all used to animate rigid body motion. In Maya, there are two kinds of rigid […]

The start of this lesson set up the mood for the entirety. Mathematics. I dislike this subject, as most creatives do, and seeing it on screen applied to something which doesn’t really need to involve maths was a little frustrating. But that is all down to the personal opinion of course, and I am glad we […]

Prolonging our introduction to Bifrost, we created another water simulation in this lesson, this time by following a powerpoint. I followed the steps to create a basic water crashing sim and then experimented with the Bifrost settings and parameters to make mine unique to my idea. The first step was to set up the scene. […]

Our starter, as always, began the lesson with a fun challenge. This time, we did a quiz on spotting the edited aspects of an image, more specifically the Photoshop imports. It was a slight give-away as to what we were going to be learning about but most of us were too focused on spotting and […]

e This 3D session was an introduction to a plug-in for Autodesk Maya called Bifrost. It provides a node-based framework for building custom effects, including smoke, fire, explosions, sand, snow, instances and more, all available as results you can preview directly in the viewport and render with Arnold. When I learned this definition and watched […]

The last time I did rotoscoping, the result was very messy and I didn’t feel like I understood the technique, which is why I’m quite pleased that we had another lesson on it! We recapped what it is is and why it is used as well as getting introduced to roto work in After Effects. […]