DMA: Day 4

Holy crap I'm TIRED. All this waking up early and going to bed late craziness has caught up to me big time. I don't know how I'm gonna make it through tomorrow, but I'm sure I'll manage. Today wasn't another uneventful day. Today was one of the most interesting and informative days I've had all week. We're finally getting into topics that I know little or nothing about, so I made sure to pay close attention. We covered a ton of topics, many of which I forgot already, but the bulk of what we did today centered around animation. We learned how to create bones for our models in order to make them move. I animated my raptor looking down as if it was eating something and then slowly pick up its head to look directly at the camera as if it had noticed you. Unfortunately I forgot to render it out, so I can't show it off, but it wasn't anything spectacular anyway. We also learned about morphing objects and how to animate facial expressions. Then we went on to IK systems and animating human/bipedal movement. He mainly covered IK because I specifically asked him to talk about it. It's pretty obvious the rest of the class didn't grasp the concept too well, but he was mainly explaining it to just me. After that he showed me some cool tricks with FFD (Free Form Deformation), but it's too complicated and awesome to explain here. He then talked for a while about some of the work he's done, such as for movies, tv, and video games. Most of his videos were a little crude, but they weren't meant to be production renders, just demos. They were quite impressive regardless. Apparently he used to work at Acclaim, which I guess I should have guessed since he mentioned working on Turok 3. After that he discussed texturing in Photoshop and how to do tricks with texture maps in Max. All of that was nothing new to me, so I worked a little on my raptor. He now has fingers, woohoo! I still have a ways to go on the hands and I need to flesh out the feet, but little by little he is taking shape. Below is a quick screencap of what I had by the end of class. I hardly spent any time working on it today. Most of the day was spent just listening to the instructor.

Now with crude fingers!

As you can see, the hands are a little oversized. That is all intentional though so I can more easily work with them to model them. The hands were about all I worked on today, except for the brief head movement animation. I was gonna animate his mouth opening and closing, but ran out of time at the end. Oh yeah I forgot to mention this yesterday but last time in class we covered particle effects. That's always fun but old news to me.

During one of our breaks I went upstairs to talk to my manager about the class, since he had been wondering how it's been going. I told him how it was kinda slow for me and not quite as advanced as I had hoped. Because of that, he said I may be able to attend the Max II class next week, but probably not for the whole 5 days, just some of it. That will be so cool since next week is when they really get into the hardcore topics I have been waiting for. The instructor (his name is Jonathan, btw) has been asking me all week if I was gonna be at next week's class. I didn't think I would, so I have been telling him no and he always seemed kinda sad that I wasn't. Today I told him how my manager said he might let me come some days next week and Johnathan seemed pretty happy to hear that. Plus he's gonna be doing some extra instruction at nights during lab time. That is especially cool because I'll be working those lab times next week, so it works out perfectly. Anyway, tomorrow we're supposed to do some kind of group activity where we'll be in teams and each team will contribute one part of a whole scene. So apparently one group will focus on models, another on texturing, another on animation, and so on and at the end we'll put all the pieces together to do a nice animation or scene or whatever. It sounds kinda lame, but oh well.