Computer Animation

This is a repository of some very embarrassing projects from my undergraduate computer animation course. Needless to say, computer animation did not end up being my passion. I do have an increased appreciation for anyone who does this, it feels like something for people who are a little insane.

project 1: solar system

This was our first project, a little model of the solar system. It follows an intro maya tutorial.

project 2: treasure chest modeling

The project was to model a treasure chest, and I picked the arc of the covenant.

project 3: bouncy boys

My storyline? Truly shakespearean. A story of betrayal. Meet our two characters, Pinky, a very good boy, and naughty, untrustworthy Golf. An animation (theoretically) using Disney’s 12 principles.

project 4: roller coaster

The goal here was to use track animation. At this point in the semester we were all forced to go remote online, and my animations suffered for it. My laptop could not keep up with the rendering demands. That, and I have learned I have no sense for the timing of these animations.

project 5: rube goldberg machine

This project uses some of maya’s built in physics engines, such as fo the dominoes and falling balls.

project 6: procedural animation (alt title: dice gods)

This project was about procedural animations. It’s a little ode to Dungeons and Dragons. In the center is an icosahedron, or as players know it, a d20. Swirling around the d20 are all the other dice used to play DND; d4 (tetrahedron), d6 (cube), d8 (octahedron), and d12 (dodecahedron).

The script is based on the python scripting tutorial found here. I added a few personal touches. The first was editing the shapes found in the tutorial to the dice shapes. There are an even number of each type of die based on the number of instances the user creates. Each die is given a random color by setting its shaders RGB value to a random set of three numbers.

I think this was actually my favorite project. There were tasks that were much easier to accomplish precisely in code than they were in the GUI. It was also the first animation I successfully rendered on my laptop, so the visual quality is higher.

final project: roomba

This project was completed with Alex Fantine. It’s a the story of a roomba happy to help while people are trapped inside. In hindsight, it feels like it might be in bad taste, but at the time the quarantines were expected to go on for a few weeks (rather than years) and the death toll wasn’t… what it is now.