Websites

http://www.sony.com/index.php

One thing I liked about the site was the open which was short but really good looking. This is probably done with a flash video. Another thing I liked was the drop down menus. The drop down menu is not a normal one. In some of them their are option that can be clicked that will change one side of the menu. This is probably done by creating a list that drops down when the the mouse runs over it.

http://dleeds.minornine.com/

This one I liked the set up. It also has an top menu that if you click on one of the options it will scroll down to that section of the page. If one of the links located in one of the sections is clicked on some will open up a video or a separate page.

making water collide

This is to teach how to make water particles and an object to collide with it.
Open Maya:

Step:
1. Create a water emitter
^Go to drop down menu and select nDynamics.
-Go to nparticles on the top menu bar
>Go to create nparticles, make sure water is checked on, and then click Create Emitter. (If you'd like to have it animate longer than add more frames.)

*There are a lot of options for changing things about the emitter, how the liquid looks and other attributes of the particles.
*For now I will keep the emitter at its default, except for the shape. This is how you would do that:
Find the Basic Emitter attributes section
^Go to the drop down menu that says Emitter Type, and select Volume.
-Notice that the emitter has just turned into a square.
>Find the Volume Emitter Attributes
^Go to the Volume Shape drop down menu and select the preferred shape. I will select the cone.

2. Create a plane
-Go to the polygon tab.
-Select the plane and drag it on to the scene.
-Move the emitter higher
*Notice that the particles go through the plane. That is what we will fix next.

3. Make a collider
-Select both the emitter and the plane
-Go to nMesh on the top bar menu
>Click on Create Passive Collider
*Now you see that the particles now hit the plan and slide off the edge.

*Render the scene. If rendered under mental ray the particles will appear more like water.

final

So here is the final to the recent project. It is the magic pen commercial that was a group project. My other partners were Blake and Nuru (two of my classmates), who work with filming and the poem animation. My part was to make the 3d pen, ending sequence, and the title. Here are the basics for how I did this:

For the pen I used a cylinder and just manipulated the vertexes and using a back image to help model out the pen.
The ink was the hardest part. For that I made a water emitter and placed it on the tip of the pen. Then I needed to fix the direction that it was being emitted and make an object that it could collide with to make it go in one direction. That object is hidden in the pen. Then I changed the attributes of the emitter to look more like ink. Then I made a paper that the ink could hit. I have two different versions of it that I use in the video and combined in afteraffects.
For the title I made 3d text in afteraffects and move and rotated the text so that it match the background camera and seem to be following it.

2nd version

For this version I fixed the poem so it looks like the pen is writing it, and that's all I had time for. I learned that working on multiple computer is difficult because things could get messed up easily; with missing files and tons of errors.

part 2 work plan

My plan for the rest of the week is to mostly finish the poem animation.
Wed: work on poem
Thurs: work on poem
Fri: work on poem
Mon: Finish

co-op project Magic Pen

In this project I designed a 3d pen that emits ink.
For the pen I used a cylinder and just manipulated the vertexes and using a back images to help model out the pen.
The ink was the hardest part. For that I made a water emitter and placed it on the tip of the pen. Then I need to fix the direction that it was being emitted and make an object that it could collide with to make it go in one direction.That object is hidden in the pen.Then I changed the attributes of the emitter to look more like ink. Then I made a paper that the ink could hit. I have two different versions of it that I use in the video and combined in afteraffects.

Blake Green
Surprise! I was recruited to a SECOND project. In this project there was a magic pen. There were two people in this group, Corina and Nuru, and Nuru is kind of NU (hahaha get it?) to the class and the software, so it was going a bit slow or something. Whatever the reason was, I was asked to help with their project and animate a pen that writes without someone moving it. There is a layout in photoshop similar to After Effects, where there is a timeline, and layers can be sequenced to create frame animation. I turned off the visibility of every layer, so that everything would move faster, and I clicked "Make frames from layers" and photoshop automatically sequenced each one into a frame animation, where each layer was a different frame. There were a LOT of layers, so it took a long time. I then animated the pen, which was an OBJ file that allowed it to be manipulated in photoshop like a 3D object, so that the erased bits reappeared as the pen moved over that section of the poem.

commercial

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICm9bvDDGdE&playnext=1&list=PL8F23B179E4EDAF24

I think that they made this by adding a flat 3d model into the city and then added an animation onto that.