I made some cool 3d Animation stuff

One of the classes I didn't expect to enjoy so much in my program was VFX. I stuck with it for all three semesters and had the same teacher throughout. I already posted about what we did in Intro to VFX, but now I have a new compilation video of all the projects I worked on in VFX 1 and VFX 2. In January, we were introduced to Autodesk Maya and The Foundry Nuke. We practiced 3D modelling in Maya and compositing in Nuke, usually creating one element to bring to the other. At the start, I had so much trouble navigating Maya and would occasionally have meltdowns over not being able to render my project, not seeing textures, or the program crashing unexpectedly. It took a while to understand Maya and why it could be so finicky. After 6 months of working on it, I think I have finally come to a point where I can figure out how to make something (very simple) without a PDF tutorial. Here are some pictures of some of the things I created in Maya.

First project was just a plain old heart. Took me several hours to make.

A beat up old fire-hydrant with a shadow. Prof thought it looked too square but I kind of liked it like that.

This bell took several attempts and I definitely had a few meltdowns over it. But the result is quite beautiful.

Can you guess what wasn't originally in the shot? Let’s just say I had a hell of a time getting the shadow to align with the other item.

Maya wasn't the only program we had to deal with. We would then bring our rendered sequences from Maya into Nuke to composite everything together. Nuke was also challenging, but in a fun way. I loved using the node tree and felt like I understood it better than Adobe After Effects. There would sometimes be glitches here and there, but Nuke was much easier to figure out than Maya. Here is a video of all the projects that I worked on. I also want to note that all of these projects took HOURS to render. I even had to set up a “render farm” to be able to finish them on time. I literally had 8 computers rendering at once one day.

Last but not least, my final project for VFX 2. We had full freedom to create anything we wanted using the 3D tracker in Nuke. I found this beautiful video of the Fushimi Inari Taisha torii gates that I just had to use. I then brought in a character from Mixamo into Maya and created an animation of her running through the gates. I was going to leave it at that, but then I thought it would be super cool to incorporate the “Trails” element we learned earlier in the year. I had some difficulty getting it to look the way I wanted it to, especially because the texture I chose makes it look a bit cartoon like. But then I thought of bringing it into After Effects to see if I could improve it a bit. I played around with the colouring and added some eerie sound effects. Now it looks like something that came out of Stranger Things. I am actually super proud of the result and I feel like it was worth sticking around through all the ups and downs of VFX to get to where I am now.