#autodesk student

[obviousniklr]

I have two sides as a student, and both these two actually represents it 😂

The studious student and the free-spirited student

Literally my two lobes when I'm studying/working on homework

[draco-vs-decoy]

MY MOVIE IS SO DONE

After a year+ of hard work, overcoming personal hardships, and moving on, I am proud to say my movie is here! I'll throw up some more behind the scenes stuff in time but! I'm so unbelivably excited to show this off. HOORAY!

*temporarily removing the link, as I have been told it is smart to lay off posting the film until I can weasel my way into festivals. If you want the Link, I'll DM it to you! Just ask >:]

[nobodyfearspercy]

How it feels being able to get into Maya after months of it gate keeping itself from me

[scamber]

Quadruped Walk Cycle 🐎

Brief 2: Animate a looping walk cycle of a horse using the provided rig.

Animated in Maya

This was beyond complicated, I could not get it to look natural but I guess that's just due to the limitations of this rig. Its knees kept popping if they weren't bent enough, but if you look at horses they're not super bent other than when their feet are actually leaving the ground.

Whatever. 😒

I should've added movement to the ears but eh, I ran out of time. Contrary to the vibe of this post, I really enjoyed this brief, I should've given myself more time though. I should've done more sketchbook work before diving into this brief as well, maybe would've had a better idea of what to do from the get-go instead of wasting time.

Why doesn't he have a mane 😭

I do really enjoy the 3D process, I'm probably gonna specialise in it. It's just interesting beginning to end. And it's easy to fix errors. I think the process just meshes better with my brain.

[lazypalm-pro]

Continuing to model it up! Also, color palette brainstorming is happening before we texture and rig up in the upcoming week or so!!

[arcsi0]

work from my first day of art courses this semester :) already on the grind

[complexedandfruity]

shoutout to my undergrad for keeping student email accounts active after graduation so i’ll never have to pay for a office 365 subscription 🫶🏻

[cantankerouscatfish]

back in electronics class, 100 years ago, we had this breadboarding program to draft out our projects. mostly we just made goofball messes of lights or drew pictures with wires.

but I figured out how to adjust the pitch and volume of the piezo buzzers. mapped out a scale. made a breadboard project that played 'Red River Valley' in the worst, most annoying noises possible. teacher hated it. classmates asked how to do it. class full of squeaking and honking computers. :3c

[katiekatdragon27]

A short film I made for school. Feel free to check it out and support :))

Have a good day bros :)

[chellishere]

Character Modeling...p1

I started working on my characters for my short film for school (technically starting early-- maybe a good thing, maybe not...)

Luckily I get free/cheap licenses for these expensive programs that are required to even function as a 3D artist with my tuition (which is way more expensive than those licenses ever would have been...)

Anyway-- to start, I modeled a character in zbrush. I save a lot of backups, so I can go back and see most of the steps of my process (pics below)

Then I brought the highres mesh into maya, did a little retop fun where I zoned out for like 3-5 hours as I made my cute little loops and such:

Then the whole operation was brought back to zbrush for that sweet sweet projection action to then bake maps in substance...(lowres(subdivided a ton but pre-projection) vs highres mesh below)

So I imported the maya retopologized file into substance, baked my mesh, and got to work painting by hand <3 (base color display on left, material display on right)

She's beautiful! For my first real attempt at painting textures, I think it looks pretty good, if a bit scary without... hair and eyes and such.

And I'm realizing the retop job I did might not have enough topology, especially since I'm planning on using her for a short film, so I didn't really need to worry about having too many verts or anything, especially since she has soo few that I can see issues around the edges of the geometry where (I'm assuming) the normal maps are adding shadows to where the geometry oversteps the map, for example this black line on her arm:

But I'm not even sure if I'm going to use the normal maps anyway because I want to experiment with trying to make the renders look painted/flat (rip to all that sculpting work... at least it helped me figure out how to paint details in substance even if I don't end up using the map)

...

So onto hair! I wanted dynamic hair so her gorgeous locks could blow in the simulated wind, and I wanted her to have curly hair. When I looked up how to use nHair in maya, I saw people recommend xgen. I have some limited experience in xgen thanks to one class of one course I took last semester, but really I had to relearn it through a YouTube video (thank you J Hill on Youtube! linked at end of post). It seems like I might've gotten rid of the file that had my xgen attempt so I don't have a picture to show, but... my girl was balding, and xgen wasn't letting me create maps because of issues with the file paths that I coudn't resolve despite going through the path and not finding any issues?? so I gave up. I tried to mess around with it for a bit, but really xgen wouldn't have fit the style I was going for anyway. I wanted chunky hair that I could paint textures for. To fix the mess I made, I would've needed time, and though it would've been good practice and a learning experience, I really wanted to focus on finishing my project following the intended aesthetic than branching out and forgetting about my original goal. So, raincheck xgen. We'll meet again on another day. To make up for no xgen pics, heres a screenie from the file I do have where I tried paint effects on my hair curves:

lol.

I wanted the hair curly anyway, and I didn't really want to use paint effect hair so... onwards:

Then I saw a video on using curve warp deformers for hair (GGP_Animation on Youtube) which was a cool introduction to something in maya I didn't even know existed (plugin wasn't even loaded on my machine) but I realized that if I had the curves and wanted curly hair, I could just make a sweep mesh that followed the curves! So I did, and then followed ANOTHER tutorial (CG MAGUS on Youtube) on how to make dynamic hair to figure out which option in the nHair menu I should choose ^.^ and finally! the curves were moving! --But the sweeps weren't... So I saved the preset I had made for them and applied it to the NEW hair system curves-- and finally, she had beautiful dynamic curls (ignore the eyes--temporary, just a quick 3-color ramp on spheres).

Just kidding, they're kinda ugly lol :,) but that's hopefully just because it's just a generic aistandardsurface shader with no texture. I'm going to repaint the texture on the scalp so even if it shows through it doesn't look like her hair is thinning. I'm also planning on using flair renderer (linked below), so I have to pay for that and do some testing with it to figure out how I can get the final look I'm going for. Concept portrait design below:

[armageddonoctopus]

My showreel for 2023!

Music by Seth_Makes_Sounds

[colorful-academia]

Okay that wasn’t as bad as I though it would be! Maya you're officially my new BFF, fuck Cinena4D all of my homies hate Cinema4D

Forced myself to change clothes to make my 3D modelling class at least bearable and aesthetic

[dserpentes]

Several Notes!

I'm once more promoting my Ko-Fi! As many who follow me know, I'm an animator and since last year I started doing more 3D animation work.

However, my student license expired and I wanted to keep doing more animations! So, a while ago I created a goal on Kofi to see if I could eventually buy the Maya Autodesk Indie license, but the cost is approximately €400 ;u;

All help would be EXTREMELY helpful right now

Now, you may wonder what do I offer on my Ko-Fi?

Newsletter

Get a regular (not mensal atm) updates of what I am working on, current and future projects, store items to come, when commissions are open, and so on

I also will put out polls with questions of what everyone would like to see me working on, which memberships have some exclusivity on

Memberships & One Time donation

With Memberships and One Time Donations, you'll get to see my work first or even get exclusive access to certain content! One Time Donators will have access to the same things that the first tier, Cafezinho, has!

The Shop

Being able to get updates from the Shop right away, access to FREE content (that soon will there be more). Memberships have a discount and early access to anything that I put in the shop, however.

Soon there will be an update with Physical goods as well such like, Stickers, Prints, Keychains, Buttons and so on.

And last and not least, access to my commissions

You'll get an instant update when commissions are open, some memberships will have early access to there commissions and discounts, as well!

[amarantine-amirite]

Ice Moves

Things have changed, and only some for the better. Thanks to the invention of electric planes, every single domestic flight in the country has a layover in Silver City, New Mexico. 

It makes sense. Silver City is flat and sunny. They set up a ton of solar panels out here. Electric planes can park and plug right into the solar panels. Because the charging station is so close to where the power is being generated, the planes charge faster and you don't need to generate as much energy to charge them. As a result, Silver City is now Convention Town USA. I mean, you're already there waiting for your plane to charge.

Before the electric planes, Silver City only had about 10000 people living there. Now, you have a 10000 population town trying to accommodate the same amount of tourists that go through NYC on a regular basis. The result? Folks get trapped in long lines just to get onto footpaths, buy a drink, enter a restaurant, or board a train or bus. Anyone in Silver City now waits more than two hours to get into a Dunkin' Donuts. Crowds get backed up crossing bridges, even on weekdays. You can’t remember where you’re going because you’re too busy trying not to faint.

The municipal government of Silver City doesn’t give a shit. They quickly conflated legitimate complaints about overcrowding with being swamped by dirty foreigners who refuse to adapt to our "superior culture.” Of course, tourists don’t have a monopoly on misbehaviour. I don't think the city understands that overtourism is a problem to begin with.

Regardless , we are in Silver City for Anne’s (my Mom’s boss’ sister’s) bachelorette party. Usually, when the parents have a business trip, the kid stays at home. This time, they took me with them. I’m not complaining. In fact, I’m happy I’m here. 

I helped Jessie, one of the co-op students Mom works with, set up. The ice pad had just been resurfaced, and we were the only two people here. That's another thing that's changed about Silver City, ice rinks. Hotels have ice rinks attached to them instead of pools. You can thank cheap power and a demand for an activity to stay cool that doesn't require a lot of water for that. No really, you only need four or five inches of water to generate an ice sheet and the water demands from the Zamboni are far less than the water demands to top up a pool.

“Holy crap,” Jessie said as she passed me the decorations, “I never expected Silver City to be so crowded.”

I skated over to the penalty box and put the stuff down there. ��Yeah,” I concurred, “I’m happy that the ice rink at least it’s nice and quiet.” A light went off in my head. “I think this is it. We're gonna do this”

Jessie looked at me and asked, “Do what?”

I took the video camera out of the pile of stuff that Jessie had passed me. “I always thought that a music video of me figure skating would be really cool.”

Jessie nodded. “You mean that literally, right?”

“Both literally and figuratively,” I giggled as I passed Jessie the camera. “I hope you don't mind, but here's the camera.”

Jessie beamed. “Cool! I will help you with a music video.”

“Thanks,” I said, “it will certainly be a step up from what we did before”

Jessie tipped her head to one side. “What happened before?” she asked.

I didn't feel like telling Jessie the whole story because I had trouble putting it into words. We created a music video for our band's cover of the song “Heart Shaped Box” by Nirvana. They made the mistake of leaving Mandi and I in charge of filming the video. 

Mandi had asked me to do ink drop simulations in Autodesk Maya, but she didn’t say why. I soon discovered why when we were shown the finished product.

Mandi had made a video that consisted mainly of black and white footage of a dumb boy wearing a helmet made out of a watermelon rind, a gold chain, and a diaper. The diaper began to swell in size until the contents, represented by the ink drops and the only thing in colour, exploded forth.

And that was it. That was the entire video. There wasn’t much of this video and what little there was was just nauseating. Mandi insisted that we were trying to be minimalist, but it didn't work. 

My two bandmates gave Mandi and me a hefty talking-to. As our drummer, Carol, put it, “I don’t know what stinks worse, the premise of the video or the guy's diaper.” 

“Well,” I said, trying not to give too much away, “Let's just say we screwed up badly enough to get nicknamed Fart-Shaped Box. 

“Really?” Jessie chuckled. I nodded. “That’s bad,” she replied.

“Even worse,” I continued, “the girlfriend of the guy in the video, Alison Peric, got bullied a lot because of it.” 

Jessie shook her head. “I've known a handful of people who were bullied because of the actions of their boyfriends,” she said, “It never ended well.”

I explained what happened to Jessie. “Guys think toilet humour is funny.” Girls don’t, and they often define you in terms of your boyfriend. That means if your boyfriend does something immature, you get the worst of it.” As I said that, it occurred to me that I identified the reason why, unlike many of my female friends, I had no interest in dating. You can’t define someone by their boyfriend if there’s no boyfriend to begin with.

“Rough,” Jessie winced, “I hope she’s OK.”

“She is, but only just.” I nodded while warming up, “The prevailing theory is that the only reason she didn’t have a breakdown because of the bullying is because her ankle healed up enough that she could skate again.”

Jessie hit record, and I started skating. I did a two-foot spin that segued into an upright spin where I changed direction halfway through. Then I went backwards and did a spiral that looked more like a golf pickup. I tried to do a double toe loop into a flying camel spin, but it devolved into a weird-looking butterfly.

Then, "Set It All Free" from the movie Sing came on the radio. I put together a free skate off the top of my head. 

I skated forward clapping with my hands above my head. Then I turned around, skated backwards, and did a double lutz followed by a lunge. I turned around again and did something called the galloping peacock. I fell trying to do a flying camel sit spin but turned it into a belly flop with style. 

After leaving the spin, I did a back crossover, turned around, and then went into a double axel. At least, it began as a double axel. Thanks to trying to look around to see who was wolf whistling at me, it ended up becoming a very over-rotated mess where I landed on both feet. 

Once I got my balance back, I finished it off with a couple of awkward-looking forward spirals and a camel spin variation that Jessie nicknamed the “donut on a stick”. 

“Wow, that was impressive,” Jessie said as she stopped recording. She gave the camera back to me.

“Thanks, there were a lot of load screens, but it felt awesome.”

Given how ridiculous it looked, it's hard to appreciate how much skill it took. I made the whole thing up as I went along. Improvisation is a hard skill and I should be rewarded for making up a routine off the top of my head as smoothly as I did.

We finished with about 3 minutes and 30 seconds of footage of me ice skating. I don't plan to use all of it, and we could always loop parts or play them in reverse or slow motion.

We had the Zamboni go over the ice sheet a second time to remove the tracks I made on the ice. Anne had her bachelorette party, and we went back home. 

Mandi and I now had a better idea of what we wanted the new video to look like. Besides the footage of me ice-skating, we had little animations of shifting camouflage patterns and a pair of scissors eating little geometric shapes that look like confetti as it traces a self-avoiding walk across a night sky.

It wasn’t until Mandi and I were putting the video together that we noticed something unusual about the ice-skating footage. That over-rotated double axel I managed to do was a quad. 

The video went live a week later. Seeing my quad axel in a music video did not please Alison Peric. 

“I thought you learnt your lesson after seeing how badly bullied I got because of you.”

I looked at her. “You mean how you got bullied because your boyfriend was in a music video where he shit himself wearing only a diaper, a gold chain, and a watermelon rind?” I responded. What happened to Allison was far more complicated than she got bullied because of something I did.

Alison folded her arms and glowered at me. “You don’t understand, do you?” she huffed, “I've been training my whole life to be the first female figure skater to uncork a quad axel, and some loser who looks like Will Ferrell with boobs beat me to it!”

“I can see how that'd be disheartening,” I nodded, “but they only count attempts completed in competition. We were shooting a music video while setting up for a bachelorette party, so I don't think it'll count.”

“That's even worse!” Alison screamed. She grabbed both sides of her ponytail and pulled. “You’re not even a real figure skater, Beryl, you're a musician! What the hell do you know about figure skating?”

“A lot more than your average figure skater knows about music,” I said with a grin.

The teacher escorted both of us to the principal's office. The principal made us delete the video while a teacher watched. I have now been tracked out of arts and into math.

I'm glad we got the quad axel on video because I don't think I can do that again!

@ghostly-prompts

[scamber]

Character Design 💁✏️

Brief 3: Design a different humanoid character each in a research group and produce 5 character sheets.

Created in Autodesk Sketchbook

I think I put more time and effort into this project than I thought.

I hope you can kinda discern what type of person she is just by looking at her. I wanted her to be very kind and caring, but she has a bit of a bite - she won't tolerate any nonsense. Think of Katara from ATLA. I was aiming for her to be about 15/16 but I fear she does not read as 15/16. Maybe the slut strands age her?

We were thrown into groups and randomly assigned a setting and two genres - we ended up with skate park horror/adventure. We definitely could've developed the plot more cause I think our final outcomes are probably all a bit different, but literally only 3 of us out of 6 contributed consistently and 2 sent one single message to the chat each :/

We had the vague idea that our cast is a friend group of monsters that meet at a '90s/2000s skate park at night and get up to whacky shenanigans and they're also human haters. But like,,, my character doesn't really look like a monster - maybe I could've given her pointy ears or a more monstery face?

I didn't choose a character immediately, we thought up character types and sketched them out to work out which characters we're drawn to.

I really, really wish I stuck with the werewolf jock I drew, I thought the idea was so fun. I also liked drawing this druid stoner guy but someone else in my group was more attached to the concept, so I didn't design them.

When I was drawing the witch, I originally had the Hex Girls from Scooby Doo in mind, edgy quirky girl.

We also looked into fashion trends for the time period, everyone knows y2k fashion and all that. We also looked into style and decided on Jamie Hewlett's style for Gorillaz.

^^^I drew out my group's characters to work out the style.

I DRAGGED my feet creating these character sheets. I created a turnaround but it was just poor, her positions didn't match up between angles.

She looks a little cheeky with her tiny skirt here.

Call me crazy, but I was quite proud of her 3 stripes from her choker, bag and belt. I also wanted to maximise her stripiness and I later gave her socks with stripes like Winnie the Witch. (I also was gonna say the witch from Room on the Broom but I just realised she doesn't actually have stripey socks :o).

I wanted her to have a fringe like Sapphire's from Steven Universe, fluffy and round? I over-complicated it too much though and realised I could make her fringe compliment her hat!

SPEAKING OF HER HAT !!! I could not get that cunt to look right. It started as a rigid bandana and then my advisor and friends told me to make it a beanie but I wasn't sure how to draw it for ages.

(I swear I'm almost finished ranting)

I also thought about drawing a star on her top but we were told these designs had to be easy to animate and I can't draw stars.

When I was deciding on her colour scheme, I knew I wanted her to wear blue but she was a very warm character - and I am terrible with colour theory. I think it looked pretty good in the end though! I originally envisioned her being blonde but I wanted to differentiate her from another character in the group so I made her ginger. I really like the low contrast between her face and hair, call me crazy.

Do we like how she skates on a broom with wheels guys?! I can't upload anymore images but it's in my final gesture sheet. I really tried to make sure all her poses were nice and rounded to communicate her sweet personality.

We actually DON'T talk about the construction sheet.

How do you make a construction sheet? We had to animate these designs so I drew this sheet up after animating her and I still didn't know what to say.

Anyway, sorry, this is really long. Again, I thought longer and harder about this process than I realised and I wish I got this in-depth with my submission video but I forgot to mention half of this and there's still thoughts I have that I've not written down here 😭

[cookietastic]

So Maya was 3k up front. You coulda got a student version for free (if you had the right code through the school you used) or you could have gotten Maya Lite for 700ish. Now, the weird thing with the guy is they had a maintenance fee (which WAS likely standard for all Autodesk stuff), and it was reasonable to start considering what it was: 3k up front for the seat, then 300 (or 400?) a year for updates, upgrades, maintenance, support, and whatever bologna was involved with file transfers and other services. Again though, perpetual license, and with Unreal and Blender being way behind back then, it was like, "okay, no, this is kind of the only reasonable horse, I'll take it."

And then they got greedy. 1800 a year for subscription, phased out the maintenance FORCEFULLY by raising the fee each year (was like 1200 in 2019 or 20 from what I understand), saying they just wanted to be competitive (besties with landlords, likely) and then eventually just said, "EH, no, not enough, EVERYONE ON SUB."

And everyone said, "fuck you," including older hats, and Blender got more attention in defiance, got super polished and refined, and now it (and Unreal Engine) are competing as industry standard, because fuck corporate greed.

I'm learning today