Cat Walk with Arms v.1.1

Well, here is my cat with arms. I fixed the foot roll problem before I added in the arms. The fingers were fun to try and rotate.. I almost didn't get it to work but here it is. I was playing around with actually making my kitty move... it's on another file on my computer. I think it looks okay.. I have to fix the fact that, on some frames, it looks like he slides across the floor.

I don't know if anyone else feels this way.. but I feel somewhat... naked without my sketchbook. Like a part of me is missing. :( I'll have to scrounge up the sketchbook I was using before ACM.

But yes, here is my still cat walk with arms.

Enjoy~

Still Cat Walk v.1.3

Still no arms. Awaiting approval to try starting on the arms and shoulders.

Catwalk_noarms

Still Cat Walk v.1.2

Links are going to have to suffice for now till I make smaller renders of my movies. Linda has uploaded my walk vid for me and it'll be a text link for now until I get a chance to make a picture link for it. Hopefully it looks better. Still working on the UH server problem.

In the first version, there was a slight glitch in the leg movement the second time around, but it has been fixed in this version.

[edit 02/26/07]
It's kind of big... I made the width and height too big, so it's going to be a link for now. But, thanks to Art, I have the code to put the videos correctly on my blog from now on.. and I may have solved my uploading problem with the UH server.

You have to download the vid to see it!!
You do this by right-clicking --> Save target as.. I don't have this version on Maya anymore. I forgot to create the separate file and I just revised and saved over the old one. So this is the only version I have. It's too big to do a regular embed and I'm not sure of the coding to move where it would resize so... yeah. Sorry^^;

Cat Walk Version 1.2 (no arms)

Still Cat Walk v.1.1

Here is my first attempt at the Cat Walk. I am currently revising my Follow Through also. I know, I know it's still in Photobucket.. but it's the best way I know how to share these videos without that stupid Forbidden message the UH server keeps giving me every time I try to make a link. Anyone know what's going on and what I should do? What about this: What coding do you put into your blogs to post from your UH account? That would be MUCH appreciated, thanks. :)

Cat Walk Version 1.1

Robot Designs

Here are my robot designs. I wasn't in class to recieve the full critique on it, so any comments, questions, and suggestions are very welcome. :) You can probably tell which one is the male and which one is the female (if not, then.... I guess I'll have to explain a few things to you). For the male, it's kind of an ambitious design. I was kind of obsessed with the design of the thighs and legs, the rest sort of followed from there. A lot of my references for him go to the runegods from Magic Knight Rayearth, various mechs I saw on the covers of Full Metal Panic! and the helmet was inspired by illustrations of the dragoon job class of Final Fantasy III for DS Lite. The female... well... I kind of made her up on my own. Her design is SUPER basic and I will probably develop more features on her as I model her or maybe add in to the sketch as she progresses.

It'll be a long process, but I think it'll be fun when I'm not stressing about the deadline too much. :)

From Gesture to Cat Model (Excited)

Here are my (better-late-than-never) 3D cat poses. It took me a little while to figure out how to make him jump... but when he did, boy did he look happy..

Now, off to work on those final character designs. I'm really not sure HOW we're supposed to execute the final colored characters, so I'm just gonna wing it and bring in the best I've got.

References for Character Design

And the winning species is the... POLAR BEAR!! yay. I did the sketches/ drawings on my own since I honestly didn't understand what we were supposed to do.. so I just ran with it and said "Hey, polar bears... that looks like it could be something" The final products are still in the works... HOPEFULLY I'll have them done by tonight or even before class tomorrow, but I have everything else to do, too... Oh yes, crunch time "mid semester" comes over the horizon to cast a shadow over the light of free time.

Oh yes, and when I get home (and get a chance) I'll change my music to a more "spring atmosphere happiness" mood. Once I figure out how to play m4a's.

From the Anime Series, "Chobits"

I know it's quite irrelevant.. (and it probably won't be appreciated much because it's not my own work) but I was watching the ending of the japanese anime series "Chobits" by CLAMP and I'm not sure why, the whole last dialogue kinda struck me. It's weird.. and very corny.. but it just hits me somehow. I kinda wanted to just type it out to get it out of my system.

----------------

"Something happened to me in the past that was really tough.

It still makes my heart ache...

The pain, the difficulty in staying after losing something so dear.

But I am looking...

Someone that will love me because I am me.

The person just for me.

And... I found him.

But that was the beginning of something even more painful.

It is painful to be next to him, though I could not do anything.

It is painful to see him go through pain.

That is why I stopped being in front of him and disappeared.

I disappeared because I loved him.

And yet...

It's even more painful being unable to see him

It's much, much more painful not being able to meet him...

What is happiness?

Happiness is..."

~From "Chobits" (Disc 6, ep.24)

Excited Gestures

Here's my excited gestures. Honestly, right now I dont' feel very excited but I tried to depict it the best I could. I tried to think about how I would be if I was excited (posing in front of the small mirror in my room..) and this is what I came up with. I especially like the jumping ones.. cause I know how that feels: to be so happy as to jump off the ground. It was quite a challenge since I would usually define "excited" by facial expressions.. but it was a lot of fun.. I had to think about what would make me UBER happy/ excited. :)

Oh yes and, on a side note, I'll be trying to change the times of my posts because I realize that I forgot to change the time setting for my posts from PST (Pacific Standard Time) to Hawaii time... if I try to change it now, my posts will show up like.. a month late in the archives. So yes... my times are about 2 hours off if I don't change it manually. :)

Oh yes, and my follow through is finally up and running.. I've been having trouble uploading and posting from my UH account, so it's in Photobucket. I know it's not the best presentation, but it's what I have for now. It just hasn't been the best morning for me. -__-;

Happy Chinese New Year~

2D Walk Plan

Here is my sketch of my walk plan. It was hard and easy at the same time. I think I attempted to do this on my own a while back (just for fun) and got a bit frustrated. This time around, it's still pretty... erm.. it's still kind of hard to grasp despite how easy it looks. It's pretty difficult. I mean, to get the timing, spacing and proportion just right.. not to mention making sure the character won't look off balance. Like I said before, it's easy, but it's not at the same time.

I understand that when the weight shifts, the hips tilt in whatever direction... like whenever you step with your right, the hips tilt down on the left. Whatever's the opposite of what side you're stepping on.

It's definitely a worthy adversary of an exercize. :nods:

Shoes of Doom

This was quite a challenge. I realize the texture mapping is off... I blame it on lighting :P Overall, I think it came out pretty good. :) Thanks very muchly to those who helped~

The parts I'm most proud of are the buckles on the top of the shoe. Those were kind of a lot of work, but they were fun to make. :)

From Gesture to Cat Model (Devastation)

My cat model on Valentine's Day... aww....

I realize that his nose is going INTO the table... but hey.. it's all about how it makes you feel, right? Don't we all have days like this?

Retarded Videos

I realize that my videos are being retarded (forgive me for my lack of better words to describe it). I'm not sure if it's because of the file extension or because Photobucket is being stupid. I'm going to try uploading it elsewhere and also trying to save it as a quicktime. If it doesn't work, I'm gonna get a bit frustrated. >< If anything, I'll try to upload to the UH server. It hasn't been nice to me in the past, so I hope this time around it will be.

Soon to come: 3D "Devastated" & Shoe Models

Devastated Gestures

Here are the gesture poses for "Devastated". A lot of them had strong arcs as they bent over... #2 looks more like an angry or bewildered kind of devastated. The ones I feel look the most devastated are maybe #3 and #8. The ones that come close are #5, 6, 7 and maybe 4. But that's my opinion. :) I wonder who'll be the winner...

Legislature Saturday

After the recess (or right before), I noticed June was sketching stuff so I decided to do a quick one of a couple of the senators. Only ones I was able to sketch were Will Espero (Vice chair) and Carol Fukunaga (Chair).

I had the opportunity to go to the Legislature on Saturday to check out what was going on. What's happening is (if I'm not totally stupid) that the faculty and head guys for the ACM (and it looks like not just them) are trying to get bills passed so that the ACM has a facility where students and anyone into this new kind of media can come together and work in a close environment I guess where we can interact with each other as far as getting input and being able to hang out and work. I just thought I would write about it and what I thought since I never really went to this sort of thing before. I'm not really good at explaining stuff, so bear with me while I puke out what I can remember and what I think in this entry. :)

Saturday morning: I caught the bus with fellow classmate, Nathan Britton, which was quite an adventure in itself since there was a bunch of things that happened during that bus ride that made me feel really sorry for people who had to get off at places where the Express didn't stop. (A man tried to get out at this one stop and he asked the bus driver to open the door and she said it wasn't where she stopped so he had to wait till the bus next stopped, which apparently was really far from where he wanted to get off.) It was kind of my first time riding a bus somewhere on my own.. which is why I'm writing about it. I actually had looked online to make sure I knew what time the bus was coming and where I had to get off. Good thing I wasn't totally alone this time! There was also something going on, a police investigation or something, and the bus driver was instructed by radio to not stop at that bus stop that was in front of it. So we passed right by the people waiting there. The look on their faces said, "WTF, why isn't the bus stopping?" I felt so bad ><

ANYWAY, we caught the bus to the State Capitol and walked over to the Legislature building. The place is huge. I've been there once before for work, so it was really nice getting to go there again. After waiting for other classmates, we made our way to the conference room and got to sit down for a good couple of hours listening to testimonies and what other people had to say about the bills and trying to get new facilities and such.

The part that sort of blew me away was the amount of testimonies that were submitted. As one of the Senators, Carol Fukunaga, was reading off the names off all the students who submitted testimonies. (One of my friends even did one! That was interesting to hear) I, myself, didn't write a testimony but I kind of did want to get up and say something. It was in the back of my mind, but I didn't. I'm shy like that.. and maybe I should have. It goes against my whole zodiac sign personality as an Aries~ haha.

I honestly was afraid it would be boring as hell. I mean, I've been to meetings like that where they'd just go on and on, but I guess since it pertained to something that involved all of us, as students, I was interested in what they had to say and I didn't get bored as easily (or as fast). The senators weren't totally as I expected them to be either. I mean, they were pretty cool. I'm sorry but a lot of higher-up kind of people have this stereotypical persona that puts me to sleep. They are super formal, they don't seem to have a sense of humor, and are in this "I don't want to be here, but I have to get this done" vibe. But, even though they all might have been that way to an extent, they also had this laid back vibe. For example, one of the other Senators, Norman Sakamoto, related making a surfboard to something one of the other people from the Mele project was trying to say. I think that's one reason why I almost went up to testify. It made me feel comfortable to be there.

Getting back on topic, it didn't seem like we were getting ANY opposition from them. As it was discussed after the meeting with my classmates, they were asking for specifics: how many acres do you think it'll take, how many years do you forsee this or that, if we gave you money, what would you do with it? That's how it felt and it was really kinda like whoa, you know? (If I could say it better, I would.)

After that, we were all hanging out outside and decided to go to lunch with Kaveh, Linda and her husband, Bob, and [will insert name here when I remember]. Ended up going to Chinatown where they were partying hard for the Chinese New year (yay party!). Let's see, it was me, Art, Nathan, June, and Christie. We must've sat at that restraunt talking story for so long, I wonder if the owners and waitresses were getting irritated that we weren't leaving haha. Taking about everything from video games, ACM homework, jobs, natural disaster stories, comics... lots of stuff. That was really cool. I never had a time where I went out with my classmates and thought "Do the teachers want to come to lunch with us?" Hahaha that was great! I guess in college, if the teacher is open enough to their students, it makes it easier to feel like they aren't totally this higher up figure who's there to dicate what to do for homework and what we learn in the classroom, but someone who can get down to their student's level and be cool with just hanging and talking about stuff that both can relate to... like video games and comics.

I thought that was the best Saturday I've had in a long time. It wasn't only business and work, but it was a lot of fun, too. Hope a bunch of us can do that again sometime~!

From Gesture to Cat Model (Balance)

Here are the Balance poses for my cat. Hope they turned out alright. As hard as drawing the gestures for balance were, actually modeling it out with the cat was much easier. On the image where I have my gesture sketch... when I brought my 3D snapshot into photoshop it scaled the image so it was in a square shape when I added the sketch.. so when I saved it, the image went back to normal. That is why the gesture sketch looks super stretched.

Onward to "Devastated"~

Follow Through

Here is my First Attempt at Follow Through. To be HONEST, it wasn't that hard, just annoying. I know my tail messed up a bit, but I think overall, I get the idea of follow through.

Follow Through Attempt 1



Okay I'm getting a tad bit irritated because videos aren't posting or, when I do make a link to the UH server, it says "you don't have permission to access this server".. Can anyone help me out here?

From Gesture to Cat Model (Weight)

Yay~! This was pretty fun. The tweaking takes a lot of time, but I think it looks really good when it's finished. I gave the cat a slab of marble to carry... then again.. marble isn't exactly light.. especially for a cat. He looks so sad.^^;

I think from now on, I'm gonna just say this quick overview of what we're doing in class for new refined projects I post up (because I know my mom checks my blog too.... Hi mom!) We had to draw gestures (see a previous post) and tweak a model Linda (our teacher) had set up for our class. The way the cat was set up, originally, was upright with its hands out to its sides (like a lower case "t") and we had to move it around, play with how it was rigged, etc. till it came out to how a selected original gesture drawing was (as seen in the last snapshot). So that's what this is.

BTW, if anyone's wondering, My images ARE staggered. I was originally going for posting them side by side, but I think the staggered layout looks better.^_^

Balance Guestures and Quick Cat poses

Here are my quick balance gestures and cat poses. I think the balance gestures were a bit harder to do this time rather than the heavy weights.

Teacup Compositions

[edit] 02/07/2007

Here are the newly scanned teacup comps. Easier to see, right? Yeah... my printer/ scanner/ copier has decided to go on strike and not align its print cartridge carriage correctly so I'm thinking of buying a new one (EPSON this time). I know the dimensions are a bit off, but I didn't have a lot of time at work to scan these. :P Hope they're much better to see!

[/edit]

Bouncing Ball V.1

And here it is finally! I have Maya on my happy new computer (it's a PC... no booing and flaming from the Mac-aholics please :) ) and I can now work on stuffies at home! *cheers*

[edit]
Linda showed me how to render it out a little better, though it renders out as a .avi file. Oh well. It can still open in quicktime if the user pleases.

...okay the server is being retarded so I'm just gonna leave up my Photobucket one for now. -__-; grr...
[/edit]

Ball Bounce Wall

Good luck with everyone's Tea Parties and Gestures~