In an alternate universe I became a 3D animator instead of a Programmer. These are the origins of alternate universe me.
In high school I took 3 years of 3D animation, by far my favorite class. These are my final projects for my second and third year.
2nd Year 3D Animation Project
Halo Reach is a great game. I would always make sure to do all my homework solely so my parents couldn’t complain about all the video games I wanted to play. My high school days were filled with my friends and I playing the Halo games together.
It’s no wonder I decided for my 2nd year project to recreate this scene from the Halo Reach campaign. The models don’t hold up, but I am fairly proud of getting the timing right.
3rd Year 3D Animation Project
A culmination of all that I learned about 3D modeling and animation in high school.
A lot of time was spent building the floating city. More time yet making the splines that my vehicles would animate along.
In the end I was really proud of the final product. I even won a trophy for having one of the top animation projects in the class!
Riverside Industrial Education Expo, Sweepstakes Winner 2012
My Source Filmmaker phase
In 2012 Valve released Source Filmmaker, their in-house tool for creating the cinematics for their games. Naturally I jumped in and started putting my 3D animation skills to the test.
My friend and I would play a lot of Team Fortress 2. I found this combination of gear for the Engineer that I loved to play with. It involved my trusty Frontier Justice and my quick deployable level 1 turret that my friend and I would affectionately call “Dinky.”
And then there was this idea. What if I created a mini-series about the Engineer, his Frontier Justice, and Dinky the sentry.
It never ended up going anywhere, but this was a test shot of what I was imagining.
Facial Animations
One very cool feature of SFM is the ability to completely animate the faces of the TF2 characters using phonemes. Basically, if you want the character to have a wide dumb grinning face, you would take the EEE phoneme slider and drag it to its max value. Because when you say EEE, you smile. At least thats how I remember it working.
I wanted to challenge myself and see if I could animate characters and their facial expressions. So I took this one scene from Batman Begins to recreate in SFM. The scene where Ra’s al Ghul meets Bruce Wayne for the first time. Why this scene in particular? I don’t know I just really like the Nolan Batman movies.
I never ended up recreating the entire scene, but I felt pretty good with what I had accomplished.
Be honest, what did you think?
Who knows, maybe my path in tools programming will bring me back full circle to 3D art and cinematic tools…