3d Animation

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 at the time. These are my final projects for my second and third year.

3d animation project - Year 2

3ds Max - Halo Reach cutscene recreation

Halo Reach is a fantastic 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.

3d animation project - Year 3

City Invasion - 3d Animation

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

An image of a jet flying low through the streets of a city. The jet has just fired 2 missiles at an alien ship floating low through the streets. The missiles have exploded and their bright fireballs engulf the alien ship.

A showcase image of 3 alien interceptor ships, each oriented slightly differently but generally flying toward the screen. All against a white background.

A showcase image of a large alien mothership. The camera is viewing the ship from its rear-right, looking down at an angle to show its top side. The 6 large engines are clearly visible on the rear of the ship.

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.

An image of the Scout from Team Fortress 2 in a pose low to the ground, against a white background.

An image of a customized Scout and Engineer from Team Fortress 2. They are against a black background. There is a half opened door leading to a white void a short walking distance away.

An image of the Demoman from Team Fortress 2 customized to look like a knight, and a large mechanical Heavy almost 3x the size of the Demoman. They are standing face to face with the Heavy blocking a door. The Demoman is posed with a sword looking like he's prepared to fight. The background suggests they are in a medieval era village with castle walls.

An image of a dark room with pillars and light streaming in through thin openings in the far wall.

In image of a dark room with pillars and light streaming in through thin openings in the far wall. There is a mechanical Scout character close the camera duel wielding katanas in reverse grip. He looks like he is about to fight someone off screen.

An image within a dark room. There is a small window with moonlight streaming in from left to right. There is a Scout kneeled on the ground with a flashlight and pistol in hand. He is pointing his flashlight away from camera, trying to look for any threats.

darkroomfightscary00.wmv

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.

SFM Dinky Shorts 00

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 that’s 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.

Batman Begins Scene Recreated in SFM

The Dark Knight Trilogy: Ultimate Collector’s Edition

Who knows, maybe my path in tools programming will bring me back full circle to 3D art and cinematic tools…