J Ben Sledge | Technical Artist

Assignment 3

Ben Sledge — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 04:58:35 +0000

Soft Shadows and Reflection.

Assignment 2

Ben Sledge — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:01:49 +0000

Assignment 1 – Basic Raytracer

Ben Sledge — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 02:50:54 +0000

Final Image

Final Project

Ben Sledge — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 01:17:11 +0000

Our final project for CPSC 807 was to create a 15-30 second animation that showed off techniques taught in the class. My animation is a quick sequence of a guy building a snowman. An interesting challenge I had on this project was the snow particle effect. I had trouble getting the right color for the snow flacks, so I rendered them separately and composited them in after in AfterEffects.

Motion Capture Clean Up

Ben Sledge — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:27:21 +0000

The goal of this project was to gain experience with cleaning up motion captured animation and using dynamics in Maya. In my scene an army man kicks in a door and looks around the house. To clean up the motion capture data I simplified the curves. I started going through the remaining keys tweaking the animation, but after a couple of hours of not making much progress I decided to attempt another approach. I resampled the animation curves so there was a keyframe on every tenth frame. This removed all the excess data from the motion capture and left me with a good approximation of the original movement. Then I went through and adjusted every keyframe to improve the performance. I thought texturing the character would be a challenge, but when I looked at the model, I realized it had already been UV mapped, the UVs were just all on top of each other. I used the Select UV Shell tool in the UV Editor to separate and realign everything. Then I used Photoshop to create texture maps to apply to the model. I rendered using MetalRay so i could get the shadows. I used an expression to control the intensity of the light coming from the “TV” and another to animate the police lights.

unicycle

Ben Sledge — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:09:00 +0000

Colette

Ben Sledge — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:30:27 +0000

References

Turntable Videos

Stills

Project 1: Lamp

Ben Sledge — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 01:57:46 +0000

Motion Capture

The goal of this assignment was to gain experience in polygon and NURBS modeling. I started with a picture of a lamp I found on furniture supply website (Bush Furniture Online). I started with a polygon cube and extracted faces up, until I had the basic shape of the base. I used the “Insert Edge Loop” tool to add detail and previewed how my model would look by using Maya’s smooth display mode. This method allowed me to get a smooth, detailed looking model without building extra geometry into the mesh. After finishing the base, I used the same technique to model the other piece of the lamp (the arms and the light-shade). I chose to model these separately so they would be easer to work with later if I decide to texture or animate the lamp.

My reference image and screen captures from Maya are below.

Reference Image

Maya Wireframe Screen Captures

Perspective	Front
Side	Top

Maya Smooth Shaded Screen Captures

Perspective	Front
Side	Top

AJ Character Rig

Ben Sledge — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 06:47:34 +0000

The AJ character rig was designed for a collaborative animation project. The rig features fk/ik blending on the arms and legs, set driven key finger controls and NURBS curve slider controls for facial blendshapes.

FK/IK Arms With Stretchy

FK/IK Legs With Stretchy

NURBS Facial Control Sliders

“Remnant” Angel Wings

Ben Sledge — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 19:36:03 +0000

This angel wing is one in a set of three wings used in Matt Via’s “Remnant” game level. The geometry was optimized for the Unreal game engine, so the challenge for this rig was to create believable overlapping movement without an underling mesh.