Jeremy Huddleston, James Liu, Jirat Jirasetpatana, and Laurie Kim and I created this two-minute animated short for our animation class, with guidance from Greg Niemeyer and Sam Ou. It’s hard to really compress the whole experience into just a few paragraphs. I had really, really good team members. I contributed towards the storyline development, created many of the procedural shaders and raster textures, set up the faux global illumination and the background. I created all of the shaders, models, and rigging for the balloons, toys, and helium tank. I did much of the lighting as well. And I created the logo.
Balloon shader: I couldn’t have done this without Jeremy Huddleston’s guidance, and with advice from James Liu and Greg Niemeyer. I created all of the models for the balloons out of NURBS and polygon shapes, including a full skeletal rig with lattice deformers for bending, and blend shapes for mouth movement. I also created a good portion of the balloon shader. Jeremy and I sat down and stared at Safeway balloons, looking at where it was most transparent and where it had the most texture. There’s definitely more to balloons than slapping a Blinn shader on some oblong sphere.
Duck, Bear, and Cow: You’ll find this toy lining the shelves of the prize booth. I created the Maya procedural shaders and aimed for a furry-like texture without having to resort to using Maya Fur (which would’ve been render-intensive). This was based off a Gund toys. From far away, the duck don’t look too bad, but up close, it looks like FrankenDuck or something. Those staples are actually supposed to look like stitches.
• Art 175 (Advanced Computer Animation) class project
• Tool: Maya, Photoshop, Illustrator
• Completed: April 2004