Home Posts tagged "animation school"

New York Film Academy Graduate Does Visual Effects for Clash of the Titans and Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls

Published on April 26, 2011

New York Film Academy Animation Conservatory Graduate Francesco Panzieri, originally from Italy, has been working in the industry since graduation in 2009. Panzieri has done visual effects for films including Clash of the Titans, For Colored Girls, and Madea’s Big Happy Family. Says Panzieri:

 

“After graduating in May 2009, I moved to California where I first did an internship at the prestigious Flash Film Works Studios founded by William Mesa (famous visual effects supervisor of Army of Darkness and many more films). I was then hired by the same studios for 4 months as Rotoscope/Paint Artist on the feature movie Clash of the Titans.”



“Afterwards, I was hired as a full time staff Visual Effects Artist at the 2G Digital Post Studios (who also sponsored me for a 3 years H1B visa with a 1.5 years job commitment contract). I’ve been working there at the present time with duties such as 3D modelling, 3D texturing, 3D shading and rendering (mental ray), compositing, tracking, rotoscoping, painting on about 4 main feature movie to be released from September 2010 until the end of 2011. I always talk positively about NYFA.”


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NYFA Animation Lab: Creative Destruction

Published on February 16, 2011

A special weekly blog from New York Film Academy 3D Animation chair Bill Stout. NYFA offers a year long full immersion program in Maya based 3D Animation in addition to three and four week workshops throughout the year. 

I’ll admit it: I like destroying things. I absolutely love creative destruction.

 

This week’s animation exercise was a simple introduction to the interaction of nParticles and nCloth. The students and I set them up to mimic the properties of the ground, with the particles acting as earth, and the nCloth acting as the surface.  We then dropped a cannonball into this setup and watched the pieces fly, the crust shatter and the earth displace under the impact, to learn some of the various elements that we will later animate to make destruction look realistic.

 

Yes, it’s fun playing with particles.  Of course it is not for the faint hearted. Trying to handle a physics engine designed to simulate the complexity of the real world is no easy task.  We have to balance adjustments for mass, friction, stickiness, stretch resistance, compression resistance, bend resistance, rigidity, and more obscure attributes (including gravity scale) to define the look and feel of the particles’ movement. Ultimately, it is a lot more complex than making a sand castle and taking a flying leap at it to send sand flying everywhere, but it is just as much fun.  Just another week in the animation lab at New York Film Academy…


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Texturing With Maya For 3D Animation Group Project

Published on April 15, 2009

car

My learning experience in doing the 3D Animation group project was always a steep learning curve.  Over the course of the project I have learned to use programs that I was not totally familiar with like Photoshop and Shake.  My role  was to UV (UV means placing surface coordinates) and texture certain sections of the project, including the buildings and the car.

I first started by gathering any images that I might need, like rust, bricks, concrete and metals. Then I would taking those images into Photoshop to prepare them for the texturing process by flattening and tiling the images, which I would later use in Maya, the class 3D software.

For the car, I found different images of rust.  I had to make sure that certain images matched nicely and did not look as if it was stretched as this can result in an image looking unnatural.  I also used images of old rusted out engines or cars for reference to help me achieve the look I was going for.

I used a mental ray node within Maya to add the texture images to certain parts of the car.  Mental ray is a rendering application useful in making textures look as realistic as possible.

Waeking Ng, 1 year animation student

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3D Animation School Student Nicole Saenz

Published on February 12, 2009

As supervisor of the character design aspect of the group project, my responsibilities included overseeing the development of the main characters involved in the animation, as well as trying to maintain a uniform look within each individual character due to the fact that each artist had his or her own unique artistic interpretation of how everything should look.

I had two other students helping me produce the traditional sketches for the characters. These character included a group of generic civilians, along with the protagonist – the superhero who we decided to name “Justin”. I came up with the concept art for the superhero keeping in mind the fact that we did not want him to fall under the category of a typical superhero. Instead, I wanted him to look as if he could blend into an average group of people which meant that I did not want to incorporate a flashy uniform or a super-toned, buffed body in the design.

Since our story takes place in the future, I wanted to add a few futuristic details, which of course, is apparent within the chest plate and the mechanical arm. The tubes integrated within his attire would act as a transportive system, supplying the source for his immortality. With the final approval of the superhero’s design, Justin was ready to evolve into something a little more three-dimensional.

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Superhero Model

Personally, after having the opportunity to try out the main aspects involved in the computer animation pipeline, I have found modeling to be the most enjoyable. This particular model, Justin the Superhero, is the main character in a group project involving the entire animation class. Fortunately, I had the convenience of handling the two-dimensional design, as well the three-dimensional development of the main character. In this manner, I was able to take my concept art, import it into our 3D program (Maya), and begin building the superhero from nothing more than a mere cube.

I primarily used a method called polygonal modeling, and in some cases, I integrated a limited amount of nurbs modeling as well. I had never modeled in Maya before this year, and it proved to be a challenge in the beginning. However, as the year progressed, I felt more comfortable with the program, and decided to give myself more challenging characters to design.

The most difficult part of this model was definitely the mechanical arm. I had only been familiar with organic model up until this project, therefore, producing something of this sort was a new experience. I discovered that attention to detail is crucial when it comes to this type of modeling. Also, making sure that the mesh was clean and unbroken is necessary. At the moment, I am currently working on this model, and it will be coming to a completion soon.

1 Year 3D Animation Student, Nicole Saenz

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3D Animation Course Notes: Camera Projections

Published on February 5, 2009

camprojection_2

This post is from the 1 year 3D animation 2nd semester group project, which encompasses many disciplines necessary for a career in animation and visual effects (vfx).

Today’s class was on camera projections for modeling and textures, we used some stills that we shot for the group project last weekend. We projected the stills for accurate geometry construction, and we learned how to re-create the SLR camera used in the shoot with a comparable camera in Maya (same focal length, film back etc) and used it to project the stills for accurate geometry construction in the scene. We then projected the image onto the geometry, converted the projections to file textures and fixed them up in Photoshop, it looked quite convincing.

Camera projections are an important element for the integration of cg elements with real world images. Any visual effects reel with these steps showing understanding of camera projection in a breakdown of the animation will be an important part of impressing a potential employer.

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Robert Appleton & Boaz Livny, New York Film Academy 3D Animation Instructors

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