3D Modeling & Animation

3D Modeling & Animation I 2024-2025 Performance Based Measurement Portfolio - Tomás Moreno - Chapel Hill High School

Career & Employability Skills

Artistic Statement

My style of 3d modeling and artistic choices are influenced largely by science fiction and video games, although I try to not limit myself. I like to explore with different possibilities and therefore expand my technical skills and knowledge with every piece I model. Whenever I model something new, I look to make it unique and distinctive, trying to think outside the box and pushing my skills to their limits. I aim to have all my art pieces contain something that makes them interesting and worth looking at. My goal is to make models that satisfy the criteria, but also include small details that require close inspection to notice and appreciate.

Digital Artist Resume

Tomás Moreno - Digital Artist Resume

Artifact 1: Modeling

Modeling Process

For Artifact 1 of my Performance Based Measurement for the school year, I modeled a robotic tiger. This model contains 13,525 polys, which I know is probably beyond what was expected. The problem was that I didn't keep count of them as I went, and only remembered to check after the model was done. My modeling process began in the head. To make it I used a sphere, and a hemisphere to make the hole in the mouth using subtraction from ProBoolean. The eyes and nose are made out of boxes, applying MeshSmooth to the nose to make it smoother (obviously). I made the ears with extrusion, and for the teeth I used cones, which I bent using the bend modifier. There's a small flat section running down the middle of the upper head, which was made with subtraction in ProBoolean. For the connections between the head and trunk, and trunk and hips, I used simple cylinders. The trunk piece and the hips were made in the same way, using a box, then using inset on one of its polys to then extrude inwards. The frontal legs are connected to the trunk, as they are a couple of extrusions and bends. All of the paws are composed of a MeshSmoothed box, and the same model I used for the teeth copied, but shrinked. The hips are connected to 2 spheres from which each of the hind legs springs. The hind legs have 4 components each: 2 cylinders, 1 torus, and the paw. For the torus I deleted the excess polys that came out of the cylinder, as well as for the spheres' polys that were visible inside the hips. Finally, the tail is simply made out of many connected cylinders, with a cone in the very end.

Challenges

There are a couple of challenges that I faced while making this model. One of them was trying to get the hole in which the nose would be placed. I could fix that issue by connecting a couple of edges in different angles, and then negatively extruding, which left a close-to-perfect space for the nose. Another problem that I ran into was making the mouth, because I knew I could've made it a couple of different ways, like extrusion for example, but to have a cleaner, more robot-like, sharper shape I just subtracted a hemisphere from the head. The other significant problem that I can remember happened when making the hind legs, where I wanted to use a torus for the connection between the cylinders, but I only wanted it to be half of itself so that it didn't look like there was a wheel in the leg. I solved this by deleting half of its polygons, which I didn't know was possible before.

Artifact 2: Creating & Applying Texture

Texturing Process

In Artifact 2 of my Performance Based Measurement, I textured the model of my robotic tiger I had modeled previously in Artifact 1. To do this, I had to unwrap my model first, and then take it to Adobe Photoshop in order to paint it. The UVW unwrapping of this model was not at all easy, as it contains a lot of different pieces, and it can be hard to know where to put everything and how to unwrap it. I ended up unwrapping the head and its components separately from the rest of the body to make things a little bit easier (which is why there are 2 different painted maps on the left; the first is the body, the second is the head). Next came the painting in Photoshop. I started by painting the head; on the main monitor I had Photoshop open, and on the side monitor I had 3ds Max up with the UV editor open to see which part was which if I got confused or something wasn't clear. I would say this strategy worked pretty well with both unwraps. After painting everything, I looked up tiger patterns on google, then removed the background on them and applied them to many of the unwrapped objects to enhance realism. After both were painted, I opened the material editor in 3ds Max, used a physical material, and then applied it to the model.

Challenges

I faced way too many challenges in Artifact 2, mainly in the UVW unwrapping process. When I started unwrapping the head, I was using a very ineffective technique, trying to stitch everything together. This procedure took up way too many days, until I found the much more effective way, which is simply breaking edges and stitching some, to then reset the peel for it to be the least distorted possible. This technique made everything much easier and helped me get done with the body much faster. The problem was how long I took to figure out this method, going through different inefficient ones in the process. Another problem I remember having was that the pieces for the tail were way too many, and they didn't fit into the square, so I just placed them all on top of each other, and decided they'd all look the same for convenience. One challenge that I faced while painting the UVW was that I took way too long painting everything with the brush, which I could fix when a friend taught me how to use the polygonal lasso tool. Something that I noticed after applying the texture initially was that there were a couple of visible green seams, which was an easy fix, as I just opened the PSD file, painted over the seams, and reapplied it. Finally, the main problem I remember having when applying the texture to the head is that the UVW rejected whenever I tried to save, so the eyes and nose were misplaced. To fix this I just stitched them again and tried to realign them as best as I could with the texture JPEG.

Artifact 3: Scene Modeling & Lighting

Modeling & Lighting Process

Artifact 3 of my Performance Based Measurement came with 2 tasks; the first: making my scene; the second: lighting the scene. For this scene I modeled a couple of objects: a UFO, a small robotic bird, a factory of doom, and some trees. This scene is supposed to be set in some sort of forest, where aliens set up a factory that produces robotic animals with the ultimate goal to get the Earth to be controlled by their droids to extract resources. First I began by modeling the UFO, in which I used a compressed sphere, made some extrusions, and added another sphere on top for the cabin. Then I made some cylinders, and subtracted from them to make the cannons. After this, I modeled the factory using a pyramid, and a couple of spheres. I made some extrusions to make the tubes that come out of it, and subtracted a box from it to make the entrance in which the bird lies. Speaking of the bird, I made it with a sphere for the head, cylinders for the legs, boxes for the wings, and for the body I used spline modeling techniques. I also used extrude to modify the head and the legs a bit. I know that the bird model can't really be appreciated in these renders, but it will be in animation. For the trees, I used a cylinder and a sphere. I used the extrude and noise modifier on the base of the cylinder, and I used the noise modifier for the sphere as well. In terms of the lighting, first I aded a spot light, for which I activated shadows and modified the intensity. Then, to add to the daylight mood, I added a skylight, but lowering the intensity a little bit, and it turned out looking well. I know my lighting isn't perfect, but I had to rush it a little bit to have a chance to finish everything on time. If I see that I should make a modification, it will be present in the next artifact.

Challenges

To be completely honest, I did not face any major challenges in this artifact, but here I will list some of the ones I can recall. The biggest problem I found was when I was in the rendering process; when trying to render with Scanline, all of the objects looked stretched out and distorted. I didn't really find a solution to this problem, so I just figured it would be better to use Quicksilver. Another minor challenge that I came to was that I was trying to extrude the bird's legs to have the effect that they ended up having in the end, but it wasn't doing it the way I wanted it to. The problem was I was extruding polys instead of edges; when I did try with edges, it worked.

Artifact 4: Object Animation

Animating Process

Artifact 4 challenged me to create a 5-second looping animation for my main object, highlighting its different sides. I made this animation, in which the tiger makes a backflip, looks around, then extends its neck, and rolls his head around before going back to the initial position. As a side note: The eyes and nose aren't properly unwrapped like in the last artifact because the UV map never saved fully. This had happened before, and I corrected it to look right, but for time purposes, I will leave it like that for the animations. In this animation I worked by setting the keyframes manually instead of automatically, as it makes it less confusing for me. At the start of the animation, I made the model crouch slightly, as if it were taking impulse for the jump. For this I grabbed each individual piece (although I grouped some major parts) and moved it down, with the exception of the hind legs and the front feet. Then I made it return and leave the floor. By this point, I grouped everything to make it easier to rotate. I rotated the model slightly every time and added a keyframe until it had reached its initial position. Then, to make the landing I shifted the tiger down, and placed its paws back in a resting position. Then, in the second phase of the animation, I moved the neck and the head to look one way, return, then the other, and return. To conclude with a surprise at the end, I extended the neck with rescale, and made the head spin around, to then return to the initial position to finish the loop. The loop isn't fully perfect, as I have noticed that the model ends up being a bit further forward than in the beggining, but I think it is close enough.

Challenges

One of the biggest challenges that I encountered after animating the flip was that I wanted to move the neck for the second part, but I couldn't because everything was grouped together. I could've just ungrouped it, but that would mess the entire animation up. I tried to fix it by applying an edit poly modifier and moving the separate objects, but that wouldn't change the animation. What I ended up doing was opening the group, which let me edit individual parts without breaking the animation. Then there were also other minor issues, like the animation randomly glitching, (for example: In the initial frame, the model was standing straight and at one point it became tilted backwards for no apparent reason.) where I had to reposition the model a couple of times.

Artifact 5: Scene Animation

Animating Process

For the final artifact of my PBM, I had to make an animation of my complex scene that was longer than my previous animation and contained a camera. For this artifact, my main idea was to have the UFO fly around the scene. To do this, I had to make a path constraint with a spline, and then link a camera to the UFO for it to follow its path. The camera I used was a target camera so that I could have it pointing to the center of the scene at all times. Like in the last animation, I worked with manual keyframes. As I mentioned in artifact 3, I modeled some simple robot birds that I would use for this final animation. I made them get out of the pyramid, then fly up to the sky, 1 by 1, and make them come back, 1 by 1; this was just to add some interesting extra detail to the animation. Apart from that, I made the 1st phase of the tiger animation happen while the UFO is facing it at the beginning, and placed the 2nd phase keyframes at the end so that the part where it extends its neck would be visible.

Challenges

This could be the artifact I had the least trouble with. At first I did not remember how to apply a path constraint, so I just looked up a video from the 4 Corners project from earlier to refresh my mind on that. I also had a problem with the birds' animation (similar to the one I had with the tiger in artifact 4), where I grouped them once I had already made them fly to the top, which messed up the animation when they were going up. I was thinking on how to solve that, but considering that I was on a time crunch and that the imperfection wasn't really noticeable in the animation, I decided to keep it as it was. Other than that, the bare viewport was very noticeable in the animation, so I just copied the plane and some trees a couple of times, which was an easy fix (although it took me a bit to think about it for some reason😬).

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