3D Modeling & Animation I

Artistic Statement and Resume

PBM Artifact 1

7/4/25 - 14/4/25

(1,090 Polygons)

My first model has been quite the challenge to make. The modeling itself wasn't incredibly difficult, no, it was an aesthetic trait I wanted my model to have which gave me so much trouble. 

But, first off, I should describe how I made this model: mostly I used boxes which I made sub-object editable to give them their special shapes. For the head, I used a sphere for the main part and a box for the jawline. It ended up looking like a mask, but I think it works. I made the sphere and jaw-box both booleans to carve out the eye shape and combine them together. 

My main challenge was something that would have been almost entirely cosmetic: linked posing. I wanted to link each object together so that when I moved, say, the upper torso, the arms and neck would move with it. Then, I could move just one arm, and the entire arm would move with the arm, and then I could go from there and pose the entire thing bit by bit. Unfortunately, whenever I tried to rotate child objects, they would stretch unnaturally. I couldn't find a solution, and this issue took a large chunk of my time.

Gallery

This section of the project wasn't the hardest, but it was the worst to go through. I used UVW texturing to texture my model, and got the textures that I used for it from a useful site called Architextures. I also flattened most of the textures into boxes to streamline and simplify the texturing process.

Because I had flattened almost all my textures, there weren't many difficulties texturing, though on the less boxy objects, like the torso's, there was severe warping to work around. This portion was just incredibly tedious, but the end result was worth it. Additionally, when trying to texture my head, the UVW modifier's automatic seaming caused trouble by seaming off each polygon into separate sections. I fixed this issue by going to the utilities tab, going into its "more" section, and using "UVW Remove," which fixed the issue.

Gallery

This time around, I wouldn't I say I faced many issues. Some minor annoyances, yes, but nothing major that set me back. 

Making this mini-scene was pretty easy, and it will speed up the process of making my full scene, as it will be the focus of it. I used sub-object edited cylinders for the gears and the pencil, sub-object edited cubes the clipboard and incinerator, and normal cubes for everything else. The parts on the conveyor belt are just reused from my character. For the lights, I used two quads as light from windows, six spots as normal roof lights, and a cylinder light for the fire coming from the incinerator.

My only challenge was picking a good metal texture for the incinerator and conveyor belt without having to manually make UVW textures for them, but the textures I landed on fit well enough. On that same note, for two or three renders, the floor would act really odd with its displacement; fortunately, this problem was easily solved by removing the displacement texture entirely.

To make this animation, I, in an apparent need for carpal tunnel, moved each object on the conveyor belt by one metre every 40 frames manually, and configured each object's movement graph to make them move in unison; additionally, I painstakingly made every movement of the hand and arm.

My main challenge was the time limit, and how many frame I landed on doing. I only needed to do 150 frames, but I ended up on 260. This, combined with all the objects on the conveyor belt, and all the little movements I gave to the arm and hand, meant I spent a solid six days on something that, if properly optimized with bone structures and linked objects, could have taken only half that time. Also, the gears are moving in an incredibly odd way because rotating them normally didn't work as it should've, and I had neither the time nor patience to try and fix it. So I whipped up the random movements they currently have, because I thought it would be funny to.

Funnily enough, I actually started making this part of the PBM when I started PBM 3, so almost everything in this scene was made before I even started animating, and then once I got PBM 4 done, I worked on this for one day to finish it up.

My main challenge was making the actual scene I wanted to make without any knowledge of more complex elements of animation, like particle emitters that I could've used to make fog to give the idea that the scene is far more expansive than it actually is. To overcome this, I just used lights to make the other end of the factory completely dark, which doesn't give quite the same effect but is pretty close.

When making a separate file for this section, I realized that all the textures I added in PBM 3 were gone from the material editor, since merging files added objects with their textures, but not the textures separately. I went back to my PBM 4 file, and while the textures weren't there either, I just decided to use that file for PBM 5 as well. For some reason, this cause some of my keyframes to be deleted, and I'm not sure why.