Portfolio – Final Year Project

For my final year project I’m doing a 5 minute computer generated film called “The Stars Shine For You”. The storyline consists of a “moon rabbit” falls from the sky only to be found by a hare living on earth. The hare then decided to try and help her get back to her home by helping her build a homemade space craft. The story revolves around the time they spend together during their time on earth together. I wish to explore the ability to tell a story through music and characters and as such the movie is going to contain no speaking but rather just music and sound effects.

My main aims for this project are to learn and create a near professional animated short.
This would include story boarding, 3D modelling, character design, lighting, scripting and all post production work.
I also aim to have a very good understanding of Maya by the time I finish this project as I wish to work in the industry and Maya is considered on of the Industry standards.

I spend a large amount of time trying out different software programs that are used for CGI including Maya, Blender, Google Sketch-Up, Cinema 4D and 3DS Max.
From my research I have gathered that Maya would be the best choice of software to use, although many of the backgrounds will be done in Google Sketch-Up because of it’s intuitive interface and its ability to import blueprints and maps from AutoCAD.

I am currently taking part in 3D Modelling and Animation classes outside of college to help get a good understanding of the software and how people in the industry do their animation and work.
I have finished the preliminary storyboard for the movie and am in the process of creating the final storyboards. I has also completed the main character designs.

Portfolio – Asteroids From Space

Asteriods – Graphics and promotional images for 4th years game creation competition.

Asteriods from Space was a project I worked on for a game creation competition called the Imagine Cup. I was approached by some 4th year students asking if I would be able to do the graphics from their project. They wanted it to have an old style arcade feel to it and wanted it do be pixalated.

 

I had to make the player spaceship which needed to have different degrees of damage attached to it. There needed to be 4 different colours of spaceship as well as you could play multiplayer. I also made alien spaceships which also had different degrees of damage. As well as this I had to make asteriods which the player destroyed. There were also different types of weapons to be used as well as a shield.

 

This project was a lot of fun to do as I rarely got to draw in such a way. It also felt really great to see my graphics being used in the game.

Asteroids From Space

To view all images please download the zipfile.

Portfolio – Detective Zork

For my Object Oriented Development module, I had to program a texted based game. This has to be done using object-oriented programming principles. The game was based on the old texted based game “Zork”.

For my game I created a detective game. The player was a detective who was asked to solve a murder case. The player had to go around collecting evidence, navigating through the rooms in the victims and the victims next door neighbours house. This was done by typing in “North, South, East and West” commands. The player has an inventory where they can store their collected evidence. The evidence and other items also have weight and if the weight exceeds what the player can carry they’ll be unable to carry the item. To complete the game the player had to collect the right evidence and accuse the right person to win the game. If you accused the wrong person then you could lose the game.

I very much enjoyed this project as it really helped me to learn object-oriented development and the C++ language in an interesting and fun way. It is also one of the projects I’m most proud of as I really had to spend a lot of time working on it to make it the best it could be. It taught me a lot about object-oriented principles including encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism.

Zork.zip

Portfolio – Interview With A Pirate

CS4053 • Digital Video Fundamentals • Year 2 (October 2008) • Group of 6

This was a 4 week project, worth 30% of final module mark.

You will shoot an interview-story on-campus.
The story will be an interview of some sort, fictional or fact.
It could be an interview on the typical day of a student or lecturer,
the work of the barman in Java’s, the life of a squirrel in a college tree!

The outcome of this project was the development of:
• Basic Video-production skills, revolving around good planning
• Team Work in a Production Team
We followed this sequence of events:
1. Form groups of 6
2. Come up with a story
3. Plan a timetable and book a camera-slot
4. Make storyboards and a script to guide you on day of shoot
5. Shoot, log and capture in no more than 1 day
6. Edit a short movie, with a beginning and /or ending title (text)
7. Add over-dubbed narration, and transitions, if needed
8. Export 2 versions: Quicktime Movie and mp4
9. Upload the mp4 movie to the Youtube account: cs4053video

 

This project was a wonderful experience as I got to try out a lot of things I had never had a chance to do before. It was one of the first projects we did within the University which would have been considered classically creative. Also the use of the software we used will come in very handy in the future as well.

During the project I helped with script writing and costume and make-up as well as filming and editing. It was an enjoyable project which also taught me some very useful things for the future.

Portfolio – P.E.R.U

CS4085 • Computer Graphics II: Tools and Techniques • Year 3 (October 2009)

This was an individual project worth 10% of final grade.

Objective: The objective of this project is to consider two elements of the games / graphics tool chain by developing a model in Blender and then displaying this model in a game development environment (e.g., XNA).

 

High-level Description: Having created a 3-D model using Blender you should export the model in a format of your choosing. You should apply a U-V texture to your developed piece. You should then import this model into the XNA game development environment. In this environment you should be able to perform various “standard” camera operations such as zoom, rotate (the model) or move camera position.

 

P.E.R.U is a robot that collects garbage to help make the world a better place. He’s been a little character of mine for some time and it wasn’t until I could put him into 3D that I finally good a good idea of what he really looked like.

 

This was one of my favorite projects and I wish to continue learning more about 3D modelling in the future.

 

P.E.R.U was moved into XNA and was able to move about the screen and such but unfortunately due to poor file keeping the rest of this project has since been lost but atleast the screenshots still remain.