Moth

Its done. My final animation 1 project. Roughly a month and a half of late nights, frantic learning of new software and concepts and I am finished. Yay... just in time to start the new quarter tomorrow. Where my other animations were more exercises than productions, this was very different. This was more of a full on solo production with the intent to create a short animation with a narrative. Looking back on the project, I learned a great deal.

I have a breakdown of the software used on the Vimeo page. It doesn't mean all that much to most people. The idea for the animation started from my shader writing class. I'll post the final for that project after this post but I had to model a scene and then write all of my shaders in code (Renderman Shader Language). I chose an alleyway. Later when the final animation was assigned I decided to save production time and reuse some of the assets between classes. All I knew was that my animation 1 final was going to take place in a alley. After seeing some of my classmate's work in their Advanced Animation class, Franz, I wanted to give the trails SOP in Houdini a try. The original idea was to have lights fly around the alley. Basically I started with an idea for a visual and went from there. In the future I think I'll try to start with a story and work towards carrying it out in animation.

When I watch the animation now I think I could probably cut the entire flying light sequence out and it wouldn't make much of a difference.

I didn't create this in a vacuum though, and I have a lot of people to thank for critiques and general technique advice. Dave Lally, Dan Bode, Jessie Amadio, Evan Boucher, Nick, Tom, Christian, Dave Mauriello, Simon and all my other Drexel classmates.

Moth from NATE on Vimeo.