Recreating with Cameras and Lights in Maya

I couldn't figure out the problem:

Lighting Your Scene

1. For my Key lighting, I created a warm spotlight:

2. For the fill light, I threw in a slightly green low intensity spotlight:

3. For the rim light, I threw in a cool intense spotlight:

Building a Scene in Maya

1. For my Key lighting, I created a warm spotlight:

2. For the fill light, I threw in a slightly green low intensity spotlight:

3. For the rim light, I threw in a cool intense spotlight:

Special Effects and Live-Action

My first two term paper scores were both above 80; I will not be writing a third term paper.

Outline of Third Term Paper

Winston Gregory

Phys 123

Alejandro Garcia

Outline for Third Term Paper

Explosions in Scale

Intro: Miniature models at times create a much more believable environment than cgi rendered backgrounds. We can see them brilliantly used from the space crafts in Star Wars, to the stunning castle in the Lord of the Ring series. However some of the most brilliant use of miniatures are when they are fused with the special effect of explosions.

At the beginning of the early 2000s, when Computer Graphics was starting to blossom in the film industry, many of the first effects that were created were explosions. Now a days, with major block busters like the Avengers and Transformers, movies goers are desensitized to the constant barrage of cgi explosion effects. Some may argue that movies are starting to use a bit of their magic by going away from practical special effects. However I argue that both of these effects can be just as useful with the use of convincing miniatures.

Paragraph 1: In the 1984 classic action movie The Terminator, a tankard explodes when a character throws a bomb in the trucks back pipe. The explosion of the vehicle, which looks amazingly realistic, has fooled audiences into think that the speical effects team blew up an actual real tankard.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9lw3ndQpWc
• Because the explosion was going to take place near a police stockpile of ammunition in Los Angeles, the film makers decided that they could not blow up a full scale tankard.
• The miniature was built a sixth of the scale of the actually downtown place
• The shot was slowed down to make it feel like it was too scale.
• 42 charges were set off to get the realistic effect!

Paragraph 2: The business: Fonco Creative Services uses miniatures to create believable models for movies. When creator Fon Davis first saw Jurassic Park, he moved fast to adapt his skillset to the current use of Computer Graphics, however he was surprised to find out that computer graphics actually worked well for miniatures, in which he calls it a hybrid approach to visual effects.

• the example we will be looking at is a scene in the matrix, when a ship crashes into the human city of Sion.
• It uses the practical effect of the 30 food miniature moving through the gateway, with lighting and cgi explosions along with a mix of lightning strikes.
• The used large ships called bigitures.
• We you see miniatures in film, you don’t notice them. The best special effects are the ones you don't notice.

Conclusion: CGI and practical explosions can both make convincingly believable action scenes in movies with the combination of miniatures!

Character Animation

For my project I decided to animate with legos. By far the hardest part of this sequence was have the robot walk. In order to do that I fastened the robot to a cellphone charging chord attach to the bottom of my bunkbed to provide the lift and drop in the walk. It was often difficult because it was hard to get the right pose needed in my walk. Tape was used to help track the feet. In order to get the proper timing I wrote my whole animation on an x sheet for my  robot. The sounds were provided for a website called freesounds.com.

Science Fact or Cinematic Fiction

Winston Gregory

PHYS 123

10/27/2015

Science Fact or Cinematic Fiction

One of the most important rules of physics is the action of falling. This is one of the first things we learn in animation when we practice the simple exercise of animating a bouncing ball. In order to create believable falling of a bouncing we have to have the correct timing and spacing. The ball should slow as it starts to fall, and properly accelerate as it approaches the ground due to the nature of gravity and weight. Animators can exaggerate this by effectively “stretching” a ball while maintaining its volume to create a type of motion blur. Without the use of stretch, we find that balls can get the undesirable strobing effect. The impact of the ball when it hits the ground also has to be convincing. This is often accentuated by adding squash the ball, where the ball is compressed while keeping the same amount of volume.

  In the movie industry, in order to avoid injury or death, the action of a person falling is almost always created with special effects. With the use of green screens, hidden ropes, and CGI, movies attempt to make a believable fall, but sometimes fail to capture the illusion. We are going to look at some examples of movies that attempted falling physics, but somehow fell short.

The first example we will be looking at is from the 1995 James Bond movie, GoldenEye. In this movie, James Bond is trying to stop a formerly fellow agent, Trevelyan, from hijacking a nuclear space weapon. In the scene that we will study, James Bond drops the villain from an incredibly high height at the top of a satellite station, that hangs over a large half dome. Trevelyan is dropped from a height that appears to be above 850 feet, however when he hits the concrete ground, he somehow survives the fall with a couple of drops of blood spilling from his mouth, while being incapacitated, and visibly unscathed. This would mean that his terminal velocity wouldn’t have been high enough to kill him, however from that height, a human would have definitely reached a speed that would cause them to practically cause their body to explode when hitting the ground. In real life a body hitting the ground from a great height would “splatter.” Although not many scientific reports have been done on the effect of a human body at its terminal velocity, according to the hit show Mythbusters, the human body implodes on contact with the ground and that explodes.

Although the impact from Trevelyan’s body was not convincing, The fall of his body felt relatively believable. This has mostly to due with the fact that the special effects department dropped a dummy from a great height and filmed it. We can tell that the man falling is fake because his arms and legs remain straight and stiff through the falling.

The final noticeable effect of faulty fall logic is scene during Trevelyan’s impact, where his body suddenly rotates ninety degree before the impact before he hits the ground. The reason this is noticeable is that in the scene with the dummy the, body turns into a head first dive downward during the fall, however when we switch to the villains impact, we can see that he lands on his back. In order to achieve this, Trevelyan would have had to adjust his center of gravity, by tucking or twisting his body somehow before the impact.

The second scene we will be analyzing is a spoof of James Bond, Austin Powers. This movie is a little more able to get away with its ridiculous physics because unlike Goldeneye, Austin Powers is meant to be exaggerated and corny. This is especially emphasized when Austin Powers travels back in time to the 1960s in the sequel, The Spy Who Shagged Me. While Austin Powers is flirting with a women at a club, he soon realizes that she is part of a group of assassins out to kill him. After a couple of hilarious gags where Austin Powers uses the woman's body as a shield from the assassins barrage of attacks, the two of them get blown out a window. The first part of the falling is obviously shot in front of a greenscreen, because although both of the character's hair is blowing back, we can see that there is no follow through in the cheeks or the skin in either of the characters. The movement of the background also moves at an unconvincing rate as the windows move past the actors at a fast, but even rate, showing no acceleration from the apex of the fall. As Austin Powers is falling he uses the body of the female assassin to cushion the impact. Although theoretically the woman's body would absorb more of the impact than Austin’s body, the fall would be lethal for both of them at the height of twenty stories due to the extremely high terminal velocity. The actors or stunt devils, handle the fall just fine, by falling just a few feet off the ground onto their stomach, however this means that the Austin and the woman would have had to decelerate in order to survive the fall. After the impact of the characters, we realize that even though the women has been stabbed, riddled with machine gun bullets, blasted with a bazooka, and dropped from twenty stories, she still hilariously survives.

The next movie with poor falling action comes from 2006s film, Ultraviolet. The film, meant to be a serious “sci-fi” action flick taking place in the 22nd century, stars actress Milla Jovovich playing a superhuman who is on the run from authorities. Although the movie was created after groundbreaking visual effects films, like Jurassic Park and The Matrix, Ultraviolet failed to capture the magic of CGI, with poorly rendered background against live action actors, mediocre animated vehicles, and extremely unrealistic physics. The scene we will be looking at is the motorbike chase scene. While the motorbike defies physics by driving perpendicular to walls and making impossible jumps, the scene were the motorcycle drops from its fall is noticeably one of the least believable displays of physics in the segment. The first thing we notice is that the tracking of the motorcycle as it moves up and down feels a bit jagged. Because of the poor tracking we get a jagged and jerky stop motion effect. The film is trying to capture the action of a bike falling, while at the same time it tries to switch time from slow motion to normal speed. The reason is effect is so unbelievable is that even while in slow motion, the wheels on the motorcycle are still rotating as if they are in “real-time.” Another noticeably unrealistic falling effect in this film is how the actress reacts to the fall on the motorcycle. As the bike falls from the height, what we should expect is a squash on impact. What we get instead is her body squashing with the bike as it falls. In order to create a more believable effect  the actress should have “stretched” off the bike as it fell, until the point of impact where she could have squashed down. We can see this in the film Madagascar 3 in a scene where a woman officer drops down in her motorbike and effectively stretches and squashes on her fall.

Movies have the ability to create illusions and convince us that the characters and actions within 

them are real, however we learn that the best way to make a convincing scene is to do your 

homework and study how people and thing actually move and act. Sometimes movies can 

manipulate physics for either story or for comedic effect, however there are always a couple of films 

that forget to take inspiration from real life create a more believable illusion.

Here are the referenced videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtYZYxvsToM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvTb1B253fQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WspmSTzFV-8

The Movie Physics of Falling

The Movie Physics of falling

For the sake of story, or for the theme of the movie, falling physics can be changed.

James Bond Goldeneye: Sean Beans death scene.

• the fall from that height would have obliterated the body
• We would have expected him to accelerate more from the fall.
• The impact we are given, feels like he just fell from five feet.

Austin Powers: Fall from the top of a building.

• The fall is at a constant speed. The characters would have surely died from the momentum.
• Same thing happens, they are unscathed after hitting the ground

Ultraviolet: Motor bike falling, and reaction of actress

• The motor bike hitting the ground is unrealistic in timing.
• The hang time is too long.
• The entire motor bike chase seen has falling action that is too even.
• Here body doesn’t have a realistic reaction to the impact after hitting the ground.

- Whether done on purpose or created out of laziness, fall physics are constantly changed in movies.

Reverse Video Reference

ClipA

ClipB

ClipC

ClipD

I found this assignment tricky. I tried to think of all the nuances of the characters movement,

but I think I ended up acting some of these out a little stiff and mechanical.

Stop Motion Animation of Falling

For my animation I chose to make a posable figure fall from a drop. I tool a creepy toy puppet I had and made him jump out of the box to scare and trip my character backwards. Before I animated I planned out my shots accordingly on a sheet of paper. I used Richard Williams's book The Animation Survival Kit as reference for the walk cycle, and tried to implement the quarter down at halftime rule for the fall. I reshot the sequence twice because the first time my character jumped up too high. I used copy paste, the stamp tool, and the fill option to edit myself and other markers out of the scene. I took my sound effects from a legal free sound effects website. I cut all the pictures together and added camera move in after effects. Please enjoy the animation!

First Term Paper

The Physics of Borderlands: the Presequel

On October 14th, 2014, publisher 2k released there latest video game, Borderlands: the Presequel. The game was developed by studios 2k Australia, Gearbox Software and Aspyr. The game is an action adventure, first person shooter role playing game that takes place on the colorful and wild planet of Pandora. Throughout the game series you play as a bounty hunter, fondly referred to as Vault Hunters, who complete missions for cash, gear and weapons. Where the first two games (Borderlands and Borderlands 2) kept us on the alien planet of Pandora, Borderlands: the Pre Sequel takes us on a journey to Pandora’s moon Elpis. Borderlands creates a fun and entertaining universe to explore by manipulating physics. In this game we see that the laws of gravity are manipulated to hilariously unrealistic proportions, the atmosphere does not obey real physics for gameplay purposes, and the science of “digistructing” or constructing digital information into physical matter is used as an explanation for role playing mechanics.

For their third installment, 2k studios took the risk of switching their game from the beloved and familiar environment of Pandora to the moon of the planet from the two other previous games. By switching the game to the moon, the game developers took advantage of low gravity by “improving” on their game mechanics. Normal human characters were already given the ability to jump to great heights in this universe, so the introduction of low gravity exaggerated this mechanic even further. Jump pads were introduced that can launch enemies and characters through space like a cannonball. This changed the overall structure of their maps by making them a lot more vertically stratified. To help players traverse more through the environments, players could use their oxygen resources to provide themselves with an additional boost to make it to particular platforms and areas. Although the gravity modifications feel believable, a few mechanics are unrealistically altered for gameplay purposes.

First, the gravity on the Hyperion remains the same as that of the earth-like planet Pandora. The Hyperion space station is a colossal sized space facility that almost appears to be half the size of the moon. The only possible explanation could be some form of unseen gravity manipulation to allow the scientists and citizens of the space station to walk comfortably. Space stations that have centrifugal force make sense because they harness their own gravity, but this station does not have that attribute.

The next notable change of the laws of gravity would be the ability to launch people into orbit by smashing down on them with a grounding pound attack. While in midair, the player can manipulate their own gravity by falling fast into the ground below. The result is a devastating attack that can send nearby assailants hurdling into space where they perish. The laws of gravity are obviously altered by making the limp dead bodies affected less by the gravity of the moon, compared to alive enemies. This can be seen again when opening containers, in which ammo and cash floats outward as if they were in free fall or underwater.

On Elpis, there is also a lack of atmosphere. Because of this all human characters have to wear what is call a "Oz kit" or oxygen kit. While the oxygen can be used for the ground pound attack, the resource is also slowly decreasing throughout the game. While this may seem inconvenient to manage a new resource, the developers made sure to keep providing players with oxygen by placing terminals that have the ability to generate small sustainable atmospheric bubbles, as well as spreading out oxygen vents that crack through the moon's surface to allow player to refill their tanks. The developers also made it so that when enemies die, they drop oxygen containers, allowing the characters to continue fighting without worrying about their oxygen resources becoming drained.

While the use of atmosphere adds dimension to the gameplay, it also manipulates some laws of physics for gameplay purposes. While boxes outside of an atmospheric containment appear to release free floating objects, containers within an atmospheric barrier keep objects in their place.

One of the most unbelievable use of physics comes from the beginning of the game, when the player is shot from an orbital cannon onto the moon's surface inside a metal storage crate. The player manages to survive the impact through some miracle, without being slowed down in the atmosphere. Although this physics are improbable, they help carry the story onto a new location by moving the player off their initial location on the Hyperion Space Station to the alien moon.

The Borderlands game universe uses a lot of science fiction gimmicks from teleportation, to space travel, and through the use of protective electromagnetic shields. It's most impressive use of scientific physics is what is called "digistructing". Digistructing allows players to render new weapons, vehicles, and even themselves. While digistructing is a useful game mechanic that rationalizes game logic like storing hundreds of objects in your inventory, coming back to life, and making vehicles appear, is it actually physically possible? According to the formula E=mc^2 it is theoretically possible to convert energy into matter if you had technology to do so. So if it was possible to use digital information to convert energy into matter, there is potential for the technology to work, but there is no tangible technology we currently have to relate it to. The closest of these probably being 3d printing, which still needs physical matter to create something from digital information.

Overall the series pushes and alters physics in interesting ways to allow the player to collect objects, transverse their environment and battle their foes. Most of these changes in physics were intentionally done by the developers to suite the story and gameplay, rather than cater to actual science. Borderlands: The Presequel is a good example of how games can manipulate real world physics to create a more entertaining and fun atmosphere.

Term Paper Outline: Moon Physics With Borderlands

Outline of the First Paper

The Laws of Physics in an Animation Universe: A look at Borderlands: The Presequel.

Introduction

1. For my essay, I looked at Borderlands the Presequel. It was developed by 2k Australia, Gearbox Software and Aspyr.
2. The game takes place on a moon called Elpys that orbits a planet about the size of earth called Pandora. It takes advantage of science fiction logic to drastically exaggerate the physics to hilariously fun proportions.

Body Paragraphs

1. The laws Gravity are changed for entertainment purposes.

• Gravity on Pandora (The Earth-like Planet) and within the space station, which has the same gravity) Still allows normal human characters to jump a tremendous height, and have a lot of hang time.
• Enemies blasted to death neglect the laws of gravity and can fly as far up as orbit. This rule of gravity is changed to provide more satisfying kills, which is what the game is built on.
• The space center is able to control gravity with no centrifugal force.

2. The atmosphere does not obey real physics for gameplay purposes

• Without an atmosphere objects float freely from their chests, but within a contain atmospheric bubble they do not even though gravity remain consistent.
• Fires still briefly ignite from lava monsters on a planet.
• Heavier characters drop at the same rate as lighter characters, even within an atmosphere with air resistance.
• At the beginning of the game, The heroes are fired out of a cannon from the spaceship and they manage to survive the impact, without beginning slowed down by an atmosphere.

3. Digital information is transferred into physical matter.

• The game uses the science of “digi-structing” to use computer information to generate matter.
• Vehicles use an online databases to generate and construct speeders, hovercrafts, and buggies.
• A device attached to the belt allows characters to reconstruct weapons, rather than carry them on their back.
• After dying, characters can “respawn” by being reconstructed through a New U station.
• Digital information can be transported to different terminals where biological information is simplified to digital matter and reassembled.

Conclusion:

• The laws of physics are intentionally broken to provide an overall more enjoyable game with more over the top action.
• The change of physics in the third installation of the game provides gamers with a change in gameplay, giving them different ways to navigate their environment, new tactics during combat, and a change in environment.

Video Analysis of Path of Action

Video Analysis of Path of Action

Tracker Video Analysis of Falling

Shooting Video Reference

Mini-Portfolio

 Hi there! My name is Winston Gregory. I am a fourth year animation illustration major currently attend San Jose State, focusing on animation. I have taken major courses in figure drawing, illustration, and 3d modeling. Some science courses I've taken have been Geology and Biology, and a bit of Chemistry in high school. I'm currently taking a beginner 3d animation course, a short film course, a writing course focusing on design, and a Sociology course focusing on social issues. I am interested in animating characters in video games, movies or short films when I get out of school, whether that be in a smaller startup or in a larger company.

Ani 114 Spring 2015 Character Animation

Ani 28 Fall 2013 30 Second Animation

Charcoal Reversal of a Native African

Pen and Ink Running Glove Illustration

Some Paintings from my Intermediate Painting class