2 Modeled Items

Here's my two modeled items, a birthday cake and a Mario hat. The table on the bottom is just four cylinders and a rectangle with wood texture. The plate for the birthday cake is just a polygon cylinder that I raised the edges on, smoothed, and added a china pattern texture. The cake itself was also really easy, its just a smoothed cylinder that I added a chocolate frosting texture to. The candle is a cylinder with two spirals around it and a glowing orange flame on top. The Mario hat is a nurbs sphere. I changed the end sweep to 180 to make it a hemisphere, then modeled it based on a picture I found. The brim of the hat is a nurbs plane that I also modeled. To make the Mario logo, I made my own pattern in Illustrator. I just made a white circle with a transparent M in it and and transparent background, then applied the picture as a texture to a nurbs plane, so it would just look like a white circle with a red M. Anyway, that's pretty much it. I'm going to try to model a block and mushroom to do some sort of Mario type animation with the hat next.

Pendulum Swing Animation

Here's the pendulum swing animation. Pretty simple, just had to use the smooth in/out property to make it look realistic when it changed directions.

Door Animation

Here's the door animation. It was pretty simple, so there's not much to explain.

Screwdriver & Tire Imports

Here's my screwdriver and tire imports. This wasn't very hard. I just had to copy and paste them into my scene, add the textures, and then place them, so not much to explain!

Lesson 3: Texturing

Here's the stuff I did for Lesson 3: Texturing. Texturing is actually I lot easier than I thought it would be. Anyway, I pretty much just followed the instructions for the tutorial and tried to determine the best material to use that would reflect the light realistically. I added a lot of lights to my scene, probably about 9 or 10 for each lamp post, and then less intense directional one behind the moon to add some moonlight. I added a lot of new details to the scene, like flowers in the flower boxes, a vending machine, and, if you look in the top left corner of the 1st picture, you can see the glow of the candles for the birthday cake I made in the window. Anyway, that's pretty much it. Hope you enjoy!

Tire Model

Here's the tire model. Overall, it wasn't too hard, just time consuming. There was a lot of extruding to create the spokes. I'm not sure why the smoothing on my spokes didn't turn out like theirs; before I smoothed the spokes they looked exactly like on the tutorial, but even after changing a bunch of settings and stuff it still didn't work, but overall they still look good. The wheel and tire were pretty easy, and the special duplicate tool is useful for duplicating things many times. I made the brake disk by making a short, wide cylinder and then booleaning the difference with some tall skinny cylinders with it. I think that's pretty much it.

Screwdriver Model

Here's the screwdriver model from the tutorial. It wasn't too difficult, just creating some cylinders, editing some vertices, smoothing, and then the horrible booleans. The booleans decided to be really difficult with me and not work but finally I tried smoothing the screwdriver only once and then it worked for some reason (I guess Maya is just weird). Anyway, here's the screwdriver!

Alley Scene Shots (Lesson 2)

Above are my the far, medium, and close shots of my alley scene after finishing lesson 2 in the book. I mostly added doors, windows, oil barrels, improved the lamp, and added window sill boxes to some of the windows.

Alley Scene Shots (Lesson 1)

These are the shots of the alley scene. The top one is the far shot, the middle one is the medium shot, and the bottom one is the close shot focused on the street lamp.

The Ballad of Mr. Pop Tart - Extended Version

Now with an extra 37 never before seen slides!

The Ballad of Mr. Pop Tart

In thirty one simple yet powerful slides, Travis Stebbins composes the saga of Mr. Pop Tart, a story of a brave strawberry pop tart that will touch your heart. The story begins with a blank stage, where Mr. Pop Tart, in all his strawberry goodness and innocence, attempts to simply introduce himself to the audience. Sadly, however, he is spontaneously struck with a radioactive beam, invisible to us, and because he is of the species Poptarticus strawberrius, he is helpless to repel the involuntary radioactive pop tart dance. This brobdingnagian, memetastic tale is one for the generations.

Matte Painting

Here's my matte painting. I have to say the hardest parts of this tutorial would probably be getting rid of the palm tree and then breaking things and making it look all dirty. To get rid of the palm tree, I used the clone stamp tool and reflected the curved window on the right over to the left side to replace the palm tree. To make the house dirty, I just followed their steps. I also added a pattern overlay to the grunge layers and put the pattern overlay on Multiply blending mode to give it some more texture. Below is the original mansion.

Google Maps Parody

Here's my Google Maps parody tutorial picture. I pretty much just used the techniques talked about in the tutorial, which was mostly just selecting stuff, changing the hue/saturation, and whatnot. The only thing that was different was that I had to change a few things such as brush sizes when I did mine because the image I used was smaller than the one in the tutorial.

Travis Stebbins - MY BIO

Hi, I'm Travis! I'm a sophomore at consol this year, and I'm looking forward to animation. To start off with just a little about myself, I have 2 older siblings, a sister and a brother, and 1 younger sister. The older sister is about to start grad school, and the older brother is about to start college at Texas A&M. My younger sister is 2 years younger than me and now in 8th grade. In case you didn't know, I've lived most of my life on a small island called Okinawa, Japan; I was stationed there because my dad was in the Marine Corps, and no, I do not speak Japanese fluently, just a few words. Some things that I like to do are hanging out with friends, gardening during the summer, photography, reading a good book, using the computer, and anything else that sounds fun, but I'm kept pretty busy throughout the school year with classes and homework. The biggest thing that happened this summer was probably my canoe trip in the Minnesota-Canada border in the middle of June. Otherwise, it was just a normal summer. I'm looking forward to finally not being a freshman this year, and I think it will be really fun to be in animation!