Jerry Chang’s VIZ Blog

For this project, I started animating my monkey character. I realized then that the character didn’t have more than one part moving so I started animating one of my candle characters. I then realized that the candle didn’t have three parts moving on the same structure, so I quickly made a arm and a hand, and gave it a skeleton with three joints. For the monkey and candle, I’ve used no skeletons or joints, just basic translate and rotate on the separate parts. I’ve included all the work I’ve done in one video. Click here for video.

Character Models and Props.

One Candle

Three Candles

Small Drawer

Toy Monkey

Props: Pirate Hat, Glasses, Small bottle container

I used polygons to model all these candle characters and converted them to subdivisions in the end.

Here’s a shot from a distance.

Here’s a close up shot. I added a fireball to the scene to make it less boring.

I used just NURBS spheres, cones, and cylinders. Here’s a image with the wireframe.

For this exercise, I chose to model a black mage from the original Final Fantasy series. Here is my reference image.

I’ve been playing around with the fire feature in Maya and added it to my candlestick. It looks a lot better than my original cone polygon flame. I like how big the flame looks and might use it in my animation later on. I think this type of fire is more suited for bigger objects that are burning like firewood.

I decided to post some images of the first candles I ever rendered. I think they look pretty bad…

This was the first candle I made.

This was my attempt to make the previous candle look better. And I failed…

I am hoping to learn how to create a realistic flame in the near future.

Here, I tried a longer candle.

The nursery rhyme I chose was:

Jack be nimble, Jack be swift, Jack jump over the candlestick.

I have never used Maya, 3D Studio Max, or any 3D software before so I wanted to start out working with something simple.

First, I want to try to model a small candle stick. To do this, I just created a cylinder polygon and did some extrusions on it. I then used the sculpt geometry tool to make the candle look less cylinder-like. In the end, I used the smooth polygon tool to add more polygons, thus making the candle look much more smoother.

For the lighting, I decided to try the 3 point lighting method. I just used three spot lights and enabled shadow for the key light.

Also, I wanted to put the candle in some sort of environment. I made 3 polygon planes and grabbed some free textures from the web and inserted those.

Wood Texture: http://www.bittbox.com/freebies/free-hi-resolution-wood-textures/
Wallpaper: http://blender-archi.tuxfamily.org/images/Wallpaper.jpeg