Over the course of 8 weeks, I developed Cold Pursuit by myself as my Capstone studio project. The objective was to apply all the technical knowledge and skills I had acquired as an undergraduate to create a one minute long layout sequence.
Responsible for all aspects except modeling
RIGGING
While creating the vehicle rigs for this project, my goal was to have a fully function car rig that was able to deform and move in a cartoon-like style. Additonally, as the ice cream truck took sharp turns my goal was to have the chassis of the vehicle unhinge from the bottom of the car in a accordian-like style to add to the zanny nature of the truck. For this to work, I had to create a switch that controleld what pivot point the chassis of the truck would tilt on.
ANIMATION
Vehicle movement was implemented through the use of motion paths. By using the geometry as a live surface, I painted curves onto the surface of the mesh and used a motion path constraint that the vehicles would use to create an illusion of it traveling across the surface of the road. Additional secondary animation was then added to create a more realistic look and feel to the weight of the cars.
LOOK
Because my project was rendered through Maya's viewport 2.0, I used a lot of tricks to make the playblasts look as "close to render" as possible. This included adding viewport ambient occlusion, motion blur, hardware fog, lighting, and depth of field to give it a higher quality look. Additionally, textures were added to much of the set to help break up the scenes.
SET CONSTRUCTION
The sets were made from creating straight roads and deforming them with both bend and sine deformers. By combining both of these techniques, it creates unique and believable looking roads for the vehicles to travel on. After the roads were made, I did a second pass of environment set per shot by set dressing with buildings, benches, light poles, fire hydrants, palm trees, and more to make the environment look closer to a city in California.