Bio:
I am a senior at TCNJ and aspire to be a 3D animator. All my life I knew I would want to do something with animation. It was when I got to TCNJ and took IMM classes that I knew that I wanted to do 3D animation. Then came another decision, what aspect of 3D animation would I want to do? I figured out that I wanted to focus on the facial expression part of 3D animation. I am fascinated with psychology, so facial expression is a perfect fit for both my interests.
Project Overview:
Emotion is a 3D animation that focuses on facial expressions. I found a perfect 3D model of a girl, model by 3D model by Mohammed El-demerdash, to use for my animation. When creating this project, I thought of what could be something to trigger some natural facial expressions. My immediate thought was music. Music has been a huge influence in my life so I knew that would be a great way to tie in my inspirations. I have put in 4 different genres of music that my 3D model will react to. There might be some bias to the music genres, but I hope it will be an enjoyable experience.
Development process
There were some problems that have occurred when doing my thesis, I animated with the program Maya. Maya is a great program, but it is not without its faults. Maya has the tendency to crash when you least expect it. So, my project was filled with crashing and reanimating.
What do you want to do with this?
I hope this project will help impact people both at TCNJ and outside TCNJ. When I first found out about animation, I did not know that there are different factions of animation you can do. One person cannot do a whole animation by themselves. Many people have to work on the animations. So, I hope I help future animators realize what part of animation they want to do.
What do you want to do after this?
In the future I want to do something involving animation. I would love to focus more on the facial animation. However, I am more than willing to do other aspects of animation for a future job.
Biggest challenge/hurdle you overcame and how?
I think my biggest hurdle is having to adapt to the Covid situation. For humans, it is hard to be able to adapt to such a huge difference in our lives. It affected me the most the first few weeks. It is hard to be expecting a different ending to my college career and having it drastically change on a whim. But slowly I have gotten adjusted to this new lifestyle and have accepted this new ending.