Since mid - September, I've been enjoying an amazing 3D Animator internship at Zynga, off in San Francisco.
The city itself doesn't feel all that different from Orlando. Though, there's so much to do here! My favorite trip has been to the Walt Disney Family Museum, for obvious reasons. There's currently an exhibit at the museum on the makings of Pinocchio, featuring a LOT of original animation tests, animation cels, and other props. Some of Milt Khal's original tests for Pinocchio were there (loaned out by his family) and I got to flip through them. This comes after spending almost a year learning and studying these tests too! It was amazing and inspiring to see the original work of the animators that Jonathan was teaching us about. ♥
As for the internship itself ... FIEA did a tremendous job at simulating the gaming industry in its program. The transition was rather seamless. Coming off of the high - intensity pace and workload that was FIEA, the pace at Zynga feels moderate even when my workload is heavy. It's likely because I'm used to coming in before 9am in the morning and leaving by 10pm or 11pm at FIEA ... and still managing to get behind on one or two of my projects.
Nonetheless, I'm learning so much at Zynga! I'm more heavily involved in rigging, keyframe animation, and even VFX in the Unity Engine. I'm not sure about the lengths and details I can discuss about my internship at the moment, so I'll keep it general. :D There was a major learning curve at first ... and one where I constantly pestered other people to show me how to do a thing in the engine, but now I'm very comfortable with it! Granted, I feel like learning coding might definitely save me some headaches in the future, and keep me from having to rely as heavily on others for minor changes.
I've been working with some amazing people over at Zynga. The time's actually been passing ridiculously quickly ... a huge part of me is wishing that this internship was far longer than 12 weeks. ♥♥
I haven't had too much time to focus on my own personal portfolio .... but I've taken the time to tweak, render, and compile some of my already-existing animations! For rendering ... I didn't realize just HOW much of a difference AO maps made until I gave them a whirl this week. The AO maps definitely made everything pop out way more, and look far more detailed. BUT here's the shot progression of these two animations! Hopefully, I'll be finishing my third very soon and be getting to working on cycles and another VFX.
And if you're curious at all ... this was the end result from Common Core a little while back! There's some things we would have liked to do to go back and polish it some more, but this is pretty great after spending the last few days collecting our efforts, revamping, and putting it all together. : D
