3D Animation
Project 1: Projection Mapping
Projection Mapping Proposal
2019
The main object that I have decided to project onto is my chicken hat. I spent a lot of time thinking about what its significance is and how it relates to me. Eventually, I came up with many different points, but the idea that I'm settling with stems from the Chinese market culture. I thought about how the whole bird is displayed in the windows, which then led me to think about how other cultures cultivate and prepare their chicken.
All kinds of people from different backgrounds and cultures around the globe incorporate chicken into their dishes. Chicken could then be described as a culinary blank slate. Its injection into a myriad of cultures is no shock, as there are tablets from around 2000 BCE Mesopotamia that may refer the chicken as a "royal bird" and now the chicken to human ratio as of 2012 CE is about 3:1, (Lawler, Andrew, Jerry Adler, "How the Chicken Conquered the World"). In addition, "the U.S. poultry industry is the world's largest producer and second largest exporter of poultry meat and a major egg producer," (U.S. Census Bureau).
As for my animation, a whole chicken will be hanging from the strings of my chicken hat, which is in reference to the way in which the chickens are displayed in Chinese markets. This chicken will be rotating on the y-axis to reference the way in which the Costco rotisserie chickens are prepared. These two methods speak to me the
most and is drawn from my Chinese American upbringing. The chicken will then be cut up and fall into the blender below, churning into a pulp. This pulp will drain off the screen and at the top of the screen, the newly liquified substance will funnel into the chicken hat's beak. A whole chicken will then pop out of the chicken hat and the cycle is renewed.
On another level, my manipulation of the digital chicken model mirrors the physical manipulation these chickens undergo. When a chicken is prepped for a dish, it is essentially being stripped and transformed into another form, albeit not a complete overhaul. In my animation, I'm trying to show this as a literal deconstruction of the chicken as it cycles in a perpetual loop of solid to "liquid" to solid.
3D Model:
This is the model of the chicken. I built it from a cube and extruded parts to make the basic shape of the chicken. I then used subdivision surfaces to round the form so I could further manipulate it in the sculpting mode. The actual modeling part of this project was not the most difficult, but rather the texturing and lighting. Every time I tried using the bump tag for my texture, the texture had patches of pixelation. Lighting was also a big issue because my object has a very organic form and there are lots of crevices that catch shadows. I spent a lot of time troubleshooting my problems only for all of my efforts to come to naught. So, here are different views of my 3d model.
