Assignment 2: The Animation - First Impressions

So, models more or less completed, maybe a few tweaks to do. The task which befalls me now is to use them by putting them into an animation, using 3DS Max. Sounds easy enough, famous last words I know.

To Do List:

• Texture the models 
• find/create textures for each model.
• edit the textures in photoshop if needed.
• apply textures to their respective models.

• Create the animation scene - started.
• Create the skybox(Geosphere was the suggested shape to use for this, in a task during the lecture) - The Geosphere has to be quite large to fit the scale of the models, and how much they need to move, I decided on an initial size of 10,000 by 10,000 units, may increase or decrease this over time...
• Find Texture for said Geo-Sphere. I'm finding this difficult since the animation is set on Tatooine instead of in space, so a suitable sky texture would be needed to account for Tatooine's two suns. I have a few textures which I'm considering for this, but none are quite right in my opinion. I may just go with one of them for now, and then change it later once the animation has made more progress.
• Create the plane which will be the floor that the models move on, easy enough, it's a flat plane with the same dimensions on the X and Y axis as the Geosphere used for the sky. The slightly tougher part is finding a suitable sand texture, I have one or two in mind..
• Insert the finished models into the animation scene. I did this already before the models were finished, to get a scale of how big the area needs to be.

• Apply Lighting to the scene
• Not as easy as I thought, and having to constantly re-render the scene in a separate window to check the lighting every time I change something, or want to get a different view of the models, is incredibly annoying. This was after I spent ages trying to figure out how to show the lighting on the perspective view in real time. This would be so I could freely rotate and change them to see how the light reacts. From what I've found, it seems you can't do this, which makes it harder to work with for me.

• Start Animating!
• I'll start this once the models are finished, since they're integral to how the animation will be created, and I can't replace the models once the animation has started to take form.
• I don't expect the animation itself will be too difficult, since I have a good idea of what I want for the animation from the storyboard, the difficult part of the animation in my opinion will probably be figuring out the tools to control the camera, and getting it into the right place.

A little side project...

So, I got bored one day and decided to sit down and do this. A little background information first...

It's a sword called Eluciator from one of my favourite anime series, Sword Art Online, or SAO for short. The synopsis of it is, set in the year 2022, a new Virtual Reality MMORPG is released called 'Sword Art Online'. 

One of the beta testers, Kirigaya Kazuto, as his in game avatar 'Kirito', goes online on the day of release, and finds he's unable to log out, as are all of the other 10,000 people logged on at that point. 

The creator of the game, Kayaba Akihiko, appears in game and reveals to everyone that they cannot log out, and if anyone on the outside removes their 'Nerve Gear', a VR headset, they'll die for real as the headset overloads their brain with microwave radiation. 

The nerve gear cuts off all signals from the brain and redirects them into the game, as their avatars senses and movements, so it becomes a truly immersive virtual world. They can feel, hear, smell and touch everything inside the world, except physical pain, because it is a game after all. 

The only way to log out is to complete the game's 100 floors and beat the final boss. Also, if their health reaches zero in game, they die for real.

Elucidator with polys

Anyway, back to the sword, it's Kirito's trademark weapon in the series, so I decided to try to model it:

For reference, I'll also include an image of what the sword actually looks like.

I ran into a couple of problems doing this model, chief of which was when I was extruding the sword guard, I wasn't paying attention to the rotation of the extrusion, so it came out crooked on the finished product. 

I've managed to flatten it out a little by moving the vertices around, but it's not perfect. You can see this in the third picture.

This was also the first model where I used the 'Attach' tool to join two mirrored halves of the sword guard together into one model, after which I collapsed the vertices to neaten it up and get rid of the seam between the two halves.

Elucidator without polys

I've also not used an orthographic view to help scale this, so the blade to hilt ratio might not be completely accurate, but I'm pretty happy with it as a whole. 

The crooked edges

What Elucidator actually looks like in game.

Finished models and commentary

So, having finally finished my models, it's time to post them up here, and talk about them a little:

1) Jawa Sandcrawler

This one caused me a few problems. Due to its weird slopes and angles it was difficult to get the vertices in the right place. I had to use additional source material to get it as close as I could to it.

The tracks took the longest to work out the best way to do them. In the end I decided to have them as 4 pieces of outside track which will later have an animated texture. It was the first one I started to model and the last one I finished.

The inner parts were fairly straight-forward, a cylinder here and there. This was a lot easier once I figured out how to make the model transparent.... My model lacks a few details such as the windscreen and a few raised areas, but my logic is these can be later bump-mapped and textured. I may add a few details before I start texturing it.

The final model:

without polys showing

With Polys showing

2) Luke Skywalker's X-39 Landspeeder

This one is my favourite of the three, and the last one I started to model. As such, I'd learned from previous errors and made the least while modelling it.. 

As far as differences to the source material, i didn't include the grills on the side of the speeder, as these can be bump mapped and textured later, to keep the model at a lower poly count. My friend in the 3D Modellling course at ARU suggested this as good practice, as well as gave me some tips on how to do so.

I decided to redo the rear end of the model, changing it from rounded like the front, to angled like it is now... This was because I forgot about it  while making other alterations and additions to the model.

This feature is close-ish to the original design of the speeder in the films and isn't something I originally noticed when starting to model it, hence my mistake in making the rear end rounded. I'm still not completely happy with how the wings turned out, they poke inside of the engines and they aren't as curved as I'd like them. For now, they will do though.

I could have chosen to do an open or closed cockpit for the speeder. I chose to do the open cockpit so I could add detail to the inside, as well as being able to see R2-D2 drive off into the distance when I start doing the animation, just personal taste really, though its also how you always see the speeder in the films.

The only little snag with this is the way I made the windscreen, which was to cut a sphere into a quarter and  extend the vertices backwards to make the shape it is now. Because of this, the normals are reversed on the inside of the sphere, so this will look different to the outside. This isn't particularly a problem in the animation since you won't see the inside of the windscreen, but if I later use this model for something else, where you can, I may have to do something about this.

To remake the rear end of the speeder I deleted the back polygons then created a new face using the bridge tool, rotated the polygons to the right angle and added the 'housing' seen in the 2nd picture. I also extended out the rear 'fin' as I wasn't correct in where I put it my first attempt seen in the 1st picture.

The speeder body, not the engines, is mirrored, and at this point I didn't know how to attach two models together so there are a couple of points where it doesn't look quite right where the two mirrors overlap, though I tried to minimise the occurrences of these.

The final model: 

Original Rear End

New Rear End

Speeder without polys showing

3) R2-D2 Astromech Droid

This was a fun one to do, because it's very simple shapes, and not many of them. One thing to bear in mind next time is keeping the poly efficiency good on the cylinders and basic shapes, which is a really simple thing, but wasn't something I'd thought about previously. Once it had been changed to an editable poly, I couldn't find a way to change the number of sides/segments etc. which was annoying...

There are a few different versions of R2 on the internet, I picked a fairly simple one, because there are lots of details on the legs. I may do another version later on with more detail, but not right now. Some of the details on the head and legs can possibly be bump mapped and textured in, which will also keep the poly count low.

I didn't use an orthographic view to help scale the R2 unit, because I couldn't find one that wasn't at an angle, like most times you see R2-D2. For this reason, the feet aren't to the right scale and larger than they should be. I'll make sure to get a better source image in future.

Final Model: 

R2-D2 with polys

R2-D2 without polys

Castle Updated

So, I've done a bit more on my castle in my own time. Here's the new version, with added moat and a plane for it all to rest on.

I used the Boolean tool to add the front gate in the guardhouse, seemed the easiest way to do it. However when I tried to do the same with the inner side walls next to the keep, to create arches, it created these extra edges which didn't look nice, but it's something to do with how the algorithm for the boolean tool works. How I can fix it, I haven't figured out yet, but I plan to add more stuff to this model, some houses inside the wall, and a drawbridge for a start.

I'm undecided on whether to make the castle taller so the drawbridge will fit, as the lake is a little far from the actual doorway. I could also just build a stone bridge over the moat, and a smaller gate over the door...

To get the moat I extruded the surrounding polygons on the plane downwards, and used the 'Relax' tool to make it seem more curved and natural, it was just a blocky sort of V shape before with a flat bottom beforehand.

Useful Tools

In these models I found no use for the Lathe tool mentioned in the lectures, and I only used the Boolean tool on my castle. I imagine it's more useful on architecture than ships...

Here are a brief list of the some useful tools I discovered while working on these:

• Insert Vertex - Under the 'Edges' menu, took me a while to find it... Very handy for setting up a model to mirror it, if the edges are uneven or in a strange place.

• Bridge - Used for connecting edges together, useful if you find out a polygon is missing. This was before I found out about another tool which does it better, and with more  edges selected. Bridge seems to have a limit of 2 edges... 

• Mirror - Very useful if your model is symmetrical or has features which are opposite and identical to each other. I found out later on that it's possible to attach mirrored objects together into one object, funnily enough called 'Attach', a better way than trying to line up the seams between the two objects. Though you still have to collapse a few vertices on the edges of the two mirrored objects where they join, using the Attach tool is neater in my opinion.

Retrospective on Week One and introduction to the Star Wars Modelling assignment.

Welcome to my first ever blog! First off, apologies to the reader for the lateness in posting this. Now onto the good stuff.
So, the first assignment is to create three models based on vehicles, ships etc. from the Star Wars Universe. My initial thoughts when we were shown the picture of the incredibly detailed Imperial Star Destroyer were along the lines of, "Oh god that thing is huge, how am I ever going to meet that kind of standard?" The answer is I'm not, not yet anyway.

Our first task in week one was to learn the basic tools and interface of 3D Studio Max, which was easy enough, as I've done a couple of weeks of Maya tutorials in my own time, I may even post up the two models I made during that time if I feel it is relevant at all, which it might not be since we're working in Max.
After learning the interface we were given an exercise to make a simple model of a house, which was easy enough, once I figured out where to connect the edges to. Here's the result of that...

House exercise

The exercise after that was to create a castle, and here is my first attempt, which is still incomplete when this blog is posted, but it's further along now.

Castle Work in Progress - first sucessful attempt.

The Upper keep is just a scaled down version of the lower one, before the door was added, and the walls were extruded out. You can't really see it from this angle, but there are stairs leading to a doorway from the side walls into the keep. I'm proud of my idea to do crenellations on the walls, and my friends like them too. I thought the flag was a nice touch...

On to the Star Wars stuff! I was toying for ages with ideas of what to model, and it stalled me from posting for a few weeks. Now though, I have a concrete idea of what to make for my three models, and a storyboard to go with it! 

But first, a research board with images for my first ideas for modelling on it:

Research Board

After much deliberation, I couldn't think of a reason to put the AT-AT walker on Tatooine with a Sandcrawler... What a shame, it would have been cool... Anyway, the models I'm going to make are the Jawa Sandcrawler, R2-D2 and the X-34 Landspeeder owned by Luke Skywalker. 

This is the storyboard of the animation I'm planning to make using them, each scene is numbered so I'll briefly explain each one below the picture.

Storyboard first draft

1 - Camera is above the Sandcrawler, you can see the landspeeder a short distance ahead.

2 - Camera pans down to the side as the Sandcrawler rumbles to a stop by the X-39 Landspeeder.

3 - The side exit of the Sandcrawler is focused on by the camera as the door slides to the side.

4 - The ramp extends out of the side of the sandcrawler.

5 - The camera pans in further as R2-D2 rolls out onto the ramp and descends.

6 - The camera pans around R2 as he reaches the bottom of the ramp to bring the landspeeder into view

7 - R2 begins to rise upwards next to the landspeeder

8 - R2 hovers over the top of the landspeeder as the camera slowly rotates towards the front of the landspeeder.

9 - The droid descends into the seat of the landspeeder.

10- The camera lowers so it is facing directly towards the front of the landspeeder, as it begins to accelerate towards the camera.

11-The camera rotates to face the rear of the landspeeder as it goes past. 

12- The landspeeder zooms off into the distance while the camera stays still.

END 

Hopefully I can fit all of that into 30 seconds...