Final evaluation

Now that my project is complete I have learned a lot during the process, not just about 3d max but about managing work load.

The story does not match my storyboard produced early in the semester, I have had to skip the whole pier part of the story. The uncompleted pier can be seen in the background of the bar scene. This is because I kind of planned to do too much. I had never worked on a character when I modelled, boned, rigged and skinned myself.

I ran in to so many complications with the characters on the way that I eventually ran out of time to build the rest of the scene. A large part of the problems was that when something went wrong, it wasn’t until a lot later that I noticed it I would end up having to back track 20 or so steps to correct it then re do all the work (I had to set 3d max’s undo limit to 30 just to make sure). This, however eventually worked in my favour as constantly doing things over and over meant I learned it very well, especially as I had to do it with 3 characters of different builds (man, woman, child. All characters are duplicates of those 3 models). I think if I were to do character animation again it would go a lot more smoothly due to this.

Looking back I realise now that I perceived quantity as meaning quality when realistically quantity actually hindered the quality. Next time I take on a project which involves new elements I think I will keep the amount of the new element limited to give me more time to refine it improving the over all quality.

Wit regards to the rest of the scene (what is finished) I am really happy with the way all the materials and lighting came out.

Over all I have really enjoyed this module and learned a lot, but it has by far been the most time consuming module yet with scene rendering taking hours (putting my computer out of action for the duration), my sleeping pattern now revolves around when 3d max is rendering (hence the reason this was posted ridiculously early). the one thing I didn't enjoy is adding the sound, if I am honest I find playing with sound mind numbingly boring.

My final piece

My final animation is complete.

The words are titles added in premier pro.

After Thursday, when you all pointed out the way the guy entered the boat, you will notice that I have fixed this problem. It was simply a case of moving a few keyframes.

Scene 1 final......finally

After rendering it no less tan 4 times here is scene one (I originally planned 3 but am only gonna have time for 2 due to a lot of character animation complications).

Scene two is to be tagged on the end and there are still a couple of sound effects need adding but other than that its almost done.

The camera cut is done in 3D max rather than in premier pro, I achieved this by putting the camera in one place in one frame and in another on the very next frame, I did this so that the movie could be rendered as one complete AVI rather than 2 separate ones to save time in editing.

the jets out the back of the boat are 2 'super sprays' that have a fall off material applied to them, this fall off material is what makes the colour turn white when the boat accelerates.

The lens flare on the sun was actually added as a 'post prod' effect in Adobe After Effects as I found I could get a lot more control over it there than I could using the lens flare available through Max’s Video Post.

The fade effects on the video and sound were added in premier pro and it is now awaiting the other scene.

Its life Jim, but not as we know it

Where do I start. Over the past 48 hrs (sleepless I might add) I have been Boning, Rigging and Skinning this young man. The rig is ridiculously complicated and every 5 mins something went wrong.

To control the bones There are a series of helpers all linked to individual bones and linked to each other in an order so that the character can be animated by manipulating only a few of the helpers. I have also been using the reaction manager to animate the fingers, Basically I can now clench the fists by simply changing a number in the Parameter collector.

As you can see from the video the man has a bad case of pancake syndrome. This has been caused by the fact that I did not make the mesh fat enough from the beginning, never mind. I am going to mess with the envelope values for a while to see if I can improve it but there is not enough time to re-model/rig/skin as I have 2 other characters to get through, they are build boned and rigged, just awaiting skinning (and then of course animated).

In total I have three scenes and the boat scene (1^st scene) should be the only area you can see the problem, I’m going to populate crowds in the other scene but no ones limbs should bend enough for there to be a problem.

I will keep you up dated.

I would like you to meet someone

Meet the family. I have created Mr, Mrs and Junior (who is unisex so he/she can be a boy or girl).

They have now all been bones, rigged and skinned and are ready to be animated. I have colour coded the bones because they are going to be duplicated a lot for the beach scene and when animating all the bodies will be hidden, just the bones will show so my poor computer doesn't have a heart attack, this way will make it easier for me to identify who is who.

I'm gonna start easy tho, just these three in my boat scene, maybe i will include some facial animation if I'm feeling brave.

character modeling

This is a (very) brief timeline of the process I have gone through to build my first charecter for my animation, this will be the child on the boat.

It began life as a box the same size as the torso and I extruded individual polys to make the arms, legs and the feet. then I used the slice tool to add additional vertices around the edge of the shirt and sleeves, i then scaled them to smaller and pulled them under the sleeves etc to make them look like the edge of the clothing.

When it comes to applying the texture, as i plan to use the same model over and over, I am going to assign all the individual polys with material ID's so that I can use the Multi/Sub material to easily change their clothes. but that is a way off yet (time is not on my side, dam this obsession with perfection).

You may of notice the lack of head! Well the body took about 6 hours and the book I am using to do this went on for an entire chapter to do the entire body, shoes, arms, fingers, torso legs clothes, all in a chapter, now there is a whole chapter on the head on its own so I reckon its gonna be a long night.

I have been trying to get the flag for the top of my boat to 'flap' properly in the wind whilst the boat creates a nice wake on the water as it speeds by, all goes well so far. I think in the wake video I have finally managed to get the sea to look just right, its defiantly the right colour of murky to be British.

Pier comming along nicely

A bit empty at the moment (bit like my beach)

Something is wrong here, it’s well nice down there on the beach and there is not a British person in sight! (I guess I should probably get on and create them really, anyone else starting to fell like they are playing god here?)

I have been working on my scene and trying to make the sea do as I want it to and this is my first test render. Still needs a lot of work but its getting there

This week I got a bit carried away, I somehow left the lecture thinking about lights, animation and timing sounds, all this whilst listening to some dance music on my journey home and the brain kind of got away from me a bit.Lesson one for me here was the curve editor, I spent a lot of time in the curve editor editing the lights on and off and their color at specific times and.
lesson 2 was tracking movements, the spot lights are linked to the boxes that house them so that i only need animate the box in a particular direction and the lights follow, the lasers are direct target lights and their targets are partly manually key framed and partly constraining to a path. lesson three was obviously timing it to the music, it was hard work and I have not done a lot else since leaving the lecture as I had to render, check, adjust, re-render and so on......

Not sure how well it will time with the music when streaming over the net but it does actually line up.

Enjoy

It ends a bit abruptly because basically by the time I had spent 60 hours to animate 45 seconds I kind of got the idea.

My mood board

What makes the British sea side, British?
After an afternoon on Brighton seafront freezing off some of my most precious assets I think I discovered some interesting points to consider during my animation. I believe the seaside alone is about contrasts, the blue sea and the brown sand (or stones), the smooth surface of the beach with the ever choppy outline of the sea or the warm sun with the cold water. This, however, doesn’t necessarily make it British, it makes it the seaside.

During my visit I was witness to many people still enjoying a day by the sea despite the chill, there were groups of people everywhere. This made me realize, We Brits spend all winter moaning how cold it is in this country, yet as soon as it warms up a bit in good o’l Blighty, we leave for another country! Perhaps what makes the seaside British is the people that are there not what is there, we are a resilient, stubborn people that are going to go to the beach no matter what. Its about being with the people we want to be with away form the bureaucratic straight lines of our normal lives, somewhere defies the logic of bureaucracy, a place where the dry meets the wet and there are very few symmetrical pavements for us to tred but where we can see the horizon, our permanent escape from the rain.

fruits of labour

Well this is my attempt at two apples at a rather odd shaped pear. The apple on the right is a perfectly formed granny smith grown in a particularly nice part of France, especially for a fruit and vegetable competition. The apple on the left is of the ‘Essex Chris Cook’ free range variety, grown for nothing more than the purpose of feeding me, however, it is of such quality that I am now considering letting it grace the shelves of Tesco, or if it is lucky, Morrisons.

All these fruits were created from spheres that were converted to editable poly’s, the vertices were then manipulated with soft selection activated to deform the original sphere and a mesh smooth was the applied to the poly. To finish it off with a material, a green and brown 'noise' map was added to the ‘diffuse map’ section and a 'speckle' was added to the bump map.

first thoughts

Fun!
I am looking forward to this module. Being fairly confident in 3d max already, hopefully this module will kick me in to learning techniques that I should have attempted to learn a long time ago. t will also be good to learn the correct way of animating.

The biggest thing that may prove to be my downfall is that I have a tendency to strive for perfection in 3d max and I am in danger of spending too long on certain elements and running out of time. I will not do that! (We will see).