Overall Evaluation

When I started this module, I had no existing knowledge what so ever of 3DS Max and now, I feel that I have learned more from this module than from any other one so far. The models that I have made I am very happy with and feel that they are to a high standard - I would not have changed anything in that respect. The animation I feel similarly about, however, had I had more time, I may have chosen to expand on it slightly to make it longer, or to make the special effects (fire, smoke, explosions etc.) look slightly better. However, considering that this is the first 3D animation that I have ever produced, I think the quality is very good. Managing to stick to my storyboard is something that has been achieved too - planning out the animation through the storyboard beforehand really helped the visual of the final animation.
My confidence has also increased a lot throughout this module. I now feel that I have the skills to make more models and short animations, and will continue to practice making models etc. over the summer.
If I could change something, it would be timekeeping. Although I allowed over a week for rendering, as I had heard rumours of how time consuming it can be, I would allow some more time next time, due to the amount of times that I had to re-render particularly big and detailed scenes, taking up several machines in the process.
Rendering was definitely the part of the module that I found the most difficult - the errors that were involved and the amount of time it took where I could do nothing else was quite stressful. However, the end result still came out looking good and luckily I had allowed some time to re-render in case things went wrong. The part that has been the most enjoyable for me was creating the models. Allowing my creative side to come out for the brief to design and make the models to be in my animation was very fun - particularly for the buildings and the scenery.
Overall, I have enjoyed this module very much and am looking forward to creating more models, more animation and learning new techniques next year.

Almost Finished

For (hopefully!) the final day of working on this animation, the final clip has been put into Adobe Premiere along with the background music that I am going to be using. The final clip has once again rendered only as one second long when it is meant to be much longer, so is being re-rendered over several workstations to hopefully take the strain off a bit, as it's a large file yet quite a short clip, but a vital part to my animation's story. The song chosen for the background music is the Halo 2 Theme by Steve Vai. This song has been chosen because the track begins being quite calm and fairly relaxed then suddenly gets very fast paced and crazy, which fits in well with how my animation goes. The song is going to be cropped down to the right time and fade out at the end, once the final clip has been put into the animation.

Using Adobe Premiere Pro

To combat the issue of not being able to view and edit my .avi files properly, the MAC operating system is being used instead of Windows.

Due to some rendering issues, parts of two particularly large scenes have had to be re-rendered in separate sections of about 200 frames each in order for them to work properly and not cut any bits out. Although the animation looks okay without these extra parts, as I have made them and am on track time wise I have decided to spend yet more time rendering them out to ensure that they are included, as I feel that then it will make my animation complete. These are being pieced together with other scenes in Adobe Premiere Pro, and I am trying my best to get them exactly on the right frame so that the video doesn't look choppy and glitchy in places. A plain black title screen with my SID no and the title of the production have been included at the beginning of the animation, and an ending screen which will be plain black when the tank flies into the camera.
The next step after all of these files have been pieced together properly will be to pick a song for the video, edit it if needs be and then add the final sound effects.

Final Scene

To finish off my animated short, the final scene includes an explosion while the tank is still spinning out of control and while the fire is still spreading to the barrels loaded with gunpowder. The tank flies at the camera and the scene ends with a black screen. Once again, one of my most valuable tools has been used: the super spray. This created the explosion, as the only other way I could find to create a decent looking explosion was using a plug-in, for which I don't feel familiar enough with to use yet (maybe something to try out over the summer ready for next year).

With this final scene finished, all that is left to do is render my scenes. I have been trying to render scenes as I go along, but I have had difficulty with this, so only one has come out successful (due to the machines hibernating when I've had to leave them unattended overnight or the program freezing and corrupting the render). I have decided on using HDTV 720 x 1280, uncompressed, default scanline renderer for every frame.

Once these renders have been finished, I will get the video finished in one session using Adobe Premiere on the Macs (I will do it in one session because as my files are so large, they have to be copied to the desktop to even play and then they still need to buffer to do so, so to save copying and pasting files each time I login, it would be preferable to just finish within one sitting). But until the files are completed, I will try and re-familiarise myself with Adobe Premiere Pro and look up the sound files and music to be accompanied with my video. Hopefully there will be no more rendering issues in the meantime!

Camera Path

Using a camera technique that was learned in one of our tutorial sessions, I have made the camera follow a path that the tank is following. When practicing this technique in lessons, it gave a roller coaster style effect, which I found to look very effective. In lessons, I found it quite difficult to get to grips with as the end result always looked too fast and jolting for my liking, but I have managed to get the timing and the camera angles to the right settings that I would like for this scene, without hopefully giving the viewer motion sickness! Using a camera with a more narrow depth of field I think has helped to make the difference with it this time.

More Super Spray

To add some more flames and smoke in my next scene to show the fire spreading, more super sprays with mesh particles have been used. I have cloned the fire and smoke that was used for the first flame in my previous scene but adjusted the settings appropriately so that the fire is larger and looks like it is continuing to grow as it spreads. The same is with the smoke - it is proportional to the size of the fire that it is emerging out of. Once again facing particles have been used and the same materials as in the previous scenes.

Creating Fire

For the final part of this scene, I have been making a small fire, which will eventually spread and grow bigger in the next scene. A super spray has been used again, but with slightly different settings to the smoke. Mesh particles have been used again so that it can be seen what the fire looks like and for the particles to be facing. I have changed all of the paticles on my other super sprays to facing because no matter how you look at the super spray, you will always be able to see the fire particles as they were meant to be.

The rotation and collision drop-down in the modify panel has had its settings slightly changed for the fire. Although I originally used an online tutorial to create smoke and to generally get the settings needed for the super spray, through making smoke a couple of times I have learnt what the settings are and how they effect the spray. So now that I am creating the fire, I have managed to guess by looking at the settings what digits roughly I need to input to get the desired effect.

For the rotation and collision tab, the variation option is particularly useful for fire. When playing through the fire on the timeline, each time the particles move and change, they never do so in exactly the same way, just like real fire. The particles also spin in 180 desgrees, once again adding realism to the fire.

The frame settings have been adjusted so that the fire starts growing when the smoke has been growing for a few frames, then it suddenly grows bigger and brighter. The amount of frames it grows for should be about 20, but this may be changed later, as well as when the fire ends.

To create the material for the fire, a face map and gradient has been used. This allows for multiple colours to be shown in the fire. Orange and yellow have been used because although many people think that fires have red parts, you can never really see red in a flame.

The texture has had it's glossiness decreased and its opacity increased and the diffuse colour changed. The diffuse setting has been set slightly higher as well.

The gradient type has also been adjusted to radial and noise has been added to make the fire look more realistic. These settings make the particles look more vivid and separated, instead of just a chunk of particles put together. Like when noise was added to the floor texture, the texture itself looks more rough and 3D.

Here is the final result of the fire when it gets going. It can be seen how the particles have been adjusted so that it looks more like the burning embers of a fire, compared to the smoke where the particles are more transparent and merge together.

Reactor

For my fourth scene, the main focus is the barrels being knocked over by the tank and starting to ignite. To make the barrels fall over on impact from another object, the reactor tool has been used, as well as the curve editor, to give the effect of the barrels falling over and gravity affecting the speed/way that they fall.
I have made the barrels fall in all different directions depending on where the tank impacts on the barrels. I have tried to vividly imagine this and have put a lot of thought into how the movement would look if it was really happening. The curve editor has helped with the visualisation too and has allowed me to get all of the movements more precise than just simply using the timeline.
The camera used is a 200mm, so that the view is very close-up of the tank and the barrels. However, because of how effective the barrels look when they fall and roll around on the ground, I may change the angle of the camera so that more of the scene can be captured. Although I chose a close-up front view for the storyboard, as it doesn't seem to show as much detail as I would like, I may change this later on when the smoke and fire have been completed.

To make the smoke, another super spray has been used. The settings have been adjusted slightly to make a smaller trail of grey smoke, compared to the big dark smoke cloud that was used for the tank. The colours for the gradient have been adjusted in the material editor to do this, while the settings for the size of the particles etc. have been adjusted in the modify menu. For the next scene, the smoke will gradually increase in size as the fire increases, but for this particular scene, the smoke will remain more or less the same throughout.

Note: I call each different shot - as is seen in my storyboard - a scene because it is much easier to create all of the different camera shots in separate files, as well as minimising the program's crashing rate. It is also a lot easier during the rendering stage, as different machines can be used for each scene.

Rendering Problems

I have been rendering the scenes as I go along and make them, on a seperate computer. When they are finished, the avi. file is not only laggy, but sometimes cuts out frames that I have definitely rendered. I have re-checked the renderer settings several times, changed minimal things, got help from peers and still the files aren't working properly. I am not the only one with this problem but as the end of semester grows nearer it is worrying that I may run out of time. So if anyone else who may read this has any suggestions please let me know.

Edit: Found out that running the files off the desktop is necessary due to the large file size. Even when importing into Premiere this needs to be done. However, have adjusted the render from mental ray to the standard scanline, as the files that I have rendered this way in HDTV 1280x720 have been less likely to be corrupt, as even some renders in the mental ray renderer have been corrupting.

Path Constraint

For the third camera that I am using (and technically my third short scene), the tank spirals out of control, spinning around while it moves and still emitting lots of thick dark smoke around the scene in all directions as it moves. This camera shows the tank from a high angle, using a standard lens (as has been done in all of the other scenes) so that everything can be captured. A path constraint has been made for the tank to follow, in which it spins around at varying angles every few frames, and occassionally even changes the direction on the path that it is spinning. The speed that the tank is going varies as it goes around the path. The smoke will also be following the path and the tank, but as the tank is spinning, the smoke will also be spiralling in many directions and will be left trailing behind the tank until the particles disappear into the air.

Particle Super Spray

To make the smoke that is going to be emitting from my tank as it starts to malfunction, I have been using a particle system with a super spray. Using a tutorial that I found online to make cigarette smoke (which I practised using the super spray with) as a basis for what to do now, I have been modifying the settings to create the smoke. As can be seen by the render, the smoke originally started as a fairly thin and transparent smoke, but I wanted it to become thick and black like the smoke that would come out of an engine. To adjust this, the speed and variation has been increased, as well as the material colours.
To create the colours in the smoke, a gradient has been used to create three colours for the smoke to change, to show it thickening. The particle timining has been adjusted so that it appears and disappears in the frames that I want it to. The particle size has been increased and a particle pre-set used to get the desired effect.

Because the tank is going to moving and spinning about in lots of directions to show it malfunctioning, there was no need to use the drag and wind techniques that I learned from doing the cigarette smoke tutorial, as the smoke is linked together with the tank and the smoke trailed behind the tank as it moved and spun around, eventually fading.

The smoke has been assigned to the gap in between the pieces of wood in the part where the door opens and closes. Originally it was going to seep out through the peep hole, but the smoke emerging from the gaps around the door had a better effect. The smoke emerges thin and gradually at first, but it gathers speed quickly, getting thicker as it comes out of the tank. The smoke has been made to move in the way that it does by loading up one of the presets.

This render shows the thickness, colours and the particle size of the tank's smoke. The background appears white as it has been frozen for the whole creation of the animation process, so that it cannot accidentally be selected and moved. Now that the tank has been finished along with the moving smoke, the camera has a gradual zoom-in as the tank malfunctions and spins out of the scene ready for the next camera to view it from a different angle.

Finalised Lighting

The lighting has finally been adjusted to what I want it to be. I discarded the daylight system, due to the washed out effect that it gave all my buildings, which erased all of the detail of the texturing. It has been replaced with an omni light, which is positioned high above the scenery, like the sun would be at about midday. To create some softer shadows, another omni light has been included just behind the camera to give the other buildings some more light and to dull down some of the harsher shadows.
There was some problems with the lighting where the floor was concerned: the floor was either appearing washed out or was not being illuminated at all - just replaced with the background colour. To combat this issue, the floor was re-made and scaled down, with some extra noise added to create bumps and make it look more realistic and un-even.
I started off using just a skylight at a high point in the sky above the scene to be seen as a sun, but this did not give the type of overcast conditions that I was looking for and for a standard 12pm day in the summer, so the omni lights were tested and gave the desired effect.

Rendering

I have tried rendering my scene so far, just to see what it looks like, and for only 180 frames it is taking a very long time, compared to the modelling part, to render. Because of this, I am going to speed up the amount of time left to animate and try to leave a week for rendering alone. To hopefully make the process a bit quicker, I will render the scenes seperately (maybe 100 frames at a time in the range panel) then save them with appropriate names, so that they can then be pieced together in Adobe Premiere or After Effects. This will not only save time, but as the labs in university aren't open all the time, this seems to be the only way for me to do the scene.

Camera Movement

I have now begun the filming of my animation using a simple free camera to begin with. I have been careful to make sure that the positioning of the camera does not give away the illusion of the scene (by filming the top of the background images, for example) and before the objects are going to begin moving, I have started by using a sweeping camera movement to set the scene.
The camera is being viewed in the top left-hand view, so that it can be seen what the scene looks like through the camera lens. I have started off with a high angled shot, which sweeps down to a long, straight-on shot by frame 150, then zooms in slightly on the next 20 or so frames, which is when the relevant movemnt will begin.
As I currently have a good visual in my mind of how the cameras are going to work (I thought it out quite thoroughly in my mind during the pre-production stage, mainly when the storyboard was being created), but if I find that it is needed later on, I will write or draw what camera angles and movements need to be used to give the effects that I want for the scene.
When I begin to animate the tank, to get more of an idea of how the tank moves usually, I have been watching videos on youtube to try and see which parts move how, so that when the tank spirals out of control later on I can make it as historically accurate as possible. One useful one that I have found today is from Assassins Creed Brotherhood:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txb6haeNvgc

It helps that I have played the game, but with never really analysing how the tank moves, I can now look at videos to remind myself. To animate this, I have been grouping and ungrouping sections of the tank so that when it needs to be animated, if certain parts just need to be adjusted, it can easily be done using this tool.

With the tank, I have been using isolation mode for editing certain parts. With the door starting off open and then needing to be closed, it begins as being a seperate group to the tank, then after the animating of the door, will be grouped back together with the rest of the tank. The metal parts of the door that are holding it open are the same: they are a seperate part until they retreat back into the interior of the tank, which is when they become part of the big group again. So far, the tank is spinning slowly, then, as the camera reaches it, the tank's door begins to close. The tank stops spinning and the door is completely closed.

Lighting Adjustments

As the rendering for the scenery is something that I am not 100% happy with, I have decided to try and modify this, as to show more detail in my buildings. When modelling and animating the scenery, the detail in the textures of the buildings is exactly as the bitmaps are, including the colour and bumps. But when it is rendered with the current daylight settings, all of the detail of the buildings and the floor seems to be virtually removed, due to being dazzled in light. As I want my render to allow my textures and scenery to look as similar as possible to what it looks like when I am in the creation stage, the lighting and rendering settings will be reviewed once the animation is completely finished, to see what works best with the camera angles, movement etc.
For now, what I have done is adjusted the self-illumination of my textures that provide the background imagery. As these are simply background images, that shouldn't be affected by my lighting anyway, under the self-illumination tab on the material editor, I have raised the colour to 100. This way, these parts no longer need to be worried about for affecting the lighting of the rest of the scene, such as when one side is covered in shadow.
I will continue to do some research into lighting techniques so that when the animation is complete, I can make the lighting as realistic as possible, but still with detail. I have been reading some books over the break about 3DS Max animation and cameras in general, so I will now continue onto lighting, as I feel this to be one of my weaknesses at the moment in the program.

My Completed Scenery

 

This is three different views from my draft renders of the scene. This is using the standard draft rendering and with the standard sunlight and skylight settings applied, with the times and date as mentioned before. The render shots show the different views of the scenery and the objects contained within them. I may adjust the lighting more slightly as I'm not 100% happy with the shadows and how the buildings look less detailed with different tones, as well as the texture of the floor appearing virtually non-existant.

Lighting Decisions

For the lighting in my scene, I have been using the Daylight System that we learnt about when starting to use Metal Ray Rendering. I have chosen to use the daylight system to make the lighting in the scene look as realistic as possible, and also because the country can be selected, as well as the month, year and time of day. I have selected Venice, Italy as my location purely because it is the closest city on the map to Florence, Italy, where my scene is set. I have chosen 08/08/2011 as my date and 13:30 as my time, when the sun should be at a high point.

The compass and the light have been moved so that maximum light is available for my scene. The light source is virtually directly above the city due to the time of day, and it is aiming inwards, so that the lighting will be behind the camera, which is one of the main rules when photographing and filming locations. This will be the right angle for virtually all of my camera shots.

This is the resulting render from using the daylight system, but with metal ray sunlights and skylights chosen. A sky has been added into the background as well as a floor for the surrounding area, but I am still unsure if the render for this particular setting shows the right tones and enough detail. I prefer what it looks like before the render more so than the render itself.

Using the standard sunlight and skylight settings produces the above render result. The tones and textures of the buildings are a lot closer to the original than the metal ray rendering, so it is more likely that I will be using this instead. The shadows may need to be adjusted slightly so that they are not quite so intense, but this render definitely is more of the result that I am looking for.

Assembly

I have been using the Group > Assembly > Assemble tool to group objects together. I have started on the floor, so that, if needed, the floor can simply be moved away in order to edit other parts of the scene. I am also applying this to the buildings, the tank and the barrels. The good thing with this tool is that parts can also be disasembled, which will be needed during some parts of the animating. It would have been preferable to start doing this earlier before all of my elements were merged into the same scene, but as I've only just discovered this tool, I will try my best to apply it correctly now.

Inserting Other Models Into The Scene

Now that the scenery for the town has been completed, I have begun to merge my existing models into the scene. The amount of polys is now around 520, 000 and the number of verts around 380, 000, so moving objects and generally viewing the scene is taking longer as things are slow loading up and generally editing, so time management may be more of an issue now more so than before, due to software limitations.
One problem I have found when merging existing models into a scene is that the textures can sometimes be a problem. As in the screenshot above, I have inserted the barrels that I have made into the scene with textures already applied, yet they do not appear to be there. They appear when I am rendering the scene, but if I decide that I need to change one slightly, I cannot do so without the materials being present in the material editor. Also, as rendering is now taking a few minutes for the scene rather than a few seconds, it is more time efficient that I can actually see the materials on my objects, rather than having to render each time to see the effects.

The tank has now also been merged into the scene, but with no problems viewing the materials on the tank this time, unlike with the barrels. I have been using the orphographic wireframe view to ensure that all of the objects in the scene, including the buildings, are all on the right level, so that things dont sink through the floor while I am animating. Making use of all of the different viewpoints has made positioning and alignment a lot easier, especially using the wireframe, while the perspective view without wireframe shows what my models look like in their entirity.

Problem Solving

Now that my scenery has progressed and I have begun to merge all of my models together and increase the detail of them, my home laptop has decided that it can no longer cope. While doing some work, the program decided to crash (2011 32-bit version) due to the amount of polys etc. that are now being used. So now I am slightly more limited in where I can do my work, and even some of the computers in the labs are going slower than usual. Because of this, I am saving at least a week at the end of the semester for rendering my final animation, and am going to ensure that I get the majority of the modelling and animating done by the end of the easter break, then do all of the blogging after. This way, hopefully any further problems that I encounter, due to the program not being able to cope/crashing and losing some of my work, will be rectified. I will also ensure from now on to back up every single time that something gets changed, and to keep multiple back-ups of my work incase one of them becomes corrupted.

More Buildings

Constructing my scene so far is going well. I have noticed the program getting slower, so am expecting to encounter some crashing in the near future, maybe due to the amount of polys and vertexes that are now being used, from the detail on all the buildings and the background combined. Although I have only been cloning and re-arranging the set of the buildings that I have recently developed, the scene I feel is still looking quite impressive and what I planned it out in my storyboard and other sketches to look like. I will continue to develop this further by adjusting the lighting, importing other features into the scene and possibly adding some other features to the street if I deem that necessary later on (I will look at some more pictures of streets in Venice from the 15th century to see what things there normally were).

Adding The Background

I have now begun to make the background for my scenery. As Florence is a busy town with lots of buildings and I do not have the time to make a whole town, I am going to place bitmap images onto a box shape, then adjust where they need to be positioned according to the angle of the camera. As long as three of the angles are covered, then this should hopefully work out.

The first problem that I encountered was when finding the images to be used: the images weren't of a substantial size for my original box for the background. As a result of this, the background was made slightly smaller, but still big enough, to accomodate the sizes of the images that I was using and to prevent them from being blurred. They were then cloned, with the image being mirrored so that it all looks like one big background. When testing out the camera, if needed, I will add on some extra sky using Photoshop, but hopefully this won't be an issue. The lighting will also need to be adjusted accordingly so that it looks like daytime, but as we have already done this when using metal ray rendering, it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Floor Texturing

For the texture of the ground for my scenery, I have used a stone/rock texture, that has been applied to a box shape and cloned many times to cover the area that I need. I have cloned it lots rather than using one big plain as when I first did this, even when applying UVW Mapping, the floor still looked blurred and the texture quality was poor. This way, it looks more realistic. However, I have had to be very precise when aligning all of the pieces together to prevent overlapping.

Textures

Have found a very good site for the kind of textures that could be used in my animation. Some of them are similar to the style that I am using and would fit in very well with scenery of the time era that I am looking at.

For my own reference, in case I lose the link:

http://www.mb3d.co.uk/mb3d/maxTextures_Home_-_Free_Seamless_and_Tileable_High_Res_Textures.html

SWOT Analysis

SWOT Analysis of my work so far:


Strengths

• Can stick to deadlines and am keeping good progress so far.
• When work needs to be done, I will do it and sacrifice other things to do so.
• Bit of a perfectionist.
• Keen eye for detail.
• Have some good models so far as a good basis for the animation.
• I am enthusiastic about 3D animation and am enjoying it immensely, which makes the work a lot easier.
• Am now familiar with 3DS Max's interface and with many of the tools used.
• Good mark from the first part of the assignment, which I am very pleased with!

Weaknesses

• Tend to focus on one particular module above others (good for this module but not so good for keeping the workflow up to date with the others - it'll catch up with me eventually).
• Have used 3D Max so far mainly for modelling, so not as confident with animation.
• Only animation that I have done so far has been 2D and in Flash.
• Pressure to keep up with the high grade from the first assignment so that I can still keep an A grade.
• Rendering time will be longer for animating, so need to leave some extra time at the end to allow for this.

Opportunities

• Learning how to use a program that is used in the industry to create 3D models and animation.
• Have learnt a variety of modelling, animation, design and texturing techniques: covering a wide area for future career choices and having all of this available to show at potential job opportunities.
• Am now familiar with the 3DS Max interface.
• Growth in confidence with creating 3D - especially with modelling.
• A program that I enjoy using.
• A new possible career, as I feel that I am good at 3D modelling and really enjoy it.

Threats

• The job market: when coming out of uni will there be many jobs relating to 3D available?
• Stress from work overload.
• All of my back-ups somehow being destroyed.
• The program crashing and losing some of my work.
• Not keeping up to date with everything.

First Finished Set of Buildings

Front View

Rear View

The screenshots above show the completed buildings for one side of the street where my animation is going to take place. Upon viewing the screenshots, I am debating whether to make the gap between some of the buildings slightly smaller, in case it proves a problem later on when the tank is viewing around and seeing the rest of the scenery. For the other side of the street and at one end of the street (as the animation will only be shot from one end, there will be no need to include buildings at the other end too) I will be cloning the buildings and re-arranging them, so that I don't have to spend more time modelling, but the re-arrangement is so that it isn't completely obvious to the audience that the buildings have been cloned.

Further Progression of Modelling

I have been pushing on with making my buildings for the road where my animation is going to take place. I have been making another building today, using mainly elements from the first building, but by adjusting the textures and the colouring slightly. The screenshot above shows where I have had to include more polygons in the top part of the building, so that I can correct a part where a section is sticking out. The sticking out part suited the alignment of the first building, but as the lower part has slightly different dimensions in this building, this part needs to be adjusted accordingly.
Another problem that I encountered today was in the material editor. All of the locations of the bitmaps for my materials could not be found, so I had to re-locate all of these for the main bitmap and for the bump bitmap, so that all of the materials look the same as before.

As I don't want the windows to all look too similar, I have been changing little features of them for the last couple of buildings that I have been making. The top part has changed colours slightly, and for the smaller windows, the edging has had a brick texture applied. For some windows that will be on the side of the latest tall building, the shape has been changed and the image used has needed to be adjusted so that the quality of the bitmap itself is not impacted by the framing adjustments. However, I am using the same bitmap images for the windows and doors that were used in the original model, to ensure consistency throughout the buildings, as the majority of the buildings in this time era and especially in the same area had very similar doors and windows.

My next task has been too adjust the brickwork so that all the different boxes and other shapes that I have made are consistent with each other in terms of textures. As some of the brickwork has been coming up slightly different sizes, I have made note of the exact measurements of length, width and height and am inputting the numbers to the needed sections, using the UVW Mapping tool. The majority of the mapping has been using box mapping, but certain parts have required the alignment to be changed. Although this detail may not be the most noticeable thing during the animation, I would prefer it all to be correct to make the animation seem more realistic.

For the brickwork on some of the roofs, UVW Mapping has once again been applied, but the parameters have been changed so that there is no distorting the image. Also, Cylindrical Mapping has been used so that the brickwork is in the right position, rather than all of the bricks simply going in the same direction. I may look for some more slightly varied brick textures for the roofs, however, the problems that I found before were either that the angle the photo was taken was not efficient to create a texture from, of that the image was watermarked and required a payment to get the un-watermarked image. If this is the case again, I can edit the existing images that I have in Photoshop, just to vary the texture and colour settings slightly.

Reactor

Today, we have been using the reactor tool in our animation. The reactor tool is used to edit the mass, friction etc. so that when an object moves, these things are taken into account. Firstly, we simply made a box fall from a strange angle onto another flat box, which forms the surface. the objects needed to be grouped into a rigid body collection and the mass of the box needed to be adjusted. The gravity could also be adjusted if it was needed to be.

Next, we had a model of a bowling alley to animate. Firstly, the mass of the pins and the bowling ball needed to be adjusted appropriately: the pins had a mass only half of that of the bowling ball. We also needed to adjust the position of the ball in the first 5 keyframes so that it is rotated slightly to have the momentum to move down the alley. The Col. Tolerance also needed to be adjusted so that the pin wouldn't simply fly everywhere, so it was changed to 0.5, which was the lowest that it could go. Originally, I had the problem of one of the pins falling through the floor, but after adjusting where the pin was slightly, this problem was combatted. The pins and ball still fall off of the end of the alley, but only because of the length and width of the ground.

Modelling The Scenery

I have now begun to model my scenery that will be needed for my animation. I have begun by adding on an extra building to the end, using the roof from one building, the windows from another and the brickwork from the third. Some UVW Mapping needed to be applied again to ensure that the bricks went the right way round, but apart from that and some alignment, not much has been needed to be done so far. I have also left a gap between the two buildings because some buildings in Italy have narrow gaps between buildings, to allow for shortcuts. This also adds some more variety to my models, rather than having them all terraced and joined up.

Progression of Town

For the scenery in my animation, I am needing to expand on my model of three buildings. The sketch above shows the rough plan that I am going to use to make the rest of these buildings. All of the buildings are going to have very similar brickwork and features, as many of the buildings from this time period were very similar. However, to be more creative than simply cloning the three buildings that I have already made, I am going to use features (e.g. windows, shapes etc.) and mix and match them together to make a set of new connecting buildings. I aim to have them look similar to the sketch above, then this set will be cloned/rotated/shifted around slightly for the other side of the street in which my production will take place. I will then use some more of these buildings, if needed, for the background of my animation, depending on how the camera looks. I will also find a decent texture to use for the brickwork on the floor, and a photo or two for the background.

Morpher

Today, we learnt how to use the morpher tool. Starting off, we had a model of a basic human head, which was then converted into an additional poly and cloned (as a copy) three more times. Using the polygon selector, the bottom part of the mouth was selected. Then, using the grow tool in the editable poly menu, the rest of the lower jaw was selected. This could then be moved to make the mouth more open. I renamed each of the heads according to what was going to affect them, which was an open mouth, closed eyes and raised brows. Once all of these had been edited, the morpher tool was then applied. This was firstly applied to the original head, with the slots being filled with the other heads and how much was adjusted.

This was then smoothed using the turbo smooth, to make it look more shaped like a head, and then the auto key was enabled to begin animating. The only problem with animating is that on the timeline, we cannot see which feature is being animated, as all of the keys are the same colour. To combat this, the curve editor is opened and all of the different movements can be seen and adjusted seperately. For the animation, I made a short clip of 100 frames showing a person opening their eyes and mouth, then closing them again as they raise their brow - a bit like someone starting to wake up in the morning. To ensure that the animation is fluid, I made sure that all of the movement settings on the first and last frame of the animation were exactly the same.