Week 12

Evaluation

The biggest problem of the evaluation is that the animation is not smooth. This was a big mistake as this was done because of a stupid mistake that i forgot about the time configurations early and then forget that I could carry on with the selected animation and then render in different camera angles. However doing this was easier as the program kept crashing and was very slow, which should not happen but this was partially fixed by changing the display drive to software but this made the program hard to use as the graphic for modelling and animations was difficult to work with. However there is a range of camera techniques which makes it alight.

A technique that i should of added was a particle system called P Array





This technique would have been used to make an object explode as you can change the particle colour and with the object breaking in pieces, this could be used at great effect while animating the object and then you animate the object to disappear with the explosion to give the shock effect to the audience. However due to time constraints unable to achieve and trying to add that to the storyboard.

Week 11

Maya vs 3ds Max



It seems that the modelling the games assets is easier in 3ds max but the animation and rigging is better in Maya.
The reason for this is that the interface suggest that their is less emphasises in modelling because in 3ds max you can select an object and then you can edit  polygons, vertexes and edges, also add lots of modifiers. However in Maya there is less emphasises in editing the model as there is not as much tools to use when editing. In my opinion is suggested that 3ds max is more for modelling as the default view has four view points which increase accuracy instead of the single view port by default.
The animation on the other hand, Maya seems to have a lot more tools for animation and riggings, and having more emphasises using python coding to help doing this,as the coders could possibly make their own tools, while there is less coding in 3ds max as the default window is small for coding and there is less tools for animation.


In my experience 3ds max seems easier to learn as it is more descriptive and less reliance on icons, also the modelling tools in 3ds max is easier and therefore might as well do the animation there as well. However the games industry can depend on what program they use but they might go and use 3ds max as it has a 'larger user community' (Techy Help,2014).
Research used:
using both programs
Mark Masters, Januray 2015, 3ds Max vs Maya,[online] http://blog.digitaltutors.com/3ds-max-vs-maya-is-one-better-than-the-other/ [avaliable :10/12/2015]
Techy Help, March 20th 2014, should i learn 3ds max or Maya [video on-line]  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9lkPiGdDRA  [available 10/12/2015]

Week 11
Having discover the animation time constant the construction of the animation has increased even those having to redo the animation.

The first part is the close up of the tie interceptor as this will give the audience shock and horror of seeing an evil character as the close up of the vehicle makes the vehicle look big and menacing.


The second part is a close up to the side of the landspeeder and then the camera moves to a medium shot of the landspeeder in where the landspeeder moves. This shot was to show the reaction of the landspeeder and to introduce the landspeeder as quite weak as the camera is looking down to the landspeeder. However the animation is good until the end because at the end the movement stops so when this transitions to the next scene it will look unrealistic which will lower the quality of the animation.


part three was a back view of the action as it showed the tie interceptor chasing the land speeder and some lasers shooting from the tie interceptor . this scene has the same problem as in scene two as in the end the landspeeder came to a stop as it was the end of the animation, this can be solved in the video editing by cutting the clip or by extending the animation and then rendering less.
The camera change might not be great when putting it together as camera transition like the change from 2 to 3 would be ok, if the clips was shorter in length as that will show and give the viewer the feeling of action. However as scene three is longer it looser the feeling of 'on the edge of you seat' as referenced from the mood board. The lasers could also have the intensity of the glow effect or having the laser a bit bigger to make it easier to see the lasers in this scene as the camera shot is quite wide.

The lasers missing the target was planned as every enemy in star wars can not hit the target.


Part four was when the landspeeder had a near miss of a laser and this shot would give the feeling of the mood board which was the animation target. This scene could be improved if the laser hit an engine and then us MASS FX rigid body to have the engine explode into pieces but due to time constants and it was not planned in the storyboard means that is was not done,



Part Five is the worst as the scene drags on as this is shot in a wide shot it shows the how insignificant the battle is as they are two objects in a large land. However the shot is poorly done as the movement of the tie interceptor is janky when it does the 360 spin to get behind the land speeder and then does movement which would not be possible on a ship and this decreases the quality of the animation. The good thing is the camera moves as well with the objects to help capture the action without the use of animation the FOV which will make the objects even smaller.




Part Six is an extreme close up of the X-wing with the camera following the x-wing. At the start of this part, the camera is just staring at the sky which gives tension as the viewer will not be expecting what is in the clouds. Then the camera is an extreme close up to the x-wing.

Overall the animation needs more polish but due to time constraints and problems with 3ds max will no be able to. The Major problem of this animation is the camera transitions as some of this could be better instead of having a new work file with a totally different angle. The good thing is that there is a range of camera angles and positions which shows the diverse knowledge of camera work.

Week 10

Shows a close shot of the tie interceptor which when the ship moves past the static camera the view gets wider. The ship moves on a movable spline. The ship moves a bit unnatural as there is a lack of rotation in the ships move and the lighting is a bit unnatural but the camera work in that scene works as it give the sense of power as the ship looks big as it take up a lot of the camera and is travelling down as it is looking like it is about to chase or attack a target.

The use of the path constraint instead of the set key, key, do the action and set key, can be more useful as using a ground vehicle on an uneven surface would have a need of the auto grid to avoid movement through the ground.

To add to the animation there will be laser fire from the tie interceptor. To make this is by assigning a material id to an cylinder while painting it white then add a lens effect called glow on that id to give the laser its glow. This should be added in the final animation.


In the second scene the camera has a close up on the land speeder and it then zooms out by changing the FOV by animating the FOV by using AutoKey. This will give the viewer the expression of danger and shock which was an objective from the mood board to achieve. And then later on the Land speeder Moves away quicker than the tie interceptor initially to give a sense of anticipation as the viewer would expect the tie interceptor to follow the land speeder imminently.

After that in the third scene there is a mixed of a close up and a wide shot as the camera moves to another position quickly to capture the land speeder and the tie interceptor. This was planned to be a first person shot from the tie interceptor but the doing the shot was difficult while rotating the tie interceptor and the program keeps on crashing. I also found out a 3DS Max code to delete all frames at once by using 'deletekeys objects # allkeys'
The movement of the objects have been difficult to get it persice as even those I have locked axis so the depend on the object can not move along that locked axis, the program is still slow and jumps. A reason by this that using the display drive of Direct3D 11.0 for AMD HD cards seem to be not optimised as AMD has not realised an update for their cards that will work well with 3DS Max 16. another possible reason is that using the a height map for the ground has resulted in too many polygons and therefore requires a lot more resources on the animation.

Week nine

Camera Animiation technique

The animation of the camera will be done by using the path constraints to move the camera easeir during animation. This can be used to have zoom outs/in to change a camera shot or by follow the action in action scenes in animation. Issues of animating the camera is getting the speed right when using the camera animation to capture pursuit scenes as too slow will make the camera have a very long shot which might not be the effect I want or too fast in which the action will be missed so it needs to match the speed of the vehicles but this can depend on the camera shots needed as some shots might require the vehicles to overtake to have a close up and then a long shot to capture the speed of the vehicles.
Another problem will be that the camera could easily clip through the ground as the ground is bumpy so this means moving in a straight line could end up going through the ground. This means that positioning of the path for the camera will be key for a quality animation.


The exercise shows the use of path constraints to move a camera on a spline. This will be useful for camera techniques to zoom out or by changing camera angles during a scene of an animation.




Assessment



The unwrapping of the land speeder body. I unfold the map using the tool unfold map and this lead to this and therefore is confusing when painting so i rendered this map and saved to a jpeg to edit the map to put colour on it. However letting 3ds max unfold it automattic has caused the painting of the object really confusing.



The landspeeder has got the body painted using the mapping in gimp. The painting of the model is at a bad quality due to me not being great at artwork and was a consiquence of the mapping of the object being all over the place.

The glass was done by making the shader parameter into metal and two sided and then add a reflection map with fall off and increase the advance transparancy. this website was used to help make the glass http://www.digitalanimators.com/HTM/Tutorials/jarekglass.htm .



Painting the engines was difficult as there are a lot of faces in the left part of the engine but after using the pro optimiser tool the painting was easier as only needed two colours and it was not a complex texturing because it reduce the number of face by reducing the number of vertexes.The problem is that when exporting the maps to gimp, gimp must not recognise the map colour and therefore will will have a difference contrast of black so when using the fill tool in gimp means that it will not fill in-between all of the face with in that border.



This was done to the xwing with the same method but there is still alot of green lines present but there is detail within the paint work to increase the quality of the model.


The animation of the project is going well but is still being worked.

original date: 29/11/2015 19:27   Editited on 02/12/2015 15.08

Week 8

Exercise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWIVoW9jAOs
These are some of the camera and animation techniques used in for the birds animation.
0:26 long shot is used to give the scale and the empty
0:29  close shot
0:53 Zoom out to show that there is a lot of birds in the shot
0.55 A long shot to show distance between the two characters.
0:57 A close up to help express shock to the viewer
0:59 A close up to the to the new character from the pov from the small birds to give perception of size difference
1:02 The movement of the eyes and then the head
1:17 A extreme long shot to show the scale of the setting of the animation which shows the length of the electrical wires.
1:32 A Dutch angle to give the expression of the birds slipping down and that the birds can't stop
1:34 The wire moves and then the birds move anticipation.
1:54 extreme close up on the birds feet to show that the threat is still there
1:55 extreme close up on the birds face of the realisation of that the big bird is still there of their surprise
2:16 A long shot to show the big bird is pulling the wire to the ground. and using excaturation as a wire will not bend as much like that


Assignment:


I decided to make a terrain for my animation as in the story board the animation will be a chase scene with a ground vehicle (landspeeder). To make a ground terrain is to make a height map I used the cloud effect in the tool selection to make a quick map as the the lighter the colour the lower the terrain is.

Then using the tool displace I inserted the that height map in to the bitmap parameter in the displace and then increase the strength of the displacement to bring out the height differences of the low and high parts of the terrain.


The camera will move depending on what shots I need. The camera will move move with the moving object (using the look at constraint) as it will be a target camera and will do some of these shots by changing the FOV of the camera to give focus of the object depending on which scene. The camera could move by using a spline and path constraints to move a camera or an object along the spline.
However an issue is as the terrain is bumpy is to make sure the camera does not clip through the terrain during the animation. Another potential issue is the seems less transitions of camera angles or shots as making that smooth will be difficult.

Week 7 camera and lighting

The Sky dome is to create 360 degrees sky around for the scene of the animation to increase in the quality of animation.




The blue line represents the light



can not move light source with move tool as it can only by moved by changing the time in the editing.





By using include and exclude this will effect the shadows of the house as normally it will produce shadows but now it does not as it is excluded.



This is done by using the camera options by rotating the free camera and moving it so I change one view port to the camera and this is the result.


This is done by placing and then dragging the view of the camera, this seems uses full for getting better camera angles.

Week Seven: evaluation

Model Evaluations

Tie Interceptor


The Model can be improved by adding more detail as there is not a lot of detail on the model compared to the actual source material and this can be improved by adding bumps on the wings and the inner parts of the wings.
One problem that was overcome was making the face of the ship as initially was trying to use cutter shape and then uses a boolean but it did not look accurate, so I used a new technique called inset which made a polygon inside that polygon but it still did not work as i needed to use the by polygon part of that tool. In the end I took out edges to make it look like one section of the face (this made it more polygon efficient as well), and then inset and then use bevel to bring out the septation between the glass and the metal. So I overcame the problem by using research and by trail and error, this also improved other models as using the research from overcoming this model to be used on another .


Using this picture [1] was used for the model to help for proportions by using two of the viewports as front and right. This was used to help the shape and the proportions of the ship. My tie interceptor is simulator to the source material but it just needs more detail.

X-Wing

 
 The X-wings guns (even those it is detailed), it was made using multiple shapes and this is really bad polygon efficiency as in hindsight I could of used the outline then extrude technique to create the gun with the use of multiple shapes.
The Body of the x wing initially had shapes made out of splines which was un-accurate and after looking at the shape of the body it is a hexagon so used a basic shape and edited the edges and polygons to give the body more detail and compared to the source material will look accurate.


The X-Wing proportions and shape is accurate as I used the three way view technique. I would make the guns to one shape and improve te front of the ship. Mostly I would add more detail to improve the model.

X-34 Land Speeder

This model need to improve on most aspects. The model still need work on improving detail as the detail is poor or non-existent that is makes this model look bad compared to the source material. The use of pro optimiser have helped on the polygon efficiency as this has reduce the polygons that was not needed and did not affect the shape of the model. However their is gaping problems and edges around the shape and has had a negative impact on editing the shape because of using the boolean but next time using techniques from the other models this won't happen next time. The shape and proportions on the body work was help using the front and top view and does compare to the actual model that I was recreating.




In general, There was lots of new techniques learnt during this assignment but due to time constraints quality is not the best that it could be.

References

Wookiepeedia,N.D, TieInterceptor [Online] http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/7/7a/TIEint_schem.jpg/revision/latest? cb=20081030151146 <accessed 09/11/2015>

Photobucket n.d X Wing blueprint [online]
http://s730.photobucket.com/user/Agent239/media/Star%20Wars/X-wing_schematics-1.png.html
<accessed 09/11/2015>
Wookiepeedia N.D x-34 LandSpeeder [Online} http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/4/42/X34landspeeder_schem.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20081117222005 <accessed 09/11/2015>

Story Board Redo

[1] The Tie interceptor will be zooming to the right and the camera will follow the ship by rotating but not moving which this will end up having a close up in the middle of this part of the story board.

[2] The camera will start in a birds eye view and then rotate a while moving with the tie interceptor to then be in-between the wings in sort of a first person view but not in the cock pit of the ship.. The tie interceptor will be in pursuit of the land speeder.

[3] The Tie interceptor will be further back and the camera position will be further back to capture both vehicles. The Tie interceptor will be firing lasers at the land speeder. The land speeder will be swerving to the left and right to try and dodge the lasers.

[4] The Tie interceptor will travel to side of the land speeder and travel faster that the land speeder. The camera will be a wide shot to capture the faster speed of the of the tie interceptor.

[5] the camera will follow the recently appeared x wing from the sky and will follow the x-wing on his pursuit of the tie interceptor and this does this while firing lasers. It will also zoom in on the cock pit and then zoom out to give tension of what has appeared.

[6] The Tie interceptor will spin out of control in to the distance. The camera will be zoomed out with a high FoV to give sense of ending the conflict and victory.

Week six

Tie interceptor

bevel on wing pylon ends to give the round bit of the wing through the wing to add detail. and back of ship

used an inset made from small boxes to help edit edges to look like a front of tie interceptor bevel the polygons inward but important to have group as by polygon,so it bevels each polygon separate; like bevelling each polygon one at a time. This made it easer instead of having use of the boolean tool as this will take a lot more time to create  a cutter shape that is accurate and previous attempts did not get the shape right.

However the top of the tie interceptor is flat and lessen the detail of the model.


For the wings I used outline to separate the wider parts of the wing from the thinner part

Also I used extrude three of the edges to add more detail to the wings. This method was better than using splines as it is a lot easier to use however there is less accuracy in this method to try and recreate the tie interceptor model.






Overall this model is going good however the getting the detail on the wings will be tricky but the basic model is finish and it looks fine, however trying to reduce the polygon count might be tricky as using the pro optimizer will end up effecting the shape or using multi-res. Also using those methods could effect the texturing of the model.
















X-Wing






The gun of the wing was made using the cylinders and a box with the use of auto grid to increase the accuracy of the position of the gun as it would have to be straight. The connection in-between the objects can be done with outlining and then extrude or use of the bevel tool to give better quality and more accurate. The polygon count for each object is also low as the segments are low.



The engines was done by using a mix between outline and extruding as use extrude for 0.1 cm and then use outline to not affect the edges of the rest of the object, as doing this made it more accurate then using bevel as that will that and not what I wanted. This is good as this looks very accurate to the x-wing and is very polygon efficient.


After clone and then copy the wings I used mirror the wings in to the right spot, this is the tool that was the most accurate however getting the wing in the right transformation was difficult.

However when redoing the body could have a simpler shape instead of trying using a spline. as I inserted an edge half way through the body and then scale that edge to get a hexagon. This could be done by using a cylinder and putting side to 6 but this would not get the accuracy of the shape I wanted, without putting in more work than needed.
This is more accurate compared to the previous body as it is more edges are more straight and there is less polygons used as there was less edges used,which lead to modelling the body more easier.





This is my least favourite part of the model as it was a more complex shape to recreate and after using the  bevel tool, it needed the vertexes moved and some of this needed to be smoothed. However the quality is still poor as that shape was hard to recreate due to the complexity.



Applying Materials to Objects

I think applying materials to the X wing should be the easiest as there is a lot of basic shapes to use the mapping parameters when the shape is unwrapped and therefore should be easier to texture the object. but the object will be needed to be broken down just to make it easier to edit the uvw map positioning and also applying textures. I think this would be the same with the Tie Interceptor but a bit more difficult as the use of outline on the wings on the objects overlapping.
The land speeder might be difficult as some of the bit on the model will be difficult as i would need to break down the object and also detach some stuff on the model as the main body's shape is complex and might be difficult to apply texture.

Week 5

Progress in assignment

The Assignment in general is going be difficult as there is time constants is restricting the quality of the models however overall the assignment should be finished on time.

Tie Interceptor

The Tie interceptor needs a lot more detail and have a finish face for the ship but the basic model is nearly completed and this is a good part of the model so far as is has a resemblance of a tie interceptor. However there is a lot of detail needed for the wings, which should be easy by moving vertexes of shapes to make more complex shapes.

Land-speeder














A problem of this model is that using multiple sources of pictures and the detailed picture ether has not enough detail in the chair or not at all  and the the detail of the body that is connected to the wing can be different depending on the picture use. Also another problems is that after using a boolean edit called union this has lead to the part connecting to the engine as one object in the body as this now has lead to a lot of problems when creating the hole in the land-speeder for where the seats are supposed to be. And this has lead to edges to appearing and made the body less polygon efficient and the body not being accurate to the source material. On the other hand the body roughly looks accurate but the models needs to improve in detail.

X-Wing

The x-wing attempt did not go well as the body of the ship is hard to recreate as the body shapes need  a lot of editing and combining multiple shapes or use a splines, however the wings of the x-wing will be much more easier as planning the shapes for the wing is more easier for me and can reuse techniques from the tie interceptor.

New Techniques 

Pro-optimizer is a modifier that reduces the number of faces by automatic removing vertexes from that object selected and therefore reduces the number of polygons in that object.

Removing is a technique to manually remove vertex s and edges of an object and I use this remove useless edges in an object however this can affect the shape of an object.

From week 4 I have been using the 3 view technique on most models now and this has help on positioning an scales of the objects. However need to keep the pictures that are used with my model files as is will not have the material for the plane without the file.

Exercise
This exercise is about materials which has a lot to learn but is very important when modelling. This is to explain the different options in the clasped view of the material menu with the use of maps and manipulating the bitmap.

This task was to create one material that look like metal and one that looked like wood only using diffuse and specular colour options.

This exercise was done before as i use this technique on the three way editing which i have used on my models and some previous exercises and this will be expanded on how to manaliplate the size or angle of the bitmap later.