Monday, 6 April 2009

Home.

The piano scene is the scene which requires the most scenery in my opinion, and because of this, i feel that it took the longest.
Initially, i started with a plane for the floor, and three boxes creating a U shape, in which a living room would sit. I then added some wallpaper style texture to give it a room feel from the start so that I would be able to build a living room from it.

I then imported the staircase into the scene, along with the piano which I placed that the top of the stairs.
I then created a sofa, by combining several boxes, some of which were created from chamfer boxes as well, to give them sofa a more natural look.
Additionally, I added picture frames to the staircase, contianing images relating to the previous aniamtions and also added a TV to the wall, making it feel like a TV set.
I then began the animation process, which involved moving the piano from the top of the stairs to the bottem. Initially, I sued the auto key mode to make the pianon move to the stair bottem, but afterwards I had to go an individually edit each frame to give the piano a bumpy action.
Below are some shots of various parts to the scene.


The scene overal

The sofa, staircase and piano falling

The living room area



Friday, 3 April 2009

Building a staicase

To create a staircase for the piano falling down scene, I started with one single box, and then duplicated this. Using the snaps toggle mode, I was able to create the steps very quickly without hassle. After selecting the snaps option, I held the shift key and dragged the duplicate box to the new position it then portended me asking whether I wanted to create more than one, which I adjusted to my number of steps. This then created my steps.
To add a Bannister, I created a pole out of a cylinder, and duplicated it using the process above.
I then created a rail out of another cylinder.
The staircase creation process is shown below:

Wednesday, 1 April 2009

Spaceship

To create a UFO for my alien scene, I chose to use 2 cylinders. I initially created one, converted it to an editable poly, and extruded the edges inwards, creating a saucer shape.
This shape was then duplicated, and placed on the top of the other shape, creating a flying sucer shape. The upper half of the saucer was adjusted to make it slightly taller, so that the UFO looked a more like a cartoon one.
Below is the result of this process (note that the image has not yet had textures applied to it):
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Monday, 23 March 2009

The temple of doom

After adding music, changing the brightness settings and adjusting the colour slightly using Sony Vegas Pro I created my finished product for my first ident.
The video shown here is at a lower quality because of size restrictions (the full quality one is 400mb).
The soundtrack chosen coems from the game Halo, and is named "delta halo suite". The tune is an atmosheric one, helping creating a dark, dingy and cold atmosphere.
The scene is made up of a plain for the floor, a 3d letter A, two boxes forming the walls and a large sphere. The sphere has a fair amount of weight added to it so that the reactor engine would create an action that topples the A shape. The rest of this scene is composed of a light (shining from the oint of view of the camera) and a set of textures.

Tuesday, 17 March 2009

Piano.

For my second scene in which a Piano comes crashing down the stairs, it was important to start by creating the most important object for this scene, the Piano.
This was created by following a tutorial. Its worth nothing that this tutorial not only showed me the creation techniques for creating a piano but it introduced me to a new area in the materials editor, which has helped make my other scenes also, look more realistic.
The process of creating the piano is as follows:
1. Create outline of the piano end using the line tool
2. Extrude this line so that it becomes a 3d object and then duplicating it, spacing them apart to give the width of the piano
3. Next, I created a chamfer box which serves as the base of the piano and another one qhich serves as a base for the keyboard.
4. Next we created a single box, which then I duplicated to make the keyboard, creating a smaller box for on top to serve as the black keys.
5. After, we create another box, which serves as the top of the piano.
6. Finally we create another box to go between the keyboard and the top of the piano. This is first created as a normal box, and then the Bend modifer is applied to give it a curve making it appear more natural.
7. After this, we need to add textures and this is where I learned a new technique.
On the material editor panel I press the button marked as "standard". This then pens a new window up and I choose "Architectural". This then gives me a drop down list of pre-defined material styles, to which I can add either a bitmap or colour, and this gives the objects material the aterial properties of the chosen option. Most importantly, it makes light and reflections look much more realistic.
My finished piano is visible below:

(LINK TO TUTORIAL: http://tutorial-zee.com/3d-studio-max-tutorials/3d-model-piano-studio-tutorial)

Sunday, 15 March 2009

Creating scene 1 part 2, "The temple of doom"

Previously in creating this scene, I ran itno some problems regarding the letter being rendered as completely opaque.
This issue was fixed after many attempts at finding out what the problem was.
The problem was solved by changing the letter A's properties in the rigid body properties box. To fix it, I had to check the box marked "unyielding" and also set the geometry to "concave mesh".
After this, the A was no long opaque.
Continuing from this stage, I added walls to the model, and introduced new textures to the objects to make them feel more realistic.
I then added lighting in two places with an orange glow to give the model the feeling of being in a narrow passageway.
A video can be found below. This video is the render output of this scene.

Friday, 6 March 2009

Changes to the animations

During the process of creating my first animation, it came apparent to me that my original three ideas would not work too well with what knowledge I had for 3dsmax.
Because of this, I felt it necessary to head back to the drawing board and to redesign the ideas for the other too images. Also, I feel by changing them I have given my idents a little variety.
Below is the new mock up designs for my two images.

Alien Abduction
This scene involves a spaceship abducting the letter A. The camera will then continue along a path and finish on a billboard with the company's logo on it.
The scenes design will also feature a more unrealistic, cartoony feel material wise, this is to aid to idea of aliens abducting the tv's main character.


Piano Movers
This scene involves a piano being pushed down a set of stairs, and hitting the character pushing him against the wall. The camera will then move to focus on a wall painting of the companies logo. The textures I will use in this scene will involve more 'homely' textures.