Critical Analysis

As this project comes to a close its time to look back on the last six weeks and what ive produced and learnt.

Over the last 12 weeks I wished that i had much more time and experience with the software to produce the anumation that I would have liked, as it was I had only a pasing experience with the software and as such I had really no clue as to how to animate a human body using the bones and rigging. The island in the first scene was one that i was never truly happy with, more time and experience would have allowed me to create a more realistic looking island or maybe looking at other software suited to landscaping such as Bryce and importing that into the 3DS Max scene. Having a computer that could handle the software would have helped aswell.

There are some areas in the first scene which could have been done better such as the very stupid mistake of getting the Lava level wrong in the second part of the scene and adding a smoke trail to the missile. The main think I didnt like about the island scene was the actual island and the water, they didnt look very realistic, more reseach into landscaping and water effects would have been beneficial but due to lack of time this part had to be animated as quickly as possible considering I still had an entire scene to model.

The second scene was more to my liking apart from the aforementioned lack of knowledge about rigging and animating characters. Lighting is the main area that really let this part of the animation down, cant get the daylight system to work the way i had wanted it to, either it whites out the entire scene due to being too bright or its completely black, managed to get a sort of dusk out of the system but it was still way too dark for my liking.

The other areas i did not really like would have been the sound, I have had little or no experience with Adobe Premier Pro and it shows with the audio, i really need far more work with this software system to get proficient with it.

Below is the trailer linked from youtube.

Post Production and the Spectre Falls Trailer

Once all of the scenes had been rendered, the footage and the audio files i wanted to use were inported into Adobe Premier to be edited together. The audio clips were all found at the following site: Absolute Sound affects Archive, the bond theme was one that i have had in my personal collection.

I used a fade to black transition to go between the two scenes and the audio clips were put into the animation where nedded, the sounds arent spectacular to be honest and im not yet that proficient with Premier to cut the audio properly and to my satisfaction. For the splash screen i grabbed some bond images and created a simple coming soon screen which is shown below:

The two images for this part came from the following sites:
007 Logo
Back spiral image

Once this sequence was all added together and set to render the trailer was essentially finished. i had wanted to include the finished video on here but it fails to upload. its on the dsc anyway.

For some reason some of the audio did not seem to work as well as i hoped and it may require a revisit to get the audio to much higher standards. I would have also liked to have animated the characters whch i think i will revisit once i am more proficient witht he software. The trailer is i think quite effective, showing something happening but not giving too much away until the recognisable theme in the last scene which does cut very nicely with the end of the trailer. Im pretty happy with the trailer at the moment, with more practice i hope to become far more proficient with the software.

Hotels

I spent about two weeks following this tutorial and getting the basics of the room correct, this meant that the room, windows and bed with lamps and bedside tables had to be created, the tutorial was very useful in helping me create the scene and before long i had the bed in the room with two lamps, pillows and bedside tables:

I then added two human figures, again curtesy of the 3DS Max Bible, a cloth sheet to drape over them and a picture frame above the bed. The picture frame was a very easy peice of box modelling and took about 5 minutes to inset, extrude and detach the front polygon and then create a glass surface over the top of the picture. The final room looks a little like this:

Final Scene render

Once i had the hotel room modelled, it was pretty easy to duplicate the scene to create a hotel building from which to start the camera pan into the hotel room.

For this sequence, i needed to animate a camera moving through the window, into the room to focus on the mobile phone on the bedside table, which then rings.

This is a slight change from the original idea as i have no idea yet on how to rig a human and to animate the bones to be able to have Bond reach over and pick up the phone. Instead i decided to cut the conversation altogether and just have the ring tone feed into the final splash screen.

animating the camera was pretty straight forward using the movement andi rotation tools to get the camera into the desired position. I prefer to animate usong the manual set key process instead of the auto key as this gives me much more control over the movements inbetween keyframes. Once the camera had been animated  i then turned my attention to the phone, for this i was going to use a simple trick of creating a black screen just in front of the display screen on the phone and then animating the transparency of the texture when i wanted it to be completely see through when the phone rings. With all this done it was then just to set the scene to render. Below is the finished animation.

Missile Launch, a hotel room to put my phone in....

For the second part of the scene i was able to remove all of the trees and focus on the top of the volcano, this removed a large amount of the memory usage and allowed me to render this scene much faster than normal.

This is the island with trees as used in the first animation sequence:

And this is the island without them as used in the second part of the sequence:

Once all of the trees had been removed and the system then had some speed to it, i could bring in the missile and create the animation. I created a lava layer out of a cylinider cut in half and then mirrored, i had placed this slightly higher than the lava in the first sequence, but of a rookie mistake that one. A black tube was then affixed under the lava to give a black inner for the base and a guide for the rocket to be sized to a nd then animated launching out of it. Below is the final rendered sequence before any after effects have been added.

On a search through the 3DS Max tutorials i happened upon a very handy tutorial for a hotel room which is included here: Hotel Room. More on that next week.

Animating and trees, lots of trees

Weeks 7 and 8 were focusing on learning some animation techniques and setting up the first section of the animation.

During the lecture we went through some basic animation techniques to make a box move, which was pretty simple as the animating tools are incredibly intuitive to use. I then went a little further and used the box to tip over and squash an unsuspecting ball that just happened to be in its way, here is the result:

A little rought but still pretty cool, was also my first attempt at using lighting.

When creating the island scene with the missile firing from the centre of the volcano, i decided to cut the scene in two, first doing the camera fly by across the water to the island and then to its summit and then to do the lava opening up and the rocket firing as a second animated section. This proved a little bit of a boon as i had just then decided to add a forest layer onto the island using some plam tree models that came from the disc included with my copy of the 3DS Max Bible. I got a little over enthusiastic and before i knew it i had well over 300 of these trees on the island. As you can expect this caused a rather large strain on the computer and stopped me being able to render the scene. A quick fix of deleting all of the tree trunks meant that the scene would render but it would take a very long time. 24 hours on a pretty powerful home computer to render out 25 seconds of footage was quite a test. Below is the final render of that part of the scene.

Camera panning

With all the assets in place i could relax for the last lecture befor the hand in dat and thats what i did, i decided to use the lecture tutorial to make a simple panning shot of the island. I placed a camera in the scene where i wanted it to start then used the auto key animation tool to slowly rotate the camera giving a nice view of the island:

My island in the sun

The last asset to be created was the first one i was playing about with, i originally wanted to use a noise map to displace the polygons on the plane but couldnt find the right one, this left me floundering a little but i did manage to create an animated lava texture which was very cool. By using a noise map and a bump map on a texture and then using the animation key frame tools i had about 3 seconds of footage of a plane of lava bubbling.

Pretty cool, didnt help much with the island though.
I had managed to find another tutorial this time it was using a gradient ramp map which gave me far more control over the shape of the island. Island tutorial
I could edit the points of the map in the texture editor with quite a lot of success:

This gace me the shape i wanted and then i used a slightly different one on the mainland area to get the main area right. The water was from this tutorial: Water tutorial 22/02/11

Once these areas had been made i then used the leacture notes to create a cloud layer above the island and a skybox to give the area a more real outside feel, its not perfect yeat but its getting there.

Storyboard

Here is the finished storyboard for the first treatment, it only contains the main points of the sequence at the moment but it will be expanded in the future.

Highly detailed phones

With the missile pretty much completed i started on the most complex of the 3 assets - the phone.

I found a tutorial online to follow which can be found here: Phone tutorial 
This tutorial has over 140 steps but i decided early on due to not being able to spend so much time on the phone that i would omit some of the steps such as applying the camera detail on the back which wouldnt be seen.

The phone originally started as a box that was 10cm x 5.4cm x 0.5cm, i wanted to keep to the real world scale as this would save me resizing the model at a later date.

It looks so tiny in the perspective viewport, this was as far in as it was possible to zoom in on the phone.
The main modifiers that where used in this model were extrude, champher and inset which meant that i could shape the edges into a more rounded phone. These techniques were used to great extent on one of the main features - the main button which had been inset, extruded and champhered so many times that the polygon count whent through the roof. This was not going to be an asset that was able to be used in a game engine, far too memory hungry for that, purely pre-rendered fmv for this asset.

Thats a lot of polygons!!!

The button was originally a spline circle that was placed on the front of the box and then extruded slightly and then cut into the box to give me a single polygon from which i could do all of the stepd to create the final button.

The screen was a very nice section, it was one polygon inse from the main front of the box and given rounded edges, this polygon was then selected and cloned 2 more times so in fact the screen is 3 seperate parts pushed so tightly together so that i could create a display screen, a border screen and the front glass screen to reflect the light. To work on just the screens i learnt a really good set of features, using the 'H' key to select the 3 polygons of the screen i could then prest alt and 'Q' to move into isolation mode - this hid the rest of the screne and let me work on the three polygons to get the perfect. Below you can see an exploded view of the screen:

The effect once these polygons are sandwiched together in the phone is great and very realistic. I had used a simple tutorial to get the glass texture and the screen was from a search on google, the screen is an iphone one not a htc, thats the only thing about the phone that isnt 'real'.

With all the textures in place and the phone finished to a usuable extent - this took about 10 hours in total i was able to light the phone and place it onto a simple plane with wood texture, as you can see here with the final version:

The most annoying thing was that i had somehow managed to slightly move the front polygon a fraction to the right which has given it a slight lopsided appearance, need to be more careful next time.

Mood Boards

The first mood board is for the Hotel room scene, i wanted to find a selection of hotel rooms that show off the colour schemes i wanted to use, which are light airy clean colours - simple yet elegant.

For the second mood board i wanted to get some tropical islands to get the colours, shapes and look of both the islands and the sea.

Slight change, extra asset, three views and the first model

On consultation with Steve there has been a slight change to the treatment of the script, instead of going to a black screen the animation will instead cut to a hotel room and having Bond use a mobile phone for the conversation. Here is the added part of the treatment for this section, a little more fleshed out with the conversation:

Cuts to a luxurious hotel room, early morning, two people are in the bed. The camera tracks to the bedside table, where a phone and a set of keys lay. The phone rings (ringtone is the bond theme) Bond's hand reaches over to pick it up and answers the phone cutting of the ringtone halfway.

Bond: Go on.

Caller: S here, we have a situation. A ballistic warhead was tracked lifting off from an island of the coast of South America and detonated in high orbit, our sources tell us that this was a test run by the Spectre organization. We need you on this Bond, Spectre must fall once and for all.

Bond: I'm on it.

S: Good sending coordinates now, don't mess this up Bond.

Cut to the Bond Logo, theme music plays and the game name shows up on screen:

007 Spectre Falls – Coming Soon.

 So thats all set no the animation can be storyboarded as well as a new asset - the mobile phone can be created. 

The lecture showed us two very good modelling techniques, lathe and 3 view, not sure i will use any of the techniques in my first set of assets but maybe in other projects. It was useful to learn how to set one up and here is the modelling area for an old bi-plane:

I created an initial model for my assingment this week, the missile, this might change alot but at the moment this is a very simple object, using some cylinders and cones.

Over the weekend i can start on the mood boards for this project, im going to do two as my animation has two very distinct settings, a tropical island and a luxurious hotel room.

Boolean objects splines and the Bond treatment

This week the excercises were extremely useful using the Boolean tool to cut into other objects is a really good technique with incredible results. Using splines to create the layouts of objects and rooms and then using an extrude modifier makes for very quick buildings which can be pretty complex in their design.

Fun with splines and cutting holes into objects.

After some thought managed to come up with a very early treatment script for the Bond animation assignment, this might be subject to change but here it is below:

Animation starts with an aerial birds eye view of a deserted volcanic island of the coast of South America. The camera slowly moves through clouds down to ground level and follows a tracking path into the island and up the side of the volcano to the crater finally looking down at the lave pool in the centre. Tropical Bird noises are heard during this section.

A loud klaxon siren starts up causing the wildlife to shriek and panic, the lava pool in the centre of the crater splits down the centre and withdraws into the sides of the mountain.

The sirens are drowned out by the roar of a rocket engine, smoke billows out of the hole as a large missile lifts off through the hole straight up and out of shot. 

Cut to black screen. Green text on screen - Telephone Call Incoming

 Conversation between Bond and 'S'

Cut to Bond Logo and game name:

Spectre Falls - Coming Soon.

This should give me a missile and an island to model to start with. Wonder what else i should do?

 

3DS Max - an introduction to the software.

Ah 3DS Max some software I had used for a little fun back in 2000, only played about with it then, didnt really get very far back then as i didnt really have a clue what to do.

For the first week we just did a little bit of box modelling for which i created a little car which tbh wasnt great and very simple but it work.

The car was never textured but i did learn one pretty important mode for modelling, the X-ray mode. This mode made the object i was modelling see through so that i could see any polygons and shapes which intersected inside the model and thus take up more rendering time for something which isnt seen in game, a very useful bit for saving memory.

X-ray mode.