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?