In summary...

I must say, this has been an enlightening experience for me, at first I really struggled but I feel that come the end I had progressed leaps and bounds. The actual animating itself proved very frustrating, but over time, learning the boundries with what you can/cant achieve made the process much easier.
I also found myelf making alot of work arounds (for example with the lazer beam appearing) which may not be as time effective as a professional still achieved my overall goal.
I would also like to share some of my reflections on techniques I used, firstly lets start with spline paths. These can be fantastic when getting a fluid object such as ship or plane to move, as the banking tool adds to some extra realism, but it is also very restrictive. Once an object is set to the plane, you cant remove part of it (again the lazer) mid flow. It is also true that you cant animate starting part the way along the path.
The graph editor i felt was a fantastic tool. Rather than keyframing the out of control Xwing by doing a series of rotations, in the graph editor I was actually able to set it to go over 360 degree spins, which is how I got the ship to tumble over itself. I actually had the ship rotate to 800 degrees over the period of 10 frames, allowing for over 2 full rotations. This allowed for a really dynamic, out of control look that I was really pleased with.
Overall I feel I grasped this assignemnt well. I did feel my lighting techniques and texturing could be better, but the Modelling and Aninmation I am pleased with (I fell these aspects will be of most use to me as a games designer) But now I will start to turn my attention to the finer details, such as shading maps and adding shine to polygons.

Break down of camera angles

So I just felt like I should break down the camera angles I chose and what I am trying to convey with them.
The first angle is a wide shot that pans following the xwing. I used this to set the space scene (the space debris can be seen in the background) following the Xwing, making it the main focus to convey that this is the protagonist.
The second angle is the worms eye whilst zooming in on the tie fighter appearing. This was to make it look more imposing and menacing creating the antagonist role.
The next scene was quite dynamic so i wanted something to represent this. I had the camera focus on the xwing being chased by the tie, then pan roud so you can see it getting shot.
For the next shot, with the xwing falling uncontrolably to the planet, I wanted to portray the impending, so I had the camera follow the xwing, with just a portion of the massive planet conveying how insignificant the ship is. I wanted to back this up with the pilots perspective (POV) trying to add some emotional attachment to him.
Finally, I felt it best to set the camera watching the xwing crash to its inevitable demise, static and unmoving, almost mournful.

Lighting and more problems

So I realise I didnt mention much about my lighting so far. the lighting really wasnt hard to grasp. The concensus online is 3 well placed omni lights is enough to gain a good ambient light effect, which is what I wanted in space considering all the stars are tiny light sources.
For the final scene, I wanted to protray the bleak desolation of the planet hoth, so I set an omni light low to cast shadows across the snow dunes.











I also wanted to vent my rage in regards to animating objects to appear at certain times. I wanted my Tie to fire a laser, and upon contact with the Xwing, create the smoke effect. I tried EVERYTHING to do this proffessionally, looked online, tried layers, even animating visability but somehow it was always out of my grasp. I had to result to sneaky work arounds, namely hiding the lazer object inside the tie, and using the curve editor to ensure they traveled the same speed. as for the Xwing, upon getting hit, I animated it to spin, then snapped to a different perspective with the smoke now attached. Not the best,but hey, it looks good

Adding text

I discovered that text counts as a spline. I had to go into the rendering in the command bar, and select viewable in render and viewport. Helpful to know, I imagine 3DS max has a size limit to ensure random "shrapnel" polys are not rendered.

Opening Scene

Animating the Xwing flying along a path I felt was the best option. I set the target camera and xwing to the same path to ensure fluid motion.

This is a fantastic way to ensure smooth fluid motion along a path, removing natural human zig zag motions. Also editing the banking amount and ticking follow path really gives it a realistic touch.

I also addressed the issues of the thruster glow. For this I used directional spotlights, and adjusted the far attenuation to ensure no light reflected on unwanted areas. It gives a nice surrounding glow to the rear of the ship.

References

Sorting out sound files for the final piece, I would like to reference the following-
http://soundbible.com/suggest.php?q=boost&x=0&y=0
http://www.tk421.net/gallery/sounds/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Znv29YPtyGA&feature=related.

The rest of the sound files will come from my personnal library and voice acting. These wont be submitted as part of the assignment as I do not have the right to distribute the files.

Thankyou to George Lucas and Lucas Arts for the use of sounds, images, and references of the Starwars Universe.

Animating xwing crash

Whislst animating the xwing crashing into hoth, I decided to manually draw the z axis track to add jostling to the ship, I felt this worked really well and had to blog it. I feel this is an amazing tool to really convey the motion of first person views, and is widely used in the gaming industry for things like running.

Also I found this amazing tutorial on creating smoke effects that I will use to portray the damaged xwing in external shots http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3regJHtfBU.
One final note Id like to make is excluding hoth from the interior lighting, I felt this gave a much more crisper finish to both the cockpit and hoth. In future I will use this function to achieve better lighting.

Texturing the Cockpit

Firstly I wanted to reference http://bypuk.com/2008/09/tenclo-set-building/ as they had an amazing picture of an retro looking Xwing cockpit that I used part of in my textures. secondly i wanted to blog about my problems with texturing inside an element.
Part of my animation will inclue a view from inside an Xwing. Initially upon texturing, I found everything was appearing on the outside of the element, instead of inside like Id hoped. I discovered UV wrapping is not dependant on the side you click the polygon from, its natually always wraps to the normal facing side. It was sjust a case of adding a normal modifier and clicking "Reverse Normals"

I now know a very quick and easy way to texture interiors in the future.

Arranging UV unwraps and referencing

Firstly I would like to thank Agida Iwo-Sse for the use of this texture http://swg-piloten.com/html/x-wing_texture.html. I did not use all of it, just some of the engine decor .
Also http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=tie+fighter+side&um=1&hl=en&biw=756&bih=526&tbm=isch&tbnid=euUPlGo_dVNrHM:&imgrefurl=http://www.erikstormtrooper.com/vehiclestickers.htm&docid=GWhM9-vovcQCsM&imgurl=http://www.erikstormtrooper.com/tiestix.jpg&w=1018&h=635&ei=F1bRTtGvPIi5hAebuamgBw&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=429&vpy=216&dur=202&hovh=177&hovw=284&tx=224&ty=141&sig=116454246868238874563&page=6&tbnh=129&tbnw=207&start=33&ndsp=7&ved=1t:429,r:6,s:33

which I found useful for the Tie fighter wings.

The texturing of the xwing was very straight forward, however the tie fighter has a large poly count, so I am finding it more and more essential to move the polys around in the UV template to get a better, more accurate detail placement.

More Problems

Back to UV wrapping those pesky cylinders. This time I was trying to texture multiple engines at once. This was the result-

From now on, im only going to texture one element at a time, I believe what happened was the centre of the gizmo was placed between both the engines and as a result, I got a mish-mash of textures. I will try just texturing the highlighted part of the engine first, see how that comes out.

Solution found-

Where I had booleand these engines together, there were discrepancies with the join. Upon slecting only the polygons on the exhaust, it was also selecting something internally and stretching the texture across it all. My solution was to add groups of polygons to a channel, then make a multi/sub-object and attach the bitmaps to these and in the UV mapping menu, set it to apply ONLY to a certain group.
In all honesty, I should have done this from the beginning. It is a faster, more accurate way of texturing large, detailed models.

R2 Texturing

Getting to the hard part, UV unwrapping. it is difficult trying to work out if maps should be unwrapped cylindrically, boxed or spherical. So far Ive only been met with disater using cylinder, but box seems to work for everything with the exception of outwardly spherical objects like R2 units head.
Im blogging about this as its the first succesful spherical unwrap I have done. It is very similar to normal box UV wrapping, and it gives a much more curved result. It is, however harder to draw in GIMP to get the dimention of curvature right, but it is definately work it. I am also finding the hide all unselected button very useful at this point. I will also add quickly that I have added just the white texture to the base of the head. I know this is unneccesary and If i wasnt so scared of messing up my model at this point I would delete it. I will note this for future reference.

Asteroid textures

I found this great asteroid texture online http://www.filterforge.com/filters/3215.html.
Now Im only changing the colour of this texture and not UV mapping them as they are only in the scene for a few seconds, but also rock formations are jagged and un-even which this texture stretch exentuates.
I wanted to mix up the asteroid feild a bit and show an understanding of different layered materials so I added a rare rock. I was basing it on a chunk of the mineral Blue John which is a precious stone that has blue veins running through it.

This was achieved with the metal shading parameter, adding perlin marble to the diffuse colour. In the perlin marble window I tweaked the two colour parameters and then added a dent map to the first colour. It was in the dent map I added the rich dark blue of the veins. Obviously this could all be done with UVW unwrapping, but this method is faster and more random/natural looking.

Space, Stars and Hoth

After doing some research I stumbled across this tutorial for stars- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw7zYkZlbbI

Again using our old friend noise, creating a noise map in the environment tab then tweaking the values and colours leaves us with this-

which I felt was a very impressive looking space effect. It adds this noise effect to a rendered scenes environment, it isnt constantly present so this is a good use of memory.
As for Hoth, I would like to thank Duael Designs LLc & Robert Stein for the texture they posted on the blog http://freebitmaps.blogspot.com/2010/12/srgb-planet-hoth.html.
Although not quite the right colour, I felt this was a very attractive looking planet texture that I then colourised in GIMP to give it a snowy feel. It was then applied via the material editor.

Modeling Asteroids

I realised I could make some nice aseroids by getting a sphere and altering the vertices to create and iregular shape, but I went hunting for different techniques and came across this video explaining noise filters- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqGmpJqG5qo

By adding a filter, and even just changing the seed 1 unit, gives vastly irregular looking rocks, perfect for the look im going for.

The noise filter looks like a good go to tool if Im wanting to make natural jagged looking environments.

Setting the scene

I have been giving some thought about background for the space scene. Initially I was going to make a sky dome but then I realised that sky domes are curved to represent the curvature of the earth.
I felt it would be better to create one massive plane that will be the backdrop. Since space is fundamentally dark, I feel the lack of curvature wont be a problem for this. The only thing I must be careful with is texture stretching so I must be sure create a large texture to stop this happening.

Week 9

Heres the result of attaching a cylinder to a bone structure. I can see this not having any use in my current project, but for the next seimester this will be very useful.

You may notice that as at the arm bends there are actually gaps where the vertices are weighted to bones. This can be altered by selecting vertices and going to the weight table. Altering them thusly, I managed to reduce the gap to a more realistic bend.

Importing

I made the Xwing cockpit today. It was achieved by importing my Xwing model into a new file and then deleting all the un neccesary polygons. It looks quite plain, but as the camera will be from the inside, ther external detail is not needed. I intend to create several different textures for the windscreen, with more and more cracks spreading across it. These will be added at certain keyframes to show the progression of damage done to the Xwing. The control panel detail will just be textured as this is not the main focus of the scene.

Week 8

Today we were learning about attaching cameras to splines to track an object like so-

Playing around with the graph editor, adding a point to the graph at frame 51 and lowering it allowed the camera to start slowly, then speed up once beyond this frame.

Week 7

Camera Exercises

Camera types: Free (must be rotated into position)

Target Camera:

Can be drag clicked to form position and focus point. the focus point can be selected and positioned for more accuracy

More advanced techniques:

Clipping

Clipping can be used to adjust how much of an element is viewed (effectively truncating it at certain positions, both near and far)

Here I have made the dolphin appear in a very narrow clipped corridoor. If we were filming in a very dusty/foggy environment, this could be used to exhaggerate the model appearing from the mist.

FOV and Lens Size

These are directly inverted in value. Larger the FOV, the smaller the lens size is used and vice versa. this effectively allows us to control the zoom of the camera and the feild of view too.

Week 6 Lab

Here is an onmilight on a dolphin showing the light contrast.

This effect was done by including the skydome with the shadow parameters. The rest of the polys are still there, they are just engulfed in the shadow. 

 Here is 2 lights sources, one included on the gound with the colour changed, the other included on the skydome.

Final touches

So here is the (very almost) complete X-wing. I say very almost becasue, as you may spot in the photo, there are a few unwanted polys becoming evident along the nose and wings. I have tried connecting the vertices near them, but so far no luck.
I added an R2 unit. This is a group of the body and its head allowing me to rotate the head during the animation process.
As I am a massive starwars geek, I didnt model the wings in the symbolic  X attack position, instead I opted for its sleaker closed wing stance for its speed and manouverablity since it will mainly be fleeing.
One thing that crossed my mind was weather I should model a gap between both wings to show they are 4 not just 2, but I felt this was generating unneccesary polygons that a texture could do just as well, if not better. Again this was the case for the detail on the R2 unit, since its so small I felt it wouldnt need the level of detail justified by more polygons.

Xwing Thrusters and Turbines

Ok so I know this is only minor, but I decided to blog as it amazed me how something so simple can give such a dynamic look to a cylinder. I connected the sides and set slide to move the new edges to the end. I then selected the end vertices and used to scale tool to shrink then to create a great slanting exhaust.

As for the turbines, this posed quite a task for me. I wanted to create the inverted T shape that goes across the front, but how to make a curved cylinder protrude oblongs. Eventually I found a method of connecting the inside polygons, then connecting these. It was then a case of extruding, deleting obstructing polygons and then target welding across.

X-Wing modelling

So on to my final model, the x-wing. I wanted to really put my skills to the test with this one. The first little trick I used was on the nose cone. The picture has a small wedge cut out of the front. Rather than boolean this, I wanted to try it with extruding and target welds. First I used the connect tool to form the rectangle. Because the nose cone was sloped, but the wedge was flat, just extruding wouldnt do this. I extruded inwards, then deleted the surrounding polys. Using target weld I then rejoined the vertices like so. Afterwards I used the create poly tool to fill in the gaps.

Tie Wings and finishing touches

The slight detail I am doing for the wings consisted of selecting all the polygons for the solar panels, inset slightly, then extruding negatively gave the desired finish.

For the centre detail, I was experimenting with insetting then extruding. I also used the bevel tool which has similar mechanics to the other two, but with an added function of pulling the local vertices into a sloped formation. This added the desired effect.

Approaching the final stages I split the model. Then used the symmetry tool to weld the two parts into a single object.

All that was left was to trim the fat so to speak, removing any non essential edges, and viola!

Very happy with the outcome. I felt I learned alot making this model in regards to extruding and vertex manipulation. The biggest skill I feel I gleaned was that to correct (or delete) polys to fine tune a model, then just repairing my damage to improve the model over all.

Tie Fighter detail vs poly count and welding

Being a future games developer (hopefully) I did some research into game models and the level of detail vs poly count. I turned up this image of a TIE from SW galaxies. I noted that alot of the detail is not actually designed on the model, and is infact added to the model via a texture. Although I intend to display different modeling techniques, I feel the level of detail in some areas (namely engine and access hatch I will add as a texture.

I have also been having fun with welding and collapsing. As mentioned in a previous blog, I extruded edges out along the wings, but I could not attach these to the extreme edge vertices. I decided this may be due to interfereing polys so I deleted the wings to look inside and delete the culprits. Once these were removed, I experimented with collapsing and welding vertices. It would appear I could collapse vertices directly connected by an edge, but could not collapse to vertices from another poly. This was achieved via target welding them.

Tie fighter Problems 2

So the model progresses. I selected 5 x 5 grid of vertices at the side and with careful manipulation and extrusion I elongated these into the wing spokes. I also created the guns out of a many segmented cylinder. When it came to boolean these I had problems.

It created extra edges that were warping the model. After trying to delete/add extras. Though I found that the first boolean creates a ring of edges where the 2 elements meet, by copying the gun, deleteing the origional and then boolean them together again, they attached nicely.
I am wondering if attaching at this stage is a good idea. Yes I get a crisp model, but when it comes to UV wrapping it may be troublesome. I think from now on I wont attach till later.

Tie Problems

Ok so I wanted to confess about some issues I have been having with the Tie fighter. I initially intended to use a sphere, boolean out a cylinder from its front and extrude the window detail from this. However I found this a vert messy endevour as I couldnt quite get the octogon shape I wanted for the mid section of the window. I then tried creating a cylinder with 6 sides and attached/boolean to the front. I then created vertices at the edges to target weld to the edge of the window to create its symbolic 8 sided star window design. This was not to be due to unwanted polygons. After a good 4 hours playing around with these, I have decided to form the shapr from the cylinder, then just boolean it on to the front.
Im aware this is not the professional way to do this, but at this stage I cant afford to mess around with it any longer.
My Tie Fighter will be presented with the window paines missing. I intend to add polygons and make them transparent when I come to texture it.

UV Unwrapping

This Lab we worked through a tutorial covering more UV wrapping and Unwrapping.

Some were interesting methods employed in this. This was my first time using the hide tool, allowing me to focus on specific polygons or groups of polygons. This tutorial also taught me how to split a material down into several grouped materials that could be set to grouped polygons, allowing for quicker group selection and texture mapping.

As a side note snapping the mapping gizmo to an axis allowed for a better texture spread.

This tutorial mentioned fog effects at the end, so I decided to look into this in more detail for my hoth landscape. this is what I created.

This was created by adding a Fog Volume from the environment tab. I also changed the colour to a slight hint of blue as I felt this reflected blizard conditions better. The fractal box was ticked to add a slightly more clumped effect to the fog/

Hoth Model

Here is the finished product. I feel this was a complete success, although one the height map was added, I had to touch it up to make the landscape look less jagged. I also found adding some decay made it look more realistic.

I was taken back by the amount of polygons used to create detailed relief terrain like this. I could see terrain would need to be built to strict parameters if we were restricted to polygon use/memory usage.

I also feel this step is a slight leep of faith as we have not covered sky domes or filming to scales etc but I am confident, with an added haze (snowstorm) this terrain will be big enough to film the scene as intended.

(NB. After origionally posting this, I discovered a box gizmo to contain the fox in a localized area to speed rendering and reduce memory usage. This has now been implemented)

3 Assignment Models

I have decided to submit for the week 6 assignment a X-wing, Tie Fighter and the Hoth landscape (I appreciate this wont be as detailed, but I felt it shows off different techniques to the other models)
Luckily there are plenty of interesting tutorials showing off many of the varied ways of creating landscapes.
Inspired by this tutorial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzRYxSScQGk&feature=related I decided to take a snap shot of the arctic as my material. The method in the tutorial left the terrain quite flat and lifeless. Since Hoth is a much harsher environment I felt the ranges should be more mountainous.
I printscreened the location and transferred this to GIMP. I intend to make this layer transparent and create a height map to my specification, Import this to a plane in 3DS Max, then add the screen shot as its texture.

UV Mapping

Today I would like to share my models from labs and explain a little of what I have learnt.
The first picture is of two different textures I created. The first is a rusted iron that was created by setting shader parameters to metal, and increasing the gloss drastically and specular slightly. In the gloss tab I also added a Perlin Marble map to give it the patchy look.
For the wood effect I used a Oren-Nayar-Blinn shader and added a wood map. I reduced the gloss to 0 and increased the roughness to 100.

The following picture depicts how a chess board jpg is mapped across several different shapes. You can clearly see here that on objects such as sphere of base of cone, the image is stretched, so would be no good to achieve a nice even finish.

The next image depicts the effects of adding various maps to images (in a simlilar syle to the rusted metal) Here I used a swirl design, tweaking the tightness of the twirl and level of colour blending to get this nice effect.



This exercise involved using the UV map technique to familiarise us with its limitations.

1- A sphere with box mapping. Note how the image has been applyed 6 times as if it were a cube. Effect is very distateful.

2- Two spheres, one with the image mapped spherically, other shrink wrapped. Spherical wraps the sphere in the texture but the seem is quite obvious. Shrink wrapping takes all 4 corners of an image and pulls the round a shape into one area (or pole) that hides a seem.

3- Two cylinders, one cappped.

4- Face mapping, every single polygon has the map.

5- Mapped so single image stretches roun the pot. I did this with face mapping, but could be done by adjusting UV co-ords to stretch image out and around.

6- A box with images opposite edges with no image overlapping the sides.

And finally this was quite a complex combination of 2 layers, using masks to create clouds.

I feel this will be useful for the smoke effect of the damaged X-Wing.

Story Board

So this is it, the final piece of my preparation. I feel this storyboard conveys my plan and over all feeling for the story really well. The camera angles I have chosen reflect the mood and tell the tale the way I feel it should be told.

Week 3

Here is my model of a fighter jet from class. I only built half of the plane (Using the bool function to slice it in half) and rather than use the mirror function and weld all the vertices together, I discovered the Symmetry function that not only mirrors, it welds all the vertices along the centre together.
I found the 3 view editing method amazingly helpful, and the practice this gave me with manipulating vertices I feel has helped me break through a wall. My plane is far from perfect, but two weeks ago I would never have dreamed of being able to make something so sleek.

Mood Board

Here is the mood board for my new sequence. I will be trying to portray the sense of suprise the X-wing pilot will feel at being Ambushed. I want to portray the sense of battle and fear of being shot at, whilst being alone in the coldness of space. The X-wing will have a sense of duty and purpose to report the invasion, making him a hero in the process.

New Sequence Research Board

Here is my Research Board for my new project. It will invlove the initial contact between an X-wing scout and a Tie Fighter Infiltrator as a pre-curser for the Hoth Invasion.
It will invlove a Tie Fighter hidden in space junk becoming active, then pursuing the scouting X-wing, trying to destroy it. It is down to the heroic X-wing to survive long enough to warn the Rebellion that the Imperials have arrived. It will take place in space, and on Hoths surface.

Progression

Im am beginning to feel some real progression with this project now. Playing around with the lathe modifyer I was able to make a really nice looking watch tower, which to me, is a vast improvement on the blocky turrets I made on my first castle.

Now Im beginning to grasp my capabilities and time scale needed for my project, I am doubting the practicallity of my initial idea. Trying to create and animate a race between three AT-ATs and an AT-ST was maybe a little over ambitious so I have started developing another alternative that will showcase more of the 3DS Max features and animation techniques.

Week 2

This week involved creating derelict buildings by a technique known as Lofting.
Being Derelict it gave us the perfect oportunity to use our new skills to destroy them.
Here I inserted new vertexes then connected them allowing me to delete the formed polygon, creating a tear in the wall. Being a fan of Godzilla I also thought I would use Boolean spheres to create a bite mark. Doing this I discovered two things. Grouped shaped cant be used as a boolean together, and using multiple boolean subtractions on the same shape creates excessive polygone creations.

 Here I created a Hospital, Using the text function to create a Helipad. I created a gurder and cloned it, then by creating extra Segments and selecting certain Vertices I was able to manipulate them into a twisted look. I also discovered when cloning something, you can select copy or instance. Copy creates a stand alone object that can be manipulated at your discretion. Instance allows any changes made to the block to be receipricated to its clones.