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.