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.