Evaluation

Overall I was very happy with the outcome of my three idents. I believe I used different techniques and facilities for each one. They all revolve around a similar length, never exceeding much more than 30seconds. In relation to what 3d techniques I have used I feel I have learnt much more. In particular with the reactor engine, creating water and also learning how to make light beams visible. There are still many tools within 3DS max that I am yet to learn, but I’m sure I will pick these up with time.

As with my seasonal calendar work I think it is visible in the idents themselves of the progress I made with the program, and again as with the calendar I found myself liking the most recently created ident the most.

If I had more time on the project I believe I would probably look over some of the materials used to try and create more realism than it has already. Although I think the materials I have used work well, this doesn’t mean improvement can’t be made. One aspect that I would have particularly liked to have added would have been in my final ident (lord of the rings). I would have liked to be able to animate the ring dropping off into the water, creating a splash effect, ripples in the water from its impact and then to be able to alter the gravitational settings to allow the ring to sink down to the waterbed. However due to not having a clue how to do this I did not even attempt to do so.

Finished Idents

Indiana Jones Ident





Alien Ident

Lord of the Rings Ident

Write Up

I decided to make my idents revolve around famous scenes or key features of films. I selected 3 different films and went about storyboarding these. The films I selected were Indiana Jones, Alien and Lord of the Rings.









Indiana Jones

This was the first ident I created. I had decided to recreate the map room from ‘raiders of the lost arc’. The first thing I had to set about doing would be making the room, this was simple as the room was a simple rectangle; meaning I could create the walls, ceiling/floor from boxes. The room however needed a small opening for the lighting effects to be added later. This was created using the Boolean tool subtracting a small box from the front wall, thus making the window.
I decided to add materials to the inside of the room so I would be able to see where it was going. I created sand like textures by layering a custom bitmap with pre-built in bump maps for a grain effect. Colours were edited for the floor so it appeared darker and mixed with dirt. The walls had a similar treatment but rather than create a dirt effect, tiling was added to look like carved stone blocks.







I then went about creating the staff and medallion head. The staff was very simple to make as it is just a cylinder needing a wood like material, which again I used a custom bitmap of. The medallion head was created using the line tool and then modified so it could be extruded. The material added needed to look metallic, so I made sure the preview of it would shine. I used a Phong shader with reflection maps to try and create this shine whilst using a yellow base colour. The next part and possibly most important part of the medallion was the crystal. I used an NGon to create the basic shape and then proceeded to the materials. I used a simple red Blinn effect with a high specular level and self illumination but found that it was still too solid. I added a refraction map using a ray trace map on top of it and setting the object to 2 sided, this seemed to fix my translucency issue.








The buildings created were all made from boxes and set to different sizes/shapes. These also had the sand grain effect applied to them but with a variation to the bump map. Lighting would be needed for multiple reasons in the animation. Obviously one would be to keep the room at a constant level so the viewer can actually see. 4 other lights would be needed still though; these would be for the sun, beam of light from the crystal and the end glow. The sun and the end glow would use the same principle. They needed to be big and bright with visible rays and glow. This meant I had to add lens effects to the selected lights. The beam of light was more complex than this; I used a free directional light for it and increased its intensity to 5x the normal. The reason for this was that this light was going to be like a laser beam and so would lose much of it’s intensity through the ‘fog’. A volume light effect was added to this light, this is what made the whole beam visible. The fog colour was matched towards the desired colour of the light whilst the attenuation colour was set to blue to filter through it. So that this beam of light didn’t seem to come out of nowhere a fade in of another light was made from the crystal so that once it met its peak the beam would appear. This again used lens effects of glow and rays.

The final animation part of this ident was of course the camera angles. I created a free camera and key framed from the beginning where I wanted it to move and what it should be showing at the specific point. I wanted to show the sun and show started facing that way when panning up, only to swing around into the remainder of the scene. Finally an environment map was added using a bitmap of a sky so the sun had a setting.






The video editing was a simple process as I had already made all my angles and knew what I wanted to show. It was just a case of adding fade ins and outs and the final scene of clipping to the text ‘sky movies’. Sound was also added and edited in Audacity to get the correct length and segment needed.


Alien

I wanted to attempt different genres of film for my idents so I could show the variety of the selection which the channel shows. So after Indiana Jones, being an action/adventure, I decided to go along the lines of horror; Alien being one of the most famous ever. One of the most memorable things from Alien to me were the eggs and facehuggers, this is why I selected them for this ident.
The first thing I decided to create was the egg as it was probably the most important thing in the whole animation. I created it from a simple sphere that had been stretched out into an oval shape. Obviously alien eggs were never ‘perfect’ and so some deforming would be needed, this was done using the soft selection tool and moving parts out of line. A material was needed to create the correct texture so a Dent map was placed on top with the main colour being a green and the secondary a yellow for highlights. This again was too perfect on the object so an additional dent map was placed to bump it. This made the object seem much more rough and realistic. The next step to the egg would be the animation of it hatching. I did this by using key frames and the soft selection tool, lowering and expanding points to create an opening at the top of the egg.












Once I had done this I created the environment that the egg would be placed in. This had to be a dark cave like setting. So I first created the ground using a box and the soft selection tool to make it an uneven terrain. The material added to this was a simple brown dent map with a smoke bump map added to give it more depth. The environment backdrop was a bitmap of a cave just to keep to the theme. A tunnel was added as to give an entrance to the cave where the camera would later travel down, this was made from a cylinder with another cylinder extracted from it using the Boolean tool. As in the films any nest of eggs was surrounded by what can only be explained as a stringy ectoplasm. To create this effect I used multiple planes rotated at angles as to intercept each other and then added a wire material to them. Adding a green/yellow colour to them made them fit in with the eggs; the last touch to this effect was again to use the soft selection tool so that it wasn’t so flat. I proceeded then to clone the egg I have made. I made multiple eggs and then altered the key frame positions on the other eggs so that they didn’t all hatch at once.









The facehugger was much more complex than originally thought. The main body itself was easy, being a cylinder edited slightly with the soft selection tool to put curves where I needed them, and then a simple mouth layered on top. The tricky part of the creature was primarily its legs and then its tail. This was because they required bones to be added to allow movement. The tail was made from a cylinder and slimmed out to a point using the soft selection tool. Once the bones had been added to this it allowed me to curl the tail round into the body so it didn’t look so stiff. The legs were initially going to be made individually as to allow various movements in each but I found this to be complex as it had the tendency to mess up when rotations were needed. So in the end one leg was made with fully working bones and cloned so there were 6 legs total, this also meant when I wanted to change the original legs bones they would all correspond, which was ideal for a jumping movement. The materials used on the facehugger were all custom bitmaps. The body and legs used a sample actually from an image of a facehugger, though the body sample had to be rotated and laid differently as to look acceptable. The mouth was also a bitmap taken from an image of a fish, for its sharp scary teeth. The facehugger once complete was scaled down and placed inside the front egg, so that it could move up and out once the egg had hatched. It would proceed to jump out the egg and straight at the camera (as if it was a person) and latch on to their face, causing them to fall to the ground and then fade out.







Only 2 lights were needed during this animation, one of which would spend the majority of time flashing. The flashing light was to set the scene, as in all Alien films, that when you don’t have constant vision it creates a spookier effect. Again this light had a tint of green to it to match and highlight the surroundings. The second light was purely to make sure the scene never delved into pitch black.
The camera used was a free cam so that I could manoeuvre it as I wished. It was a short movement it had to do, going down the tunnel to the nest and getting attacked by the facehugger. This involved using a key frame of the camera ‘standing up’ and then another later with it side on, lying on the floor. The tween made here would make it look as if the person falls over, with it all the time having the facehugger its only view.

There was hardly any video editing required as such for this animation, only fades were used. The sound editing was a bit more substantial this time round using multiple sound clips layered on top of each other. There are 2 background tracks playing over each other to make the eerie sound effect and then still effects were needed for the egg hatching and the noise of the creature itself. These were mixed together in Audacity and put to the timing they were needed at.


Lord of the Rings

This was my third and final ident, whilst possibly also being my favourite. I started my scene by creating the basic landscape, which could be edited later on to fit my needs. This was created by making a box and initially adding a Displace modifier to it. This made a couple hills from the flat surface which would work as my ‘islands’ or water bank. The water was created from a flat plane, brought up to the level as to hide the lower segments of the ‘land’. To make this plane look like it was water was down to the material and the environment. A flat mirror effect was added to the Reflection map with its distortion levels being set to ‘use bump map’ that was to be added next. The reflection map level was kept at 100 for maximum effect. A bump map was then added using the Noise effect, the size was increased to 15 and set at a default phase of 20. I felt that the water needed to display some colour rather than just be a clear reflection so I set the basic diffuse colour to a dark teal, however I found this to make the water look either too murky or as if it were solid. To solve this problem I edited the opacity level down to 50% making a much more realistic effect. The final stage to my water was to animate it; this was a simple procedure of selecting my end frame in my animation, creating a key frame and editing the phase property in the bump map to 30. This gave the illusion of a current or ripple effect on the water.









My next step was to place this scene within its environment. I tried just placing a bitmap in the environment slot, but this looked too flat. So I set about creating a spherical setting. This meant I created a large sphere, ensuring that the other objects were all placed inside. I then converted the sphere to an editable mesh and went about placing my material onto it. The material I used was a custom bitmap of a cave, I set it to 2sided to ensure that it would be visible on the inside of the sphere, and sure enough it worked perfectly.









After having the environment in place I went back to look at my land. I had to cover the majority of the edges as to create depth. So I used the soft selection tool to stretch out and imperfect the curves of the rocks. Once this was done I finally added my material to them. This was a combination of a grey Stucco Diffuse map and a Noise Bump map set to turbulence size 7 to get the effect I desired.

The ring was made from a tube and downsized. A simple yellow material was added and later tweaked so that it gave some reflection and gave a self illumination. It was also made to be faceted; this was so the edges of the ring were defined. Though this was simple to make the next part was the more challenging, as this ring had to bounce down a rock and stop. This meant I had to use the reactor engine. Originally there were only 2 objects in the rigid body collection I made; the ring and the land. The land was set to unyielding and the ring to a light weight with its elasticity being edited to allow for it to bounce. I found however the land was too varied and did not allow for a path down for the ring, instead it would fall of to the side. To counteract this I made a box to act as its runway. It was added to the rigid body collection and set to unyielding; this worked perfectly but would need to be hidden just under the layer of land as to not be visible. To do this I rotated and placed the box in position and applied the same rock material to it to try and camouflage in more. As for the rigid body collection this meant that the main body of the land could no longer be set to active, so I swapped it to a phantom object; this meant I could see it when I previewed the animation but it would not affect the rings bounce. Once the runway was lined up so I was invisible and only just under the land I set about creating the stopping point/platform. A simple rock was made for the ring to bounce against and stop, this was done by creating a box and turbo smoothing it to create a rough rock shape. A platform was needed for the ring to rest on at the end and so just like with the runway, a box was made and placed hidden just under the land.









The last 3d element I added was to add to the imagery of the arena being a cave. I created several stalagmites to ‘hang’ from the ceiling. Although the bottoms of them are only visible at a couple points the main reason for this was due to the reflection off the water. The stalagmites were created using cones and edited with the soft selection tool making a more jagged shape. The material added to them had the same properties as the material used for the rocks except a brown tint was added in place of the strong grey colour.






The Lighting used in this scene consisted of 2 omni lights. The first of which was used to create a dim tone and cast shadows. The light was set to a dark grey with an intensity of 1.5. The 2nd light in the scene was to brighten to scene up slightly and to cast rays of light. The light was set to a teal colour with an intensity of 1.0, lens effects were added to give a glow and rays from the light, the rays again were set to a teal colour.

The camera used for this animation was a free cam moved along to show various points of the area. I felt like I wanted to show as much of the water as I could so I made a swing round of the area leading the viewer to behind the ring as it makes its first bounce. This also allowed for a dynamic view of the ring bouncing down and finally when it rests for the camera to zoom in on it.

Video editing was minimal once again as my animation was all in one shot, fades were added again to transition in better. The Sound was made in audacity using a variety of sound clips drawn from the internet. A musical backtrack was placed with speech over the top, ensuring that the speech was louder than the music. The main focus of the whole animation was the ring bouncing so the sound effects for this were the loudest however I found it a good idea to show the ring losing momentum by making each bounce noise quieter as it progressed.

Swap Round

Due to a lack of ideas and the buy out of the channel Paramount Comedy I have swapped my channel over to Sky Movies. I already have a couple ideas in the making so this should prove a bit easier for myself.

I have decided to create an ident for the Paramount Comedy channel.

I chose this channel as it is one that i frequently watch and has a broad spectrum for what could be used as an ident.

I will start looking at ideas and sketch some concepts to help get towards a final design,

Here is an example of the paramount idents:

Camera Paths and Morphing

We started off today by learning how to morph basic low poly models. For this i used a simple box shape. By making copies of the model we were able to make separate animations which we could than all to the initial design. I then used turbosmoothing to make the object more rounded. Once i had done this the morphs were applied in key frames. I added boxes to be skyscrapers and then used the camera tool to create a video view. A line spline was drawn first and the camera applied to follow this path. These videos show the morphing process and then the camera path:

Semester 2

In our first lecture we discovered how to make a basic animation of a bouncing object, in this case balls.

This video was made using key frames with the curve editor and dope sheet. Although the bounce doesnt look 100% natural I believe it to be of a good standard for my first attempt.

The task this semester set before us is to create an 'ident' for a television channel of our own choice.

Evaluation

Evaluation

Winter – Initially I was very pleased with the outcome of this image and it set the learning curve for myself. My main criticism I would have to make of it however would be that to my eyes it is clear that this was my first image. I believe this because as I look at my next two images I believe that the quality is higher, but this could just be my personal opinion. I would have liked to make the short animation fully rendered of the snow falling but as stated my laptop could not handle this, but I have included the early stages of the design with the desired snowfall effect.

Summer – I enjoyed making this scene but feel with more knowledge it could be greatly improved upon. I would have liked to include the sea but had no idea how to set about making water. This will be one of the things I hope to learn within the upcoming semester if at all possible. Another problem I found with this image is that creating depth is much trickier than first anticipated; I refer to the sand in particular here. I still feel the sand looks too coarse and flat as if it were gravel or stone. I am particularly pleased with my little play area of bucket/spade and sandcastles. This was just going to be an additional little thing to fill the image up more originally but I feel they came out really well.

Spring – I probably enjoyed making this image the most out of the three. I set myself the task of creating a flower, seeming rather difficult at the time. It was quite challenging to get the appearance correct but I think that made it more enjoyable seeing the improvement I was making. I also feel that this image very different to the others but as for why I cannot quite pinpoint. This image shows my progress with the tools within the program as I have used preset 3d shapes, splines and various modifiers; one of my favourites being the hair and fur modifier. My main criticism of this image would be the grounds original bitmap, it doesn’t quite blend with the grass as much as I would have hoped and so would be the only thing I would change in this image.

Overall I am pleased with the images I created and I feel much more confident using this program. I look forward to the next semester learning about other tools I have not experimented with so that I can create more professional images and even animations. I particularly found asking people’s opinions on my images, as I worked on them, useful as they gave me new ideas and pointed out problem areas which I had not seen myself.

Final Spring Scene

Spring

Spring Scene – March

Ground
- The ground was made using a flat plane. I added a bitmap of grass to this to create a base. I looked to improve upon the appearance of this by adding a bump map yet this still didn’t help a great deal. Soft selection was used to create hills, to which I then decided I could make grass. I made the grass by using the hair and fur modifier. The colours were altered to greens with the mutations being brown. The sheer number of ‘follicles’ was dramatically increased to approximately 30,000 with variations in positions.

Daffodils
- The stem of the daffodils were created using cylinders. This was then modified using the bend tool so they did not look like they are so stiff. A plain green colour was applied as no special texture was needed. The petal were created using splines, in particular ellipses. These were extruded and bent so they had a curve to them. They were then edited with soft selection to create the point at the end of the petal. These were then cloned and placed around where the head of the flower would be. The material used for the petals was originally going to be a bitmap, however the program stated this could not happen due to a rendering problem so I had to find an alternative. In the end I came to use the noise material with a bump map using both a yellow and an orange colour. The final modification to this material was to add a black self illumination, this created the patch effect seen on the flowers to make them seem as if the surface was not smooth but had little rises. The centre of the flower was made using a cylinder and the soft selection tool. The cylinder had to be more trumpet shaped and so needed points on the outer side, so this was done by grabbing points and pulling them out. The connecting side of the cylinder to the petals was made narrower by selecting the face and scaling down; this made the cylinder get wider and bigger as it progressed to the points of the trumpet. Clones were made of the original daffodil and then placed at various points on the image with being edited for height, scale and rotation.

Background
- The background was another bitmap image placed in the environment setting of the render tool.

Text
- The front of the image felt like it was missing something by having an open space. Originally tested with placing another daffodil at the front I came to the conclusion some text would look best. I chose to take an extract from a famous poem about daffodils themselves. I felt this gave a different look to my other images. The text itself was created using the text tool and then extruded to give it some depth. The material used to colour the text was a gradient from grey to white to grey. The specular level was then boosted to give the final effect of a nice crisp white.



Lighting
- I used two omni lights to brighten up my scene. They were both of the same intensity and same colour, again a soft yellow/orange colour. I only turned on shadows on one of the lights so not to confuse the origin of the primary light source. The shadow system I used was ray traced, and again I lightened the shadow intensity so not to overpower the image.

Final Summer Scene

Summer

Summer Scene – July

Ground
- This was made using a flat plane and adding a custom bitmap. The specular and opacity traits were modified to have the cellular material applied in sand type colours; this was to accentuate the sand effect. A bump map was also added using the same custom bitmap. This plane was then edited using the soft selection tool to create mounds and dips.

Towel
- The towel was created using a flat plane with a custom bitmap applied to it. This was then modified to have the cloth properties of silk, as this is the most reactant to the variations in the environment. The friction settings between the towel and the ground were increased so that when the settings were simulated it would not slip out of the entire image. The simulated state was then grabbed and lowered slightly so that it would appear some sand has been kicked up on top of the head of the towel. To create a more material effect to the towel the hair and fur modifier was used. The hair length and sheer number of follicles was reduced so that the overall effect made the towel look more 3d and woven.

Parasol
- The pole of the parasol was made using a cylinder and then tilting it to an angle using the rotation tool. The material used was very simple as all that was modified was the specular colour, being changed to a grey. The parasol top was created using the shape spindle. This was then edited using face selection and deleting one half. It was rotated and positioned on to the end of the pole. The material used on the parasol was a custom bitmap of tweed. This was then modified using the hair and fur modifier to create some depth. This was done in attempt to create a straw looking parasol.

Bucket
- The bucket was created using two cylinders and the Boolean tool. A smaller cylinder was subtracted from the cylinder visible in the picture to make it hollow. The material added to this was an anistropic flat red colour with a light red used for the specular highlights, which were increased from default along with the glossiness. The handle was created using a torus, scaling it both down and rotating it into position. A simple self illumination of white was set on this.

Spade
- The spade is made up using rectangular splines. These were extruded and then scaled to the correct size. The Boolean tool was then used to create the gap for the handle and the shovel part of the spade. The shapes subtracted from these were boxes positioned and angled at the desired location. The material applied to the spade was near identical to that of the buckets except that the colour used was green instead of red.



Sandcastles
- These were created using cylinders that were then modified using the soft selection tool to bring in the top face of the cylinder. Once that was done all that was needed was the material. The material used had the same basic bitmap as used for the ground but modified more intensely. Self illumination was added to brighten up the sand as it looked too dark without it; the colour used for this was a shade of yellow. Bump mapping was very important to the sandcastles, so much so the bump map is set to maximum to get the desired effect of the sand being compressed into each other.

Boat
- The boat in the background may not be very noticeable but I feel it adds to the image. This was created using a variety of shapes; the main hull of the boat was created from a box. This was edited using the scale tool by bringing in two corner points, creating an upside-down trapezium. The mast was created using a simple vertical cylinder. The sails were then made using a pyramid and finally to give the effect of motion a sphere was added between the boat and the sea. This sphere was edited with soft selection to create a tadpole like shape. The colours were kept very simple as vast detail was not needed in the object. The hull and mast were both set to a light brown colour, whereas the sail and the ‘motion sphere’ were set to white.

Background
- The background used was again a bitmap image. This time though rather than applying it to a plane I used the environment tool within the rendering options. This positioned the background perfectly to the rest of the image.

Lighting
- For this image I used Area Omni lighting. I increased the intensity of the light to create the illusion of a sunny day. I also changed the light colour to a soft yellow/orange colour so that the beach looked more inviting. I used ray traced shadows for this image and edited the shadow colour so that they did not appear too harsh and kept to the friendly warm atmosphere the image is portraying.

Final Winter Scene

Winter



Winter Scene – December

I wanted to keep this scene simple and make the main focus on the fact it was actually snowing.

Ground
- The ground was created using a simple plane with a custom bitmap added. I felt that there was no need to ‘bump’ this particular image, as it did not seem to look wrong for the environment it’s in. Instead I feel it gives the feeling of perfect untouched snow.

Fence
- The fence was a long box shape stretched out to fit the width of the image. The texture added to this object again was a custom bitmap file of vertical standing planks. This image was edited in photoshop to dim the colour to give the illusion the planks were weather treated.

Snowman
- The snowman is made up from 5 components. The main body and head are spheres that were elongated using the scale tool. Further modifications were carried out here using the soft selection tool to make the shapes less ‘perfect’. The material used for the snowman’s body was different to that used for the ground. The texture used was the ‘dent’ option pre-built in with the colours edited to fit the situation. A bump map was also included using the same texture with colours slightly darker and reversed around. The ‘carrot’ nose was created using the preset shape cone and then had a gradient texture added to it with variations of orange. The eyes were made with spheres, using the scale tool again to alter the shape from a perfect sphere. The material added to these eyes used the dent preset again with bump mapping in the colours of maroon and grey.



Shed
- The shed is made up of 5 objects, 4 of which are boxes. The boxes make up the bulk of the shed by creating the walls and the door with a window. The roof comprises of a prism. The walls materials all use the same bitmap but were rotated to fit their situation, so for example the side walls have the planks running horizontal instead of vertical like the front. The Window was created using the Boolean tool to subtract a small box from the main door box; this creates an indent in the door making it appear to have a window. A custom bitmap was then added to this flat surface to look like it is possible to see some of the contents of the shed itself. The prism roof was complex when it came to materials. The front had to show the materials interlinking all in different directions, this entailed rotation and face selection by breaking down the shape using the modify tool. The roof sides proved tricky when creating a snow effect. A custom bitmap was originally laid down for the roof that was simple roof tiling. This then had a layer of opacity applied to it with the same bitmap that was used for the ground. On top of this a strong bump map was applied using the normal bump setting and then the smoke material for both settings within. This gave a rippled effect, making the snow look both layered and uneven.

Snow Hill
- This used the same principle as the ground but was applied to half a cylinder to add depth to the picture and blend to the background by making the terrain look as if it sloped down.

Falling Snow
- This snow was created using the particle system in built to 3d studio max. Modifications were made to the default settings to make the effect look more realistic. The fall point was set above the scene so that it looked like a natural setting. The size of the flakes, variation in fall and tumble rate were all altered to get a still image that looked just right. An animation of this was made in the pre-rendering stages but was unable to complete a final rendered copy due to lack of power in my laptop.

Background
- Rather than set this bitmap as an environment scene I chose to create a plane and set it at an angle to create more depth to the image. By setting this image on a plane I could also choose what to show by adjusting the height of the plane.

Lighting
- I chose to use omni lighting and sky lighting for this image. The omni light was used to simply pick up highlights and so was set to a very low intensity. The colour of the lighting in both cases was set to an ice blue/white colour as to give the impression of the cold and reflection from the snow. The Sky light was set to the default intensity and was the main light in casting shadows; both used shadow maps with global settings.

Prototype Snowfall