Week10. Reactor

This week We used reactor to create the animation of bowling ball knocking of the pins. The models were already created an imported to 3D Max. First I selected all objects and created rigid body collection by going to animation> reactor > create object> rigid body collection. Then in RB collection sub-window "properties" all objects were added using "ADD" button. Second step was to go to utilities> reactor> properties sub-menu and change mass of objects. The alley was set to 0, bowling ball to 20 and pins to 10 mass units. The reactor had strange impact on the pins, when the animation was simulated pins raised above the alley. This was corrected by changing pins "Col. tolerance" properties to 0.5 in Havok 1 World. The reactor prompted with error when col. tolerance was set to 0. Therefore, it was changed to 0.5. For even better results pins could be moved in the scene. With the autokey on, the bowling ball was rotated and repositioned in frame 5 in order to create the rolling ball effect. The reactor simulator can be turned on in preview and animation window by pressing "preview in window" and then pressing P in keybord. To see moving ball the start frame was changed between 1-5 in reactor timing, otherwise it would not show it in reactor simulation. When satisfactory result was achieved "create animation" button was used to transfer effect created in reactor to the actual timeline.

Bowling animation:

week9. Morpher

The head object was imported to 3D max. Then head was converted to editable poly. Then five copies of the head were created. Each head was suppose to present different facial emotion. While in editable poly roll out different polygons were selected and moved to imitate single emotion on different heads. The five emotions are open mouth, closed eyes, smiling, lift eyebrows and shrink eyebrows. when emotions were finished the main head object was applied with "Morph" modifier. Then in channel list roll-out box five "empty" boxes were assigned with modified head objects using "pick object from scene" button. Once all morphers were set up the animation took place. With the help of autokey i changed the values of each expression at wanted points in timeline. Finally i applied "meshsmooth modifier to the main head and rendered the scene.



And here is the animation:

Week8. Bones animation

This time we had to use bones to animated the torso. First the torso was made see-trough in its object properties window. Then the bones were created using the create->systems->bones panel.
The bones were placed along the arm bending points. The arm ended up with four bones including the small "guide" bone at the end. The bone system was moved to match the torso model. Another hand bone system was a copy of the previous one with some adjusted bones. The bones were rotated along the connection points. Then each bone was given a name. Each bone was edited in modifier panel by increasing size of side, back abd front fins so they would touch torso mesh on each side.

To make arm parts bend more natural "IK limb solver" was applied to the bones trough animation->IK solvers->IK limb solvers. Next the torso was "skinned". The torso object was applied with skin modifier. All bones were added to the "bones" box. Extra bone was created in the middle of the body to avoid unwanted stretching by the arms. It was modified and added to the torso bone system same as previous bones. To make bones movement even more natural the envelope of each bone was modified trough skin modifier envelopes sub-selection. The envelopes rings radius were changed to adjust how much mesh each bone affects. Finally, animation was creating by moving bones in different frames with autokey on.

King Kong and clapping animation:

Week7. Introduction to Animation

The first task was to animate the bouncing ball. The sphere was created using a sphere primitive object. The animation was created by pressing autokey button at the bottom of the timeline and adjusting sphere position at different frames. To make animation continious the cycle curve parameter was applied by selecting sphere and going to graph editors> Track view - Curve editor > select axis along which object is animated >parameter curve out-of-range types > cycle.

Then two more spheres were added to scene as instances. The animation length and start of each sphere was changed by going to Graph Editors> Track view - Dope Sheet.

Below is my first aniamtion test that I did with 3D MAX.

The second test uses object and the path. The object teapot was constrainted to the path trough Animation> Constraints> Path constrain. The "follow" checkbox was selected in path parameters rollout to make teapot follow the path instead of just moving along it

The camera was added to scene and camera's target was constrainted to the teapot in order to get camera follow the teapot. The extra path was created for the camera to get more movement. Finally extra objects were added to the scene and applied with materials.

Animated:

Storyboard

I am a crappy drawer. Therefore, as you realized my storyboard includes the actual models that would be used in the trailer. I can not say that this is the final draft, this is more like first one and I will be considering some changes. The idea is to create a fast paced continuous action sequence. The trailer would use one of the James Bond movie soundtracks. I have to research the sounds that I am going to use in the trailer.

Storyboard:

1.Fade in to the gun. Camera pan around the gun and stops targeting left gun side.
2.slow-motion bullet shot will be shown here for second or two.
3.Pace is normal again and camera follows the bullet to the left. Bullet's speed is faster that camera. The bullet disappears to the horizon.
4.Static camera with "007" text written. Bullet flies to frame from right and leaves at right.
5.Close-up. Bullet morphs to the car. Camera pans down. The car fells on the ground and starts going left, camera follows. Various extreme close-up shot of car mirrors, tyres and body.
6.Ice palace appear in horizon. Camera zooms to the building and leaves car behind the frame.
7.Camera rotates around the palace.
8.Camera start to zoom out from the building. When camera has full shot of ice palace entrance car drives in and stops by entrance.
9.When all building is in the frame camera stop to zoom out. The light beam from the top covers the building. Light intensity increases very fast. Only light is seen in the frame.
10.Beam of light dissolves to black background. The movie release date moves from left, turns by an angle and moves out right.

Model3. Tyre

Actual plan is to model the car. Until now I only had enough time to make a wheel for my intented Astom Martin Vanquish model. The wheel is not totally finished. I will add more detail to the rim like logo, holes, bolts and side texture for the tyre. The reason for doing is that the trailer will use extreme close-up shots of car and wheels.

The car rim has a lot of symmetry in it. I had to model 1/24 of rim and use the symmetry modifier to build final shape of the rim. The cylinder was created and slice dialog box was turned on. Then the cylinder was sliced to small 15 degree part. The symmetry modifier was applied several times and every bit was rotated to finally compile rim. After the preparation stage edges, polygons and vertices of the cylinder were modified in editable poly sub-object menu. While modelling the object "show end result on/off" toogle button was used to see how changes in editable poly affect final object with symmetry and smoothing modifiers.

The tutorial that is referenced below in source list was folowed to create the tyre. First the tube was created and smoothen out with meshsmooth modifier. The tyre top texture started with standard box primitive. Box was aligned with the tube. Box was converted to editable poly and applied with my favourite symmetry modifier to create identical tyre sides. Later with tools>array help extra box instances were created by rotating them along the tyre center. To achieve this the box pivot point was moved to same point as the center of tube. The last step was to start modelling the box in editable poly section.

Finally all different objects were scaled, moved, grouped together and assigned with materials.




Sources:
Reference image http://www.exchange3d.com/3D%20Model%20of%20Aston%20Martin%20Vanquish%20Wheel/prod_12396.html#preview Reference image http://www.netcarshow.com/aston_martin/2001-v12_vanquish/800x600/wallpaper_07.htm
Reference image http://www.mattdrive.com/aston_martin_vanquish
Tutorial http://area.autodesk.com/tutorials/polygon_modeling_9_car_tyres

Model2. Ice Palace

The ice palace is fictional building from the movie. Again it was hard to find proper reference images for my model and I have ended up with one image from the web and footage from the movie were palace is shoot at same side all the time. Once again I had to imagine some of the parts.

The oval parts are made using sphere with hemisphere and slice on. Decision was made to use the symmetry for other half of the building. The symmetry process was exactly as in the gun model. The first sphereon the left in the image below was copied. Boolean was used to remove inside polygons. The second and other spheres have windows. Again by using boolean and with cut > split option the outline was created at the intersection of the objects. The polygons were extruded to make a window. These polygons were detached as a new object for the purpose of applying different material to them and to remove unwanted smoothing.

The arcs were created by drawing similar shape with line tool. The rectangular shape have been drawn soon after. The line was applied with loft modifer as a path and rectangular was selected as the shape. Created object was converted to editable poly and bottom polygons at the end have been rotated to match palace base.

The entrace was created as a cylinder and sliced to half with slice on. Cylinder was converted to editable poly. The roof and first floor ground were created by extruding polygons. The polygons between windows were extruded and scaled horizontally. Edges were chamfered. Turbosmooth modifer was applied to the object. The polygons for windows were selected and assigned with polygon material id. The rest of the polygons were assigned with differetn material id. This was done in order to apply different materials to the object.

After modelling the snow material was applied to most of the parts. It was created using online tutorial which is refered in the source section. In the material editor diffuse color was set to white, self-illumination to 15 and specular level to 10. The "Mix" map was chosen from Maps>Bumps>none>Mix. In the mix parameters color#1 none button was pressed and applied with cellular map. In the cellular parameters under cellular characteristics "Chips" was chosen with 0.1 size. Back in the "Mix" parameters Mix amount was set to 50 and color#2 none was changed to "Noise" map. The size was changed to 1 in the noise parameters section. Entrance material was changed to "Multi/Sub-Object" . The windows id was assigned with glass material and the rest used snow material. The glass material was selected from "Arc&Design" material template list. To get this material the renderer had to be changed to mental ray renderer.
Finally building objects were grouped together. The daylight system was created and the shadows were turned on.






Sources:
Movie "Die Another Day" (2002) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0246460/
Reference images http://www.sacredart-murals.co.uk/mural-gallery/james-bond-mural.html
Snow material tutorial http://www.3dsmaxresources.com/tutorial_display.php?id_tut=38&page=1