Head Model - Update

Since the last 6-8 weeks have been spent working on the group project and other assignments I have not had a lot of time to make many changes to the final head model I made for the first part of the project.

However I did update the nose on the model which the tutor pointed out was too narrow and had very small nostrils. After doing so the modifiers above the changes broke, including the material textures and head and fur modifier. With no way to fix it to how it was I have simply handed in the changes in the hope that it willbe taken into account for final marking.

Group Project - Evaluation

Overall the project has been an enjoyable if frustrating experience. Working in a group on such a large scale project can be quite challenging to organise and not taking into account other modules is probably why the group needed the deadline extension.

However we squeezed everything we could out of the extra time given and managed to make a very professional looking video which meets the brief we were given at the start of the module. I also learned quite a few useful techniques in 3DS Max.

• Slice Animation
• Rayfire Animation
• Advanced Lighting Techniques
• Backburner Mass Rendering

Lighting gave a lot of headaches when it came to rendering. Getting a perfect flow of animation without lighting speckles or artifacts seemed to be impossible and I plan to develop my knowledge of mental ray rendering in the future.

I am happy with how the group worked as a whole, even though I had to animate a great deal of the project myself due to other members work commitments of lack of a high spec computer it was probably for the best as early on we decided that out of the four of us that I had the strongest animation skills. Jack Dickens helped me out a lot with how rayfire works and when it came to setting up the last scenes animations.

If we were to do the project again as group leader I would try to better organise the team and delegate tasks when required. We struggled initially to maintain a constant level of progress and missed the initial deadline as a result for which we are dissapointed about. Next time better planning would be required.

As a final note I am extremely happy with the final rendered video. It looks professional and I think displays a high level of skill.

Group Work - Encoding/Rendering Final Video

While the last few scene were being rendered and processed into video clips I began putting together the final video together for the group using Premier Pro.

Fade to black and transparency transitions were added to link from one scene to the other where appropriate giving the video a nice flowing feel.

We also added a 5 second intro screen and 0918959 quickly made up a ending credits for the video showing who worked on the project.

Finally we added a free to use sound clip titled 'Dreams' by Stephen Richards.
http://longzijun.wordpress.com/2010/05/28/free-background-music/

After a lot of searching for appropriate backing music we settled on this track because we felt it fit the flow of the video quite nicely.

Here is a screenshot of the final project before rendering:

Group Project - Lighting/Render Problems

Me and 0918959 spent a lot of time today setting up cameras in the interior of the house to show of the rooms in a nice high quality view. It wasnt planned initially but we thought it would be best to show how each room looks.

The lighting was extremely tricky to work out and gave us countless problems. No lighting looked bland, the daylight system didnt work indoors on its own and adding skylights gave speckles on certain textures. In the end we had to pick the best option and render those. Hopefully the rendered videos will look ok.

After the project I plan to personally look into the best lighting setup so I can use if for future projects.

Animating Scene 6 and 7

Scenes 6 and 7 involve showing how the interior of the building has changed and was quite a complicated and tedious process. However I think that the final rendered result will look really good and I am happy with the results.

Scene 6 deals with downstairs. Including the changes to wall layout and proposed use furniture. For example the shop, museum and library.

It starts by slicing away the roof and top floor. (this is important as it helps show that we are now looking inside the house). Then pans over and looks down. From here the camera pans right and walls are removed or replaced and furniture is dropped in from above.

Sceen 7 does the same but includes the walls in the guildroom which has plaster removed. The plaster is removed with rayfire and the wind modifier. The wind makes the peices float to the right and is a really good effect. I discovered this while animating this scene and if there was time I would have gone back and done something similar for the other scenes.

Slicing the top floor

Removing Old Walls

Adding new walls and furniture

Dropping in new furniture

Removing old walls

Scene 7 Screens:

Dropping in furniture

Before plaster is removed

Plaster floats away to right

Fading away

Animating Scene 5

While not originally planned in the storyboards I felt it was best to show a small scene of the changes to the entrance archway area. A simple slice of the current steps to the new steps and dropping in the new steel bollards was implemented for this scene.

Mid Slice

Bollards Dropping

Bollards in place

Animating Scene 4

The 4th scene also makes use of rayfire. The extruding walls which house the staircases to the second floor is removed in the new model so they are exploded away to make room for the new glass walkway.

The walkway is revealed by using the slice technique again, the old wall is also replaced at the same time.

Fragmented into peices

Exploded

Drift away

Slicing in the new walkway

Animating Scene 3

Scene 3 involves replacing the guttering on the guildhall with the new set and the slicing the walls from old to new. The gutter moves off the wall to the left and fades out (Keyframe animation) and the new set which starts off transparent fades in and moves into place.

The camera then pans left and up to show the walls slicing from right to left, changes in windows, doors and paint colour can be seen.

Slice being used on a number of objects.

Animating Scene 2

The second scene involves using rayfire on the chimney for a cool effect. The chimney blasts apart and floats away (using reverse gravity) as well as dissapearing (keyframing the transparency of the pieces)

Rayfire Part 1

Rayfire Part 2

After this the roof will be replaced with the new roof by using the slice tool which is another new technique for me, albiet very simple to use.

Animating Scene 1

Since the rest of the group is busy with work commitments I have taken it upon myself to begin animating the transition from old guild hall to new. Both models are complete with some last minute touch ups to furniture and textures being done on the new guildhall.

The first scene is a simple slow pan of the guildhall in its current state to give a representation of what it looks like now.

To get a nice fluid motion the camera was attached to a arc line using the animation tool path constraint. The total frames in this scene is roughly 500 at 30 frames per second.

Group Work - Surroundings

With both the old and new guildhall models complete and ready to animate I quickly added some extra detail to the surrounding areas we currently have. Since time is short we are only focusing on the small patch around the guildhall. If we had more time we would have liked to include some of the surrounding buildings (simplified) as well.

Using the built in foilage tool I added some plants to represent what plants are present in the area. The hedge in the scene was downloaded as a free model from the turbosquid website.

Overgrown Plants

Side Hedge

Testing out Rayfire (New Skills!)

0918959 Has been experiementing with the Rayfire plugin and has realised that his computer at home cannot reliably handle the program very well. Since my system at home is new and quite powerful I have agreed to animate the rayfire scenes at home instead.

After a brief explanation of how it works from 0918959 I managed to put together this small animation of a collapsing block:

The effect is quite cool and I am sure with some more experimenting I can get the desired effect we wanted for breaking away old walls in the guild hall.

Group Work - Stairs

The new guildhall has brand new staircases to replace the old set. The service stairs near the entrance and the stairs which lead to the new hallway and loft.

Service Stairs

Main Staircase steps

Adding Banisters and Sides

Finished

All thats left to do now is texture the staircases for the final renders.

Group Work - Radiator

To help others with creating the furniture for the house I made a radiator for the bathrooms in the guildhall. It was quite a complex shape using extruding, bevel, manually editing polygons and so on.

Mid Progress

Complete

Group Work - New Gate

As part of the new guildhall a large metal gate is being added to the back of the entrance archway area. The actual design on this is quite sketchy so I had to improvise and deisng something which I think suited the building.

The gate is made up of primitive boxes, cylinders and cones which have been edited. 

Mid way complete

Finished and in place

Group Work - Exposing Wall Beams

For our animation the wall beams which are currently hidden behind plasterboard in the old guildroom will be revealed by exploding the plaster away with rayfire. I've modelled the beams as accuratly as possible to the blueprints.

The roof beams are also going to be visible in the guild room so i have modelled those in too.

Group Work - Wooden Beams

To show the wooden beams in both versions of the building I started creating the beams out of primitive box shapes and adding a slight curve to the beams. At this point I realised the wooden supports on the outside of the guildhall were probably part of these beams and replaced them.

Creating the wooden beams

Almost Finished

After replacing the outer supports

Group Work - Detailing

Ive been working on the group model by adding more detail to the top floor of the guildhall. Room layouts and wooden beams as well as some smaller details over the last week.

Guild Room Wooden Beams

Chimney which will be removed

Outer wooden supports

The old guildhall design is nearly complete now with only details like doors and and exterior surroundings to be added.

Group Work Update

Continung from the initial model created by 0920876 I have simplified some of the walls and added in extras that were accidently missed out. The ground floor walls are pretty much accurate to the blueprints.

Second floor walls overhang the first floor slightly and match up with the seperate part of the building on the right hand side. The foundation is also in place.

0918959 has agreed to model the roof while the rest of the group begin focusing on detailing the current walls by adding windows/doors.

Group Work Task

Finchingfield Guildhall

The second part of the virtual enviroments module is to work in a group and recreate the Finchingfield guildhall in 3D Studio Max showcasing how the building will look after renovation.

During the first few meetings with the rest of the group members I volunteered and was elected to be group leader. All this means is I will be in charge of updating the group blog with meeting minutes, group tasks and organising the project as a whole.

All members of the group will be working on the model with key areas delagated to individual group members. I will update my personal blog here with the work I have produced for the group project which will then be shown as a group update of overall progress on the group blog.

Modelling My Face - Evaluation

Progress Evaluation

The hand in date is today and overall I am pleased with my progress. My model may not be a spitting image of me and the expression of the model is a bit gormless but generally I am happy with the current result. I think that it is easily recognisable as being me. There are still some weak areas in the model in my opinion, for one I don't think the nose is completely accurate to my own around the nostrils.

Texture wise I have already expressed my dissatisfaction with the quality of the original reference images and if I had known early on how important it had been I would have taken the time to take a high quality photo where all features of the face were visible. Because of the problems with the image my final texture is slightly lower quality than it could be and I have no decent texture for the ears. 

At this stage I have yet to create a specular map for the model which could add even more to the realism of the texture. I plan to add this to the model over the next few weeks including, if possible a better texture for the ears.

I learnt a great deal during the last few weeks in terms of modelling techniques and how to effectively create textures. Being on the Computer Games Development course means that this module has been especially useful for me so far as I can apply my developing skills towards 3D modelling in video games.

Modelling My Face - Adding Hair

Since the first deadline is today I have decided to quickly add some hair for a more finished look. Using the built in hair and fur modifier tool provides a quick and easy way of adding fairly realistic looking hair to a model. This is done by selecting the polygons on the model which produce hairs, in this case the all of the polygons on the top and back of the hair to the hair lines.

I then styled the hair to better match my own style by using comb and scale. I also quickly attempted to brush the fringe to one side as my usual hair style.

Im very impressed with the quality of the hair modifier tool. It looks quite realistic and even looks quite like my own style.

Here is a full high quality render of the model using a daylight lighting system and transparent shadows.

Modelling My Face - Bump Mapping

Bump mapping is used to create the illusion of depth in a texture. In this case the small bumps and contours in the skin. The process of doing so isn't very difficult and can really help make a texture look much more realistic. However the quality of the bump maps is dependant on the size and quality of the reference image used. This is slightly worrying as my reference image was not of the best quality.

I created the bump map above using the texture I had created previously in Photoshop. Grey areas in a bump map indicate flat areas whereas white and black indicate the rise and fall in the texture. The background of the image was set to a mid-level grey for the flat effect. I then removed the saturation from the image turning the image grey scale before applying the high pass filter changing the image to the one seen in the screenshot above.  At this point the image can be used as a bump map. However the edges of the image have white lines around them. This would cause a bump in the texture along the symmetry lines. I fixed this using the rubber stamp tool and blending them slightly.

The final bump map

Applying this bump map to the facial texture adds all of the little bumps and grains from the bump map and applies it on top of the face texture.

The bump map effect is most obvious here on the forehead and center of the chin. The low quality of the texture again can be seen on the side of the nose with some stretching unfortunatly.

Tweaking the bump map properties with a noise modifier reduces the density of the bumps in the bump map giving an even more realistic effect.

Close up the effect of the bump map is quite impressive.