Week 9 (A long post!)

This week I finished texturing my X-wing, there's not much to say about it as it was simply UVW mapping like the tie fighter. I did the wing and body seperately, and used a solid colour for the rest. Again I modified a picture I found online, which was a blueprint of the Xwing that I coloured in and airbrushed parts out of. I do like how it looks with the textures. If I had a bit more time I would have liked to texture the whole thing, or put a different texture on the top and bottom of the wing, but as it is they're the same.

Also this week I rendered a test scene I made. (I can't remember if I made it this week or last week, I just found it again on my removable hard drive), which was just an experiment in texturing, animation, cameras and lighting. It shows a "moon" moving over a height mapped plane, with a 'skybox' sphere, and a light is attached to the moon for a day/night cycle type effect. My friends know this scene as "Hillary Moon" as in class I had attached an amusing picture of Hillary Clinton to the moon as a texture so her face would always be watching you, much like the moon from the legend of Zelda. It detached the textures when I brought the scene home, so I've replaced the textures with 3DS Max samples, and I've added a self illumination effect to the moon.

I learned a lot from making this, if only just basic things. It showed me how to get it all to work together. I'm pleased with how it came out but it's simply a test. In hindsight I should have added a glow effect to the moon to practice that too, but I can test it when I make the lasers.

Scene 1

The whole cast together on set! I merged them all into the Scene.

As the first scene is going to be a simple fly-past of the camera with the empire's ships, I just disabled the X-Wing for this scene.

I used directional lights with a volume light effect added to make exhaust lights on the X-wing and the lambda shuttle. Though when I rendered it I realised my omni lights were incredibly bright, so they've been toned down for the final recording.

As this scene was slightly longer than intended, I increased the length of the clip to 200 frames. As I was going to render at 23fps in premier pro, this is actually longer than it sounds which worried me slightly, but I'm sure it will be okay. Since the end of the clip hangs on for quite a while as the ships pass, this means I'll have plenty to cut out when it comes to editing the final animation, and it also gives me some leeway to fiddle around with the length of the other clips.

I'm happy with how it plays so far, though I could change the speed of the ships and the the camera's arc to make the shot slightly more exciting as it appears quite boring at the moment. I'd like to have the camera swoop out of the way at the last second.

The main problem I'm still facing is 3DS Max constantly crashing and losing my most recent changes. Its begun to crash so often I can never get past 3 autoback files. Autoback 4 and 5 are from when I was still creating my models. I've repaired the installation, however this has not solved any issues at all. I'll have to look for more fixes next week.

Week 8 - Part 2

This week I only did a small amount of work on my Tie Fighter. Using photoshop and the exported UVW maps I created this by cutting up an existing image from google images using 'draw selection', 'opacity' and the layers function in university on photoshop and at home on gimp. (When I found the ones I made in photoshop wouldn't export to gimp correctly, even as a .tiff file, so I had to remake them with the wing panels adjusted to fit better). To make textures for the rest of the ship I simply used varying shades of the colours from around the edge of this texture so they would all match. The window frame for example was a bit darker. I won't post those as they're simply blocks of one colour as I didn't use UVW on those.

Also to edit the individual textures I learned how to use open and open recursively on groups. Up until this point I'd been using explode and regrouping everything. This would have saved me a lot of time if I'd learned it earlier.

I would have liked to add more detail to the cap in the middle of the wing, and the body, but I'm a very bad artist, and I think it looks okay without the detail cluttering it up. The iconic look of the Tie Fighter is there thanks to the UVW on the wings, and the colouring is also there.

Week 8

This week in our lecture we watched a couple of pixar shorts and identified the techniques and uses of said techniques.

Going back to week one's storyboard, I intended to have a shot looking down onto the cluster of empire ships as the X-wing slides into view ominously and quietly to obscure the view of the  empire ships. I think as far back as week 1 I felt that that would be a good shot, even if I didn't know why. In hindsight and with the knowledge that Steve gave us this week, the shot itself puts the viewer into a position of power and highlights the "power" that the X-wing has over the ships below by its stealthy 'sneak' up on them. It also puts the viewer higher than the X-wing which gives the viewer the feeling that they are currently at higher power than the X-wing as they can see everything going on below.

During the fight scene in the second half of the animation I also hope to have some views from inside the cockpit of the X-wing as it gives the viewer the feel that they are also the hero of the scene and makes them happy for the X-wing pilot as he takes out the empire's forces. It will also ramp up the excitement of the scene as the viewer can only see part of the battle which will allow me to hide some ships movements from the viewer and create tension, not to mention the viewer seeing lasers come towards them.

Also while watching 'For the Birds' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWIVoW9jAOs Ipicked out a few techniques to practice analysing said techniques.

1. from 00:17 to 00:28 they use a medium range shot that follows the telephone wires along to show that there is plenty of space, and when the small bird does come to land on it, it shows the viewer that this bird is small and possibly makes the viewer feel that it is cute.
2. from 00:28 to 00:47 the picture is zoomed in to show that in the bird's world at least, they are very important because each bird takes up more visual space, this is intensified when the birds start to squabble as they all are selfish and angry, which shatters the 'cute' aspect of the previous shot.
3. The camera then begins to zoom out until 00:54 which shows all the little birds are the same, and this sets up the next shot which reveals the big bird all alone, compared to the tiny ones. This shows the viewer that the big bird is probably not friends with the small ones at all, and is all alone compared to their group.
4. At 00:58 there is a close up of the birds as they all look on in horror at a seemingly harmless big bird. This is similar to other shows and films with teenage groups when an outsider approaches the 'popular' group and they are shocked that  the outsider wants to join them. This is then reinforced by the following shots where the birds start to make fun of the big bird while they know he is watching.
5. The small group and big bird are not shown in the same shot until 1:17, and even then this shot is just there to show the little ones running away and separating themselves further from big bird.
6. There is a close up of the small birds on the wire at 1:38 which gives a claustrophobic feel, you can't even see the whole big bird and this shows he's taking up 'too much' space in the shot, meanwhile all the little birds are squished together and nearly 5 whole little birds ARE in the shot.
7. 1:51 when the big bird tips over once again plays with how much space everyone takes up. The little birds all fit in, while only the big birds feet and legs are on screen. it makes the small birds look like a very close gang, with the big bird trying to stay a part of it, even in such a small way.
8. 2:16 is the shocking moment when it zooms out fully for the first time after the wire has bent, and reveals to the audience what the small bird on the left just noticed in the shot before. They're nearly on the ground already. The big bird isn't going to fall hard, but the small birds are going to take most of the fallout from their bullying.
9. 2:56 has just the big bird taking up the screen and this shows the smaller ones finally value him as they're willing to give up their own space on the rest of the screen to use the big bird to hide themselves, leaving the big bird with all the space and the small birds with none as they were the bullies. 

Week Seven - Final Models (and finishing the lambda shuttle)

Lambda Shuttle

In addition to finishing my ships, I had a ton of work to do on my Lambda shuttle. I was sort of putting it off because the round edges on everything was quite a scary prospect. I shouldn't have left it so late, but I completely remade the body, and the head. I'd been overcomplicating it before with the cylinders attached to the cube and MSmooth tool and everything. I went back to basics and started again, but this time I used a Chamfer box. I converted it to an editable poly, and used the scale tool to grab and manipulate just the curved areas around the edges. This gave the body of the ship a very pleasing shape. and also removed roughly 2000 polygons, which was just crazy.

Before and after shots of the body:

It was fairly easy adding the wing, and at this point I'd not remade the head of the ship as I'd left it to one side after testing out a very light curve over the top of it with the chamfer tool. However, later on I'd remake it too to give it a wider and more sturdy metal feel instead of just a flimsy thin covering. I like the shape of the new headpiece a lot more than the old one, and it allowed me to fix a lot of the problems with the first headpiece where it wouldn't fit onto the 'neck' that well, or work particularly well with the chamfer tool.

Left: Final, Middle: Work in progress Right: First headpiece.

I feel like the left one obviously has a more pleasing shape to it, and since I'd built it with quite a bit more experience than the first time I was able to make it much nicer to work with. I'd made the mistake of deleting a lot of edges and vertices and so on from the first one, and I could build this one without having to make that same mistake.

I was very proud of myself when I made the vent on top of the ship, it required quite a bit of forethought to make it, and quite a lot of aligning and boolean.

After I'd made the base shape of the ship, with the body and main parts of the wings completed, the rest was quite easy. I'd use the autogrid tool to add on detail, and then just drag vertices, faces, edges etc. and mirror it as required. Probably the hardest detail to do was the panels on the bottom wings because they were at a 45 degree angle, autogrid didn't seem to like it that much and I had to rotate a lot of the pieces to line up. It was hard and frustrating work, but seeing the completed ship made it worth it in the end. 

Final Ship Evaluation

Lambda Shuttle

I hadn't left myself heaps of time to complete all the detailing on the lambda shuttle, and I should have allocated myself more time to do it. I'm not really that happy with the job I did on the underside, however I'm not intending to show the audience the underside in the animation, so I'm not too worried. I did really like the look of the detailing I did on the backside of the ship though, with the hubs and pipes connecting them. I thought that it was simple but effective.
As with all the ships, I feel like I matched the source material really well with the proportions, mainly because I used the blueprinting technique that Steve showed us in the lecture. So most of the main proportions are correct for ALL the ships. However especially on the Lambda Shuttle, I did have to make some adjustments as the blueprints didn't seem to look quite right compared to other images of the ships, so I did make some adjustments there and perhaps the middle section of the lambda shuttle the trapezoid section in the middle of the main body could have been improved, but it looked tall enough in some material and too small in others so I'm fairly unsure.

Tie Fighter

 If I had to do the Tie Fighter again, I wouldn't merge the layers of the wings into one object. That would be the biggest change I would make. Perhaps I would also add some more detail to the underside too. Also I feel as though I've wasted a lot of polygons on the tiny vents I created around the wing hubs. It feels like there should have been a much more polygon efficient way to get the vents to look good, but in the interests of time I simply went with making a small vent and putting it into place on the wings. I had to make an alteration here from the source material. In the original Tie Fighters, the vents on the wings are just to one side. I tried this on my Tie but it made the hexagon look slanted, so I made the decision to place them in the middle between each 'spoke' on the wing, and I think it looks a lot better. I'm still very happy with the arms on the wings, and I really feel like I've come a long way since my awful Tie Fighter on week one (or two, maybe?)

X-Wing

Out of all three models, I'm probably most attached to my X-Wing, even though I think my Tie Fighter might be better. The main issues I had with the X-Wing were the underside of the wings (For some reason the boolean tool wouldn't cut indentations into them, so I decided to make them stick out slightly instead,) the back part of the engines which look slightly bare, and the curving of the long nose of the ship. I tried to make the nose of the ship as perfectly as I could, but it just wouldn't look right when I'd straighten it out, so I left the curve in. The tip of the nose is exactly the same as from the first attempt many weeks ago, it was so difficult to make the first time I refused to remake it, but I think it looks perfectly fine. The guns are also the same, if slightly squished (and with a little more detail). The cockpit was so difficult to get right in relation to the raised platform with R2D2 behind it. In every image it's slightly different. I found a way to make it look nice and went with it. The body of the ship is slightly narrower than the blueprints to accommodate the cockpit, but I think it works well. I'd like to redo the underside of the wings, but I think with materials applied they'll look a lot more acceptable.

Overall my time spent with 3DS max so far has been a rollercoaster. The constant crashes and backtracking because of this has made me hate the program, but I really love how it all just seems to work (when its not crashing). Working with editable polys is actually quite intuitive and nice, because as I said it just works exactly how you'd naturally try to use it. The only exception to this is not being able to weld two points that aren't on the same face, but it's an easy workaround. I think in the end it was worth it because making these ships has really opened my eyes to how much time it must take people to make humans or monsters, and even better versions of the ships I've made. I'm looking forward to animating, as the camera and lighting seems just as intuitive (minus the shadows being off by default).

Week Six

UVW Mapping Test

During this week, I tested out UVW Unwrapping on a simple cube just to get used to the basics.

I accidentally drew on the 'Hi' upside down, but since Steve showed us in the lecture how to change that, it was no problem:

X-Wing

This week for my X-wing I completed the main body, and a small thing that I forgot from week five: 

I actually successfully used autogrid to do some bolts on the wings, and I'll definitely be using it in future to to smaller details. I'm still not happy with using it on larger shapes. For example, I did use it to add red 'paint' to the wings. I'll be able to remove the 'paint' when I do the materials, but I think it looks nice for now.

 I did go back later in the week and add some more detail and nearly finish the ship altogether. I just need to go through and look over all the object names for any that I've missed, and maybe change around some of my groupings. I'll post an evaluation of it next week with the two others.

I think it will be really easy to texture the details, since I've made them seperately. The body of the ship and the wings may need UVW unwrapping, but I'll have a look when I get around to texturing. The gun might be slightly difficult to texture since I didn't remake it as seperate cylinders as I did with the engines (I did slightly squish it inwards with the scale too, as it looked a bit wide).
Tie Fighter

I couldn't believe how much I actually got done this week, not only did I do all the work on the X-wing, but I've practically finished the Tie Fighter too.

My 3DS max has been crashing VERY often, so I've kept having to use the autoback saves to rescue my work. Some days it'll cooperate, some days it won't. 
As you can see, I've completely built up the arms of the ship (that was actually very fun) I've used the mirror tool a lot on both the X-wing and the Tie Fighter to get everything perfect. I'd align the pivot with something in the hierarchy tab, and then mirror the object  (or group) to get it perfectly symmetrical. It's such a useful tool. I love the way its turned out so far, although the ball in the middle looks very bare, so I'll finish adding the detail that you can see I've started in the picture (the dark blue) and add some to the front too. I still need to add lights (I think they're lights) on the back, and some sort of hatch onto the top. I'm considering cutting into the sphere with a tube for that.

Week Five

Lambda

This week I started work on my Lambda shuttle, if only a very brief start. I created a rough body and head for the ship. To make the body, I used two cylinders and attached them to a box to get the rounded edges, and then I used the inset tool on the back to create a smaller face which I could pull out to make my own curve.







As you can see, this looked very blocky and I felt it wouldn't look that good so I used the MSmooth tool to smooth it around a little. I don't like the sheer amount of polygons it has added, but I think it looks better than the very blocky back on it. I think I may look to improve upon this later.






Tie Fighter




I also made a new simple tie fighter. I only created one wing and arm since I can use the mirror tool when its complete. I then worked on he detail on the panels of the wing, and the main window on the body. I'm actually really happy with how the window turned out, and my progress so far. I think the wings still look very bare though, so I'll have to add some more detail to the centre, and around the outside edge.











X-Wing

Finally for my X-Wing this week, I remade the body from scratch so it was perfectly symmetrical, and recreated the engine which I feel that I'd overcomplicated by using inset and extrude to create one long shape. Instead I now separated it into a couple of cylinders which not only looks better, but it allows me to shift them around a bit easier to find a good position for them.

Another thing that I've noticed that it makes such a difference when you change all the object colours to sort of the correct colours. I was very uneasy about how the whole ship looked until I changed the colours to grey (excuse the engine, as I was still working on it) and at that point it all sort of came together, and looked a lot nicer. It stopped me worrying a little bit also about how the finished ship would look.