Final Evaluation of Module and Personal Work

So 3D Modelling and Animation,. I was excited about this module as soon as I found out we were doing it, as the idea of being able to model and animate had always been one of my main interests for going into Game Design.

I feel like this module was well laid out and clear on what we had to produce for both assignments and the Star Wars theme made it even better! Who doesn't love Star Wars? So I was pumped to bust out some AT-AT's TIE Fighters, Star Destroyers, Snowspeeders or Jedi Starfighters and have myself an awesome space battle with all my favourite ships. Of course, easier said than done.

Despite this, I still insisted to myself I wanted to make a Star Destroyer, even with fears it might be a little too big of a workload for what counted as just one model. I still went ahead and chose my favourite clas, the Republics Venator Class Destroyer after checking with Steve if I was going to put too much work on my hands. Alongside the Venator I chose originally the Rebel A-Wing Starfighter and CIS Vulture Droid Starfighter. After a brief point of trying to make the Vulture Droid, i realised maybe another ship would be better, so I changed it to a Imperial TIE Fighter.

I feel like this was the right choice because the TIE Fighter I made came out pretty good and would have gotten me better marks in the first assignment over the Vulture droid which lacked surface detail. Improvements as far as the other models go include wanting to do more detail to my Venator, more specifically the turrets, which I feel could do with improvement, alongside maybe detail in the hangars or something. My Y-Wing was styled to be 'factory' new as the typical Y-Wing is very inconsistent and hard to model, with all the panels, wires and tubing across the body. I think most improvements would be fine detailing, such as making the R2 Unit behind the cockpit more detailed, and texturing, as I was unable to texture in time, but despite this, I still think the model looks okay in the animation, as if I were to texture it, it would only to make the panels more metallic. The TIE fighter came out well considering it was the model I spent the least amount of time on, and I think my main improvements for it would be cockpit detailing and the connectors of the wings.

All in all, I am proud of the work I have produced, but like anything I feel like it could be improved with more time. I will be using the skills I have gained over the course of this module and applying them to future projects/assignments whenever I can as I really enjoyed it and feel fairly confident in my ability.

May The Force be with you.

Editing the Animation.

The software I used to edit my animations was Adobe Premier Pro CS3 as it is software I have used many times before and am very comfortable using. I knew I could add in special effects to my animation using this software instead of using 3DS Max, as I felt like this would be way too fiddly.

My final animation consisted of 10 separate clips in total, using various angles and camera movements. I know sound effects and music aren't a necessity, but I wanted my animation to have sound effects, it would be boring without them! Sound effects I included were the Y-Wing and TIE Fighter engine noises, TIE Fighter laser blasts and a few, royalty free effects I edited myself. The backing track for the entire animation is 'Battle of Heroes' from Episode III.



Above is the timeline for my fully edited animation. As you can see I used multiple tracks of both video and audio.

Special Effects: How I made them.

My lasers and explosion of the Y-Wing at the end of the animation are all simple 2D videos pasted on the layer above the animation window and key-framed in. The green TIE Fighter lasers have a simple colour change modifier on them to make them green, instead of creating an entirely new image. The explosion also has a chroma key on it in order to make the black background invisible. This also makes the explosion have a slightly green tint, but in this case the TIE Lasers are green, so it looks okay!



Keyframes and path of motion for the Venators cannons. Explosion is done with the same method using a pre-keyed explosion effect, placed on the layer above and set to a motion path that covers the Y-Wing.

Despite Prem Pro (in my experience) being notorious for crashing, especially when dealing with multiple layers and keyframing effects, nothing negative stopped my editing process with only 1 crash. I was able to work efficiently and quickly, which was nice, getting the whole animation done in around 5 hours, give or take.

Finished Models: Venator and TIE Fighter

Week 9

Below is are pictures of my fully textured Venator Class Star Destroyer from multiple angles. By far the best model I produced this module. Texturing was more time consuming than it was hard, due to the size and number of objects on the model itself. I used a few normal maps to add extra detail, and this can be seen best on certain parts, such as the large red strip.

I wish I had more time to keep adding more and more detail to this ship, as I found it super satisfying to model and bring to life. If I could I would add more detail to the hanger and the turrets, making them more accurate and realistic. I might end up doing this in my spare time.

 TIE Fighter

I also finished my TIE Fighter shortly after the Venator, although this one was much harder to texture well (I think due to its spherical shape) and took just as long as the Venator purely due to all 'the fiddly bits.' I had to edit the texture I made in photoshop quite a few times to get a correct looking result. The wings and cockpit being the most of a hassle.

To create the wings I took a side on image of an existing TIE Wing to and cut up the sections of the panels. How the way my model is made, the black panel would be covered by 3D struts anyway, so I enlarged the panels to cover the image's pre-existing ones and I only wanted the black panel effect anyway. For the cockpit/body part of the ship I took a screenshot of the TIE blueprints and cut and erased the surrounding details until I got the circular texture shape I wanted, then made it grey.

I then stretched this texture over the 3D model, resized and adjusted until it looked just right. As you can see from the WIP image below this took quite a few attempts to get just right. The wings were easier, as being flat and a optimised texture made positioning alot easier for me.

Below are images of my finished Imperial TIE Fighter.

Shooting Scenes and Start of Editing

Week 10

After shooting my test scenes I have now started to shoot the scenes to be used in my final animation. The clip will take place in space, mostly based around my Venator cruiser, and involves a TIE Fighter chasing down a stray Rebel Y-Wing starfighter.

The editing program I will be using to piece together my scenes and edit in hopefully music and some small amount of effects is Adobe Premier Pro CS3. I have plenty of experience with this software from A Level and personal work, so I feel in terms of editing, I shall have little to no problems (hopefully)

My plan for the final animation is to have music, sound effects and if I have time, some special effects such as laser blasts, alongside the required animation clips. I plan on having one scene file, shooting the scene, then changing the same scene to shoot the next to avoid having lots of clutter with scene files.

If I run into any issues I will detail them here on how I dealt with/fixed them.

Starting my Animation: Test Scenes

Week 9

This week I shot my first scene animation scene as a test of animation and rendering. The classic 'Star Destroyer flying over the camera' shot as a test scene. With this scene I played with skyboxes and different colored lights, using blue tinted targeted point lights to replicate the 'aura' the engines of the huge cruiser would give off.

(Textures turned off to show the lights)

The background I used was just a simple generic 'Space' texture wrapped around a huge sphere with the Venator placed inside. Also inside is a Planet to give some background to the entire scene, although in the shot of the cruiser flying over you can't see it. I shot another test scene where I made the planet rotate and the cruiser float idly in orbit.

Yes, I know a planet wouldn't rotate in this manner, it was mainly to exentiate the two objects moving in unison. After now having a good play with different techniques and getting to grips on how to animate, I feel i am ready to now start shooting scenes for my animation.

Texturing: The Basics and Basic Keyframing

Week 8

This week I got to finally start texturing my finished models (something I've been looking forward too for a while now!) and jumped right in by Photoshopping some pictures of a Venator to use as my main body texture as all the lines and indents on the body are going to be detailed through the textures, as it is far too complex for me to model. Not to mention time consuming! I then created a Normal Map from this usign a website called NormalMap-Online and applied it to my model, adding the bump effect to try and give that little extra depth and detail to the texture.

I created a few more textures, the red for the main strips of colour of the ship and a alternative basic metal colour.  Below is my Work In Progress so far, the back and the smaller details haven't been textured yet.

The next thing I started toying with was 3DS Max's keyframing system, to make my Venator move slowly back and forth, in the lectres Steve has covered Cameras and in the practical Mario showed us a neat little technique in how to make an object follow the path of a Spline. The latter seems like it could be extremely useful in making the final animation look good, and I will start toying with more animation methods and techniques after the Venator is finally finished.

Storyboard update: I have started and nearly finished my revised storyboard for my animation. I will post it when it is all finished, with a closer explanation of each frame and my ideas that I plan to (hopefully implement). So far I am LOVING this project and enjoying learning all of the cool things 3DSMax can do.

RE: Storyboard

For some reason my storyboard post has not been uploaded/displaying correctly for whatever reason.Upon realising this, here is a quick re-upload of my storyboard. As you can see in the storyboard I drew a Vulture Droid which is no longer one of the models I am making (replaced by the Imperial TIE Fighter.) I will re-draw the storyboard with the TIE Fighter instead of the Vulture droid, and more than likely change some of the aspects of the planned animation too. I will post the updated storyboard with descriptive text soon.