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.

Greeble Tool and Final Touch Ups

Week 6

This week in the practical Mario came over and had a quick look at my models and happily seemed quite impressed with the work I had produced (especially my Y-Wing) and offered me a few very helpful tips in which to improve my work further from mainly a technical 'nit picky' way.

I was playing with textures on my TIE Fighter when Mario suggested I look at the bump map texture shader. A shader which creates the illusion of detail and depth by tweaking the aspects of the texture map applied to it. I guess this is done by darkening the parts of the texture that are dark to begin with, to create a visual feeling of depth.

The next little tool (and by far my favourite) was a 3rd party plugin for Max called 'Greeble'. This excellent little tool uses a seed system to generate a bunch of module like blocks on the currently selected face/object and is just perfect for creating all the little details along the side of my Venator cruiser as it replicates perfectly what the modules along the side would look like. Also very effective for Death Stars and Star Destroyers might I add!

Finally Mario suggested that I do abit of clean up on some of the finer details of my models such as my Y-Wing, as where I have used the boolean tool to cut out shapes and details, Max has filled in with unnecessary lines and edges. This creates more polys and by removing them, although no change can be seen visually, technically it makes my model much more efficiently designed and lows the poly count, which in turn would make it alot more friendly to use in games, Below you can see a before and after shot of a section of my Y-Wing after I had cleaned the edges. If you can't see the lines, just take note of the poly count in the top right. I did this by simply selecting the lines I wanted to remove, and then clicking the Remove button in the modifier tab! Simples!

Before









After

The TIE Fighter

Week 6

As mentioned before changed my choice of a Vulture Droid Starfighter to a Imperial TIE Fighter. I did this because alot of the images I found of the Vulture Droid were either simple, too samey angles or useless photos of legos models.

While moddeling the TIE Fighter I actually made around 3 versions. The 3rd being my final model in which I used the 2nd version as a template and made small adjustments to things like sizes and detailing which actually look alot better.

Version 2

I felt overall I had successfully done good overall model, at least to use as a basis for a better, more detailed model. This versions proportions and sizes are slightly incorrect though, evidenced mainly by the cockpit window being smaller than it should be, The struts on the sides of the wings are also quite messy and don't really represent the struts accurately. Its also worth noting that even though TIE blueprints are easy to obtain, I ended up doing this entire model by eye without even realising.

Version 3 (Final)

For the final version I added alot more detail onto the body and fixed how the struts were. Instead of using just one shape I used two blocks for each strut and pulled them through the wing to save on polys. I cut in some vents using the Boolean tool on the wings to add more depth to the outer connectors.

Adding panels and details to the body was challenging due to the spherical angles. I found that pulling out a polygon and then extruding it would create a shape exactly on the angle of the body. I used this methods to make the various panels around the body.

Side Note: I was playing Star Wars Battlefront 2 recently and was flying around the in game Venator Cruiser model and comparing it to my own. I was pleasantly surprised to discover my Venator model is more detailed than the one used in game. All their detail was done using textures, while some of mine are actually 3D objects. It also has 10k polygons... But principle right?

Week 6 - Finished Models

This week I finished my final Venator model as pictured below. This is by far the model I have spent the most time and effort on, and was the one I finished first. The sheer size and scale means there was alot of detail I could have kept adding and adding, but I felt like if I carried on adding more detail to this, I would never get round to finishing my other models.

The final model has around 10,000 polygons even despite me doing my best to try and keep it as low as possible. I think the main cause of this is the detail I put into the engines as there are 6 in total, with bevelled and extruding cylinders. Another cylinder based object that is quite prominent on the ship are the turrets. With 10 in total, I think i made the bodies of the turrets have way too many sides for what they needed.

In conclusion I am very proud of this model, considering it is my 'first attempt' at making a finished 3D model and accurately recreating one of my favourite ships from the Star Wars universe.

The next model I finished this week was my Y-Wing fighter. I choose this for two reasons. 1. Because everyone does X-Wings and I wanted to do something different. 2. I felt the relatively simple shape of the ship would be easier to reproduce and add detail too.

The problem I got with this that all the reference images for the ship are very inconsistent. With versions of the ships missing parts, being a ever so slightly different model with detail changes, engine sizes etc making it hard to find just one set of images to work from. So I adapted my design slightly and opted to go for a more 'fresh out of the factory' look, over the tatty and battered Rebel Alliance versions. This would help minimize surface detail and inconsistency. 

In the end I feel that the Y-Wing came out alot better than I expected, especially if you compare my Version 2 with this. 

All that is left to do is my 3rd ship and after trying to find some decent reference images for a Vulture Droid starfighter, I couldn't most o them being useless lego images. So I have decided to change my 3rd ship to a generic TIE Fighter as they have plenty of images and should be easier to make a better model from.

Connor Gambles Blog Review

Connors blog is great at describing what he is currently working on, and the processes he uses to improve his models. These describtions are always accompanied by clear images showing the design process.

Each post has the title of the week it was posted (Along with the time stamp) which when you scroll through the entire blog, shows how he has improved week after week when you compare earlier versions of models to the newer ones.

I think some improvements that could be made is thta the pictures of the models he has created could be bigger, and have more variation in the angles, allowing us to see the entire model and if he does any detail, a close up of it.

All in all a very good blog which shows a clear process of design and improvement in using the software.

Link to blog - http://arusstarwarsmodellingproject.blogspot.co.uk/search?updated-min=2015-01-01T00:00:00Z&updated-max=2016-01-01T00:00:00Z&max-results=5

3rd Venator Cruiser!

Week 5

Just a quick update with pictures of my 3rd Venator Star Destroyer Cruiser. This is by far the most complex and time consuming model I have created so far, but I feel like it has come out really well for a 3rd attempt. Each time I create a newer version I feel I improve on using the software. This model has more detail than my previous two, but is lacking finer, smaller details. I modelled its turrets and engines seperately and then imported them into the Venators scene.

Engines

Back View

Turrets and Hanger

What may be hard to see in these screenshots is the angles of the ship. The Venator is quit tilted, and the back end is alot thicker than the front. It took some time to get the proportions correct, but I feel this attempt has them pretty accurate. I will use this model as a base template for my final model.

Y-Wing and Vulture Droid - Model Progression

Week 4

This week I started modeling my other two ships, as I felt I had spent alot of time on the Venator and needed to try my other two choices. I quickly made a basic, 1st draft of both ships, seen below. Both are realtively easy to model in a basic format, the shapes being very simple too and I found this to do with ease.

Y-Wing Front

Y-Wing Back

Vulture Droid Draft

I made these two drafts with visual references. There aren't that many good pictures of the Vulture droid, but I found plenty for the Y-Wing. 

In this weeks lecture Steve showed us how to import 'blueprints' and reference images into Max itself, in order to create more scaled and realisticly shaped objects. This was done by using the lign tool and simply dragging a image onto a plane object. I then used this technique on my 2nd Y-Wing, seen below.

As you can see, this one is more detailed, as I included details such as the turret, the R2 unit, more detail on the struts on the engine cylinders and the overall shape of the starship. Since the basic shape of the Y-WIng has been made on this version, I might use it as a template for my final model.

3DS Max Practice

Week 3

This week we were intorduced to more features and techniques of 3DS Max, making use of tools like the Align, Mirror and Splines, and how these cna be used to quickly and accurately recreate a model. Also learnt how to insert segments and polys onto an exsisting shape. Mario also showed us how to import a reference image into Max to work from, something I found highlyuseful in getting the shape of my Venator correct and in proportion.

1st Attempt at a Venator Class Star Destroyer

In this weeks practical we had a been set a simple house building task, something I completed fairly quickly and with no real differculty, before I went on to keep practicing my Ventator building skills. Below is my 2nd attempt at the Venator, and as you can see, it is more detailed and shaped much better than my first attempt at the ship. I think for now I will start practicing a different ship, such as the Y Wing, and then when I make another Venator, start adding in more minimal details (such as turrets and antenna) refine the body shape as well as I can to prehaps use as a basis for my final model.

Getting Started with 3DS Max

Week 2

I have some basic experience with 3DS Max from last year, going as far as being able to create, move resive and create basic shapes and models. The majority of the lecture for me was a nice refresher, and I also picked up on new things, such as the grid snap function.

In this weeks practical I started to play with these new features, reminding myself of what I already knew, and also teaching myself on how to add vertices to an edge, something which proved really helpful. I started to model a really rough Imperial Star Destroyer, using all of the various basic techniques.

As you can see it is a very very basic model, but I think it is still clear on what it is. While I was making it, I learned plenty of new things, so the next time I make a model, I am sure it will be even better.

Above is my research board, and it shows the 3 ships I wish to model for my animation. In the top left I have chosen the Venator Class Star Destroyer (AKA The Republic Cruiser). In the top right, a standard Vulture Droid class Starfighter, and lastly in the bottom left, a classic Y-Wing. I must admit it was hard to narrow down just 3 from the entire Star Wars universe but I chose these for mainly two reasons. One because I personally like the ships, and two, I think the designs should be simple enough to re create at my skill level with 3DS Max. The link above the middle Venator is a link to a album of photos of someone building a model kit of the ship, and should be great for references.

My next task will be to start on my story boards, as I have a basic idea of how I want my animation to play out.

Intial Design Brief

Week 1

Today Steve Harris gave us a quick introduction to the module, and gave us a brief for the two assignments. The first is to make 3 seperate models from the Star Wars universe, from the films comics or other. The second is to use those models to create a 30 second animation. This animation has to make some sense, and judgeing from the few examples shown to us, maybe include some basic effects and audio.

All in all I am looking forward to this module, as I have wanted to learn how to model and animate for a while, and the subject is Star Wars.... Who doesnt love Star Wars?