Finished!!!

After a very long weekend I am finally finished!!! I’ve found the module fun, but hard work and very frustrating. I still struggle to produce realistic materials for my scene, this is the frustration bit!! Adding sound to the animation made a lot of difference, this is the first time I have used Adobe Premiere Pro. and although I only used its basic tools I can see it being a very handy programme, it seemed to bring my animation to life!

I did have a lot of bright ideas at the beginning of the module, but realistically I didn’t have enough time to create them all, well not even half!!! I must of forgotten how time consuming max can be!

I have definitely learnt a lot more on 3d max this time round. I found reactor good fun and got some good results by using it. My boat within the final scene uses a wave reactor to produce the effect. Also garment maker and cloth modifiers are handy, the flag in my opening scene uses these tools and I am pleased with the results I got here. I found bipeds a little tricky, but was able to get the results i needed, shame i didn't have enough time to animate my man though!!

I am happy with the modelling and animation side of things, but I do think that my lighting and materials let me down. Overall, with the sound, I am pleased with what I have ended up with!! Here’s a few still frames from the scene.

Bipeds

I've been playing around with Bipeds to help me create a character to put into my boat. Firstly i imported a body and then created a biped to suite it. By adding a skin modifier and moving the body into position, i was able to get the results shown below. I just need to create the engine and make some shorts to save him from any embarrassment!!!

Bike

I've created (very roughly) my ice cream bike for the scene and tried animating it so it follows a path with the wheels rotating at the same time. The model looks very rough and i need to start from scratch with the umbrella, but you can see the animation and the wheels rotation here. I used a path constraint on the bike, the auto key and rotate tool to make the wheels rotate so many degrees over a certain amount of frames.

Park

Here's a quick update, i've just created a park for my scene, i had alot of empty grass so had to fill it with something.

Clearer plane AVI

Still needs more work, but should give you an idea of what I am trying to do.

Flag

Here’s a flag I’ve animated, I am hoping to project my title for the project onto this and use it within the opening few frames of the animation.

Firstly I created a box, then added a cloth modifier to it and made the flag pole the collision object and the flag the cloth within the object properties. I added a wind space warp and dropped this into the cloth forces within the cloth modifier. By adjusting the winds strength and creating a simulation for the cloth modifier I was able to achieve these results.

Particles

Here’s my latest work on the assignment; I’ve been playing around with particles to try and create the affect of smoke coming out of the back of my red arrow plane. By using super spray and playing around with the basic parameters and particles generation I was able to create the following animations.