Week 7

This last week i carried on with my helicopter model and animation. I firstly created the side wings that carry rockets in cases. To do this i selected some faces on each side of the helicopter and extruded them out. I nexted created some cylinders that were attached to the wings in the hierarchy.

With the wings completed i had a basic model shape of the helicopter, My next task was to create some propellers that would spin during the animation to help show flight and realistisity. What i did was i created a cylinder that i placed on the top of the helicopter. I placed this in the hierarchy as a child to the base of the helicopter. With this cylinder i wanted it to look more like a real helicopters main pole for the rotor so i added in some more egde loops to allow me to edit the faces and shape of the cylinder. Once i created the correct shape i duplicated the object and placed it on the tail end for a back rotor. I made it smaller than it was on the top.


To create the propellers i added some cubes into the scene and flattened them out and streched them into the right shape then placed these into a hierarchy under a ring that is in a child to the cylinder rotor. This means i can rotate the ring with the blades moving with the ring. I did the same for the tail.

I textured my model with a file that i created on Photoshop for the base of the helicopter. I made a camouflage patten that i wanted to the base of the helicopter to be. for the windows I created a Blinn texture that was a light blue. To make them appear more like windows i changed the transpancy lower on the texture to make them more see-through.

The propellers are textured with a blinn texture that are black in colour. The metal parts of the helicopter like the bases of the rotors are textured with a blinn texture that has been edited to look clean and shiny like new metal. My textured helicopter:


I added in two planes in the scene that had File textures attached of which i created in photoshop. These textures create a scene of a landing pad and a background of the sky. I made them transparent so that the original scene can be seen to fit the rules of the project. These planes were rotated and placed into position in the scene.

My animation follows my original story board i made earlier in the project. I created 24fps scene that the helicopter flys past the camera to then fly back down and come to a middle level. One thing i changed was to add in wheels that fold out of the helicopter at this point. i created a simple hierarchy of a couple of shapes that make a wheel system that can fold out and lower down. This had a shared pivot point so they can all fold down at the same time. These wheels were placed as a child to the base of the helicopter. When the helicopter fly down at the middle level these wheels fold out as the helicopter rotates round to land into the position that shows the helicopter into the make sphere position that completes my project.

Week 6

When rendering there is an preset lighting already in place that allows you to see the object in a rendered view, you can add different lights into a scene yourself to create new and dramatic effects to your animation. Once a light is created and added into a scene then the light that is used for the original render is removed. The different types of lighting are:

Ambient lighting, this lighting is ment to create the same light of the sun and it reflects of all surfaces without a limit to its end. This means it will light up everything in a scene as the light keeps reflecting off every surface. This is a good way of being able to see you scene and objects but when trying to create a realistic scene it wouldn't be effective because shadows and light can be blocked.
Directional lighting is light that comes at one direction from a scene. This is good to create a realistic light source of the sun because you can aim from the directional point of your sun in the scene. Its better than ambient lighting because this light is able to light a scene but doesn’t light everything, so shadows can be created.

area lighting is like a lightbulb it creates light from a single point spread around a scene and like directional doesn't constantly reflect of every object in the scene.


Ray trace options leads to both transparent and allows for shadows to blur further away. This creates a more realistic shadow because shadows never have a pure straight edge.
relating back to the textures from last week

Spot light is a light that you can direct like a real life spot light. Its good to use to help highlight objects in a scene or to create more light when needed in small particual areas.

This week i spend my time learning and modeling different objects to get a better overall understanding of everything i have learnt in this last project. I started by creating a basic spherical motorcycle that was created out of basic shapes with not much polygon modeling more of a stuctored hierarchy.



I also created a basic hot air balloon in maya to experiment with both modelling and texturing. I kept with the same idea with our project by modelling it to a spherical object. I used basic texturing skills with lambert and blinn being the main textures i used. When creating this hot air balloon i was told that fire and other special effects could be created. I spent a while looking at how i could add a fire effect to the hot air ballon to make it more realistic. I found that i could add a fire emitter into a object that would create a fire effect over a time period. I firstly created a small animation of the hot air balloon rising of the ground. I next selected the ring on the fire chamber to be the object that emits the fire. I next went into dyamnics and chose fire emitter. This automatically applied a fire effect to the ring. This is what the emitter looked like in maya view:
This is the fire in a rendered image view:

I also created a basic spherical motorcycle this week to help me improve on modelling and practising placing textures onto a model. Again i kept this model to the same idea as the brief of the sphere project.

week 5

I started my helicopter at the beginning of the week using a new sphere i created to save on polygons not the sphere given to us in the project file. By lessing the ploy count in the sphere it gives me more ploys to model with later on. allowing me to stay under the maximum of 6000 and if i had spare poly’s i can add more detail later on my helicopter.
I first rotated my sphere 90 degrees so that the bases of the sphere points to each end. This allowed me to have more poly’s on the ends i would be modeling out off. To create both the front end and the barrel of the tail of the helicopter i stretched and extruded some faces from the sphere.



I created a separate tail by creating a cube then shaping it by changing the shapes of the faces of the polygons then attaching it to the base of the helicopter in the hierarchy. By adding edge loop i was able to create more faces to mold the cube into a similar shape to a helicopters tail.

I next began work on the top getting ready for a propeller so i build up from the sphere the shell the area that contains most of the engine for the propeller. This was easy, i was able to extrude out a couple of faces to save on faces as well as having to many added objects in there hierarchy.

I next focused on the front windows. I first through of modeling the sphere faces that i stretched out to fit square windows like in a real Apache helicopter but after experimenting with sphere shaped windows it fit the feel of the piece seeing that i was making a helicopter that isn’t spherical into a spherical shape. To do this i added into the scene 2 spheres and transformed them into the right shape then placed them into the correct place on my helicopter. i then added these to be children of the base model of the helicopter. I also deleted the unnecessary faces of the windows that were hidden inside the helicopter to save faces for later use.

week 5

On maya there is many different ways to create textures on a model to give it colour, shine, surface roughness and more. We spend this week learning the basic’s of using textures to make models more life like and better. The texturing process we learnt is what we could use in our final model project.

We first learnt how to access the texturing area by going into the Window menu - Rending options - then selecting Hypershade. This opened a new small window that held all the information needed to create and apply textures onto the model. All objects and models created always have the texture of labert1 attached to them and this is the grey colour that you see when creating an object and pressing 5 on the keyboard. This new window has 2 main areas, the top half box that shows the textures in use. And the workspace area that allows you to create new textures to use. Once creating a texture it will appear in the workspace area, it will only be in this area unless its dragged up into the textures in use or its applied to a object then it will stay in the textures in use area. In the workspace area the textures can be deleted if not wanted. By having textures in the textures in use area you can always revisit the texture and edit it or reuse it for another object.

There are many different types of textures we started by learning about the Lambert texture. Lambert relates to a basic texture that is similar to Matt paint that doesn't reflect light and stays as a single colour. To create a new Lambert texture you must choose Create in the Hypershade window. By clicking create you can access a list of different types of materials from materials to 2d and 3d textures. To create a Lambert texture you must choose the materials area then select lambert. You can change the colour of a lambert texture by clicking colour in the side bar and changing it to the colour you choose. to colour the object with your texture click and drag with the middle button and place the lamber material on the object and it apples it to the surface of the object. example of Lambert:

Blinn is similar to lambert it wait its used, colour can be changed as well but there is a different of what it is, Blinn is a reflective texture that will reflect light in maya creating a shinny appearance. its mainly used to create textures like glass and metal. you can change how much light is reflected by changing the specular shading properties. example of Blinn:

2D textures are another form of texturing, there are many different types of 2d textures but our main focus was on File it allows you to import a picture that you have found or created and use it as a 2D texture on you object. This allows you to expand on the choice of textures you have instead of having to use all the pre-made textures.

3D textures can be placed on a object that can be then rendered to view as a 3d object there are some problems with 3d textures. you can only use pre-made textures that are already on maya. You cant create your own 3d textures like 2D texturing. There are other issues with 3D Textures, when attaching a 3D texture it creates a square that projects the 3D texture onto the object, when you move the object the texture moves from the object. This can be over come by placing this in a parent and child relation ship in a hierarchy with the object being the parent and the child being the 3D texture. When they move now they stay together.

I created a basic model of a mushroom to help me remember modeling and as well putting in textures to help me learn to place them in a model myself. This is the mushroom i made with basic lambert texturing. I created this mushroom by using one object that began as a sphere. This is my basic mushroom model:

Too add two textures onto one object can be done by selecting the faces on the object like when we edit an objects face polygons. When selected the faces you can right click a texture in the hypershade window and then click attach to selected. This will attach a texture to only the chosen selection.

I also went back to the first model i made of the robot to have a look at texturing. I created a sliver metal texture by playing with blinn and changing the spectral shading properties. I found that in the settings of the textures i could open a setting called special effects, This gives you one option that allows you to create a texture that glows. I applied this to my robots eyes and a couple of faces on my robots front:

Week 4

This week we had 2 different sessions in learning the basics in maya. Our first session was learning how to basic model objects in maya using different tools.

Our second session was a carry on of the previous session in rigging. We were given a basic rig of a pair of legs. This rig also had skin modeled around the rig. This session in rigging was to build up a relation between the bones and joins we created in our last session so they move more like a realistic leg.

We also had a lesson in basic modelling, were where shown how to create basic polygon shapes using the primitives tool that creates shapes out of polygons. This shapes can be created in different sizes with customisable amount of polygons. We learn how to do more than select a shape as a whole but to select either the vertex's, edge lines, faces or the uv just by right clicking on the shape.

A vertex is a corner point of a face and these can be modified in a couple of different ways to create new shapes for modelling. we first learnt that by moving a vertex it changes the faces that its connected to. We also learn that when you have two vertexes close together you can select edit mesh and merge the two vertexes together. This allows you to join shapes and objects together.

Edges allow you to perform multiple tasks with a polygon, i found that the most useful was being able to delete other a edge to create a bigger polygon or remove a edge loop creating less polygons. this can be used after creating a model to lessen the poly count and make the file smaller in memory. Edges can also be added as well as edge loops, this allows me to add in more polygons for areas i wish to create more detail. When selecting a egde loop we learn that you can split apart a shape or model.



I find choosing the face of the polygons a great way of creating models because you can move and change the shape of the model shown here:

Also there is a function that allows you create polygons out from the face of a model and these can be moved out without effecting the previous polygons unlike when you just select a face and move it or change its shape. This gives me the power to expand on a model and create new shapes without spoiling an area i have already modeled. This image here shows a extruded polygon from a moved polygon:

I also designed a brief couple of designs i could make in maya for our sphere project. The idea was to create a helicopter in a sphere like shape that would match the rules of our project. After looking at different helicopters used today and before i created 4 in which i could possibly create on maya. Looking at real images of helicopters allowed me to make my draws a little bit more realistic.

Here are my drawings along with the image i looked at to help me see how i could implement a sphere:


http://imagineannie.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/helicopter20inair201.jpg


http://www.sacusa.com/gallery/Cbi1.jpg

http://site.xheli.com/9072-Heli_3.jpg


http://www.army-technology.com/projects/tiger/images/tiger6.jpg

My favourite design i thought to be the drawing based around the apache helicopter. I liked both the shape from the front two windows as well as the side wings. I will try to model a helicopter that fits a cartoon based idea that will help fit the sphere project while trying to keep a realistic view of and shape of a helicopter. For when i animate my model i created a basic story board that shows a couple of seconds of animation:

Week 3

During week three we had our first tutorial in basic rigging in the software. This session was for use to be able to understand the basics of creating the start rig for a pair of legs.
We started by creating a basic joint and bone structor using the joint tool. We snapped a joint to the grid on a side view point on maya this was the top of the leg. We next created the knee by snapping a joint to the grid below the top joint. When a secondary joint is created maya joints these joints together with bone. This bone is in the shape of a triangle pointing the direction of the joint. We kept creating joints that related to joints in a leg which included ankle, ball of the foot and the toe. These were all connected with bones. With this we had a basic joint structor for rigging a leg.

Screenshot:


We next had to change the XYZ axis of the knee joint due to the face the Y was pointing in the wrong direction to the bend of the joint. If we were to carry on without changing this axis then the knee would bend the wrong way when trying to animate or the joint.


I also created a basic model for the bomb idea i had for my animation. This is the basic model i made using a 3 different objects in maya. I firstly started by creating a basic sphere in which would be the sphere for the animation. I next created a cylinder that i had to transform into the correct size for the rim of the model. I next created another cylinder that i would used for the fuse for the model. I spilt the sphere into two sides meaning that it would be able to open for my animation. I hit a problem during the creating of this basic model and that was the idea of my animation, i would have to find out a way of creating a realistic fuse, this men’t that i would have to make it appear to have gravity and freedom to move. I thought that creating joints in the fuse it would be able to bend and appear to flop round if the model rolls onto the scene. Unfortunately i also thought that to create a good animation i had to create both a burn effect and have a way of making the fuse disappearing within the animation. My first thoughts were to when the model fuse is men’t to burn away it would be pulled down into the model and hidden within the model as it splits but this seems both difficult and could ruin the look of the animation.

I also made a basic model of my fly idea:



This is my basic model:


Due to those problems i have chosen that i will create a new idea that would be thoroughly thought out and would be both animatable with my current skills and would be well modeled. My plan is to create some ideas and to roughly story board a couple seconds of animation. To do this we selected the joint and went onto orient joint options and changed the Y to -Y meaning it would change into the opposite way to what it was at.

We also learnt that when changing the names of the objects and joints in the hierarchy its important to follow a certain rule that would help us easily find the object you are looking for in large hierarchies. Also this method can help when the computer has to search for a object. By having the Object_Side_What it is you can easly find what you are after in a large hierarchy. An example is knee_R_joi. 


Week 2

During the second week we had planned to have a secondary session in learning the fundamentals of animation, modelling and rigging. unfortunately we had to cancel this session due to teachers illness but we were asked to look at some modelling work done on http://www.cgsphere.com/

This website is a project created to get digital artists to use the sphere creativity within a set of rules. different software and effects could be used. Our aim of looking that this website was to think about what different spheres we could make in our project as well as animate the work.

After looking at the different images posted on to the site there was a couple that stood out to me because they were able to create something more than what you could normally expect out of a simple sphere. These are the works:



This sphere based work amazed me, it appears life like and yet still feels like it belongs in a cartoon. It also made me thing that objects other than balls and sphere shape objects could be used for this project. I could convert objects or creatures to fit the sphere but still give a sence of realism. I also like how this image gives a lot of action and feeling when it is just based around a sphere, it makes me feel that the modeller who created this understood how he could create maximum effect using lighting and blur.



This image is a good example of how perspective could be used. before this image i thought that the main perpective would looking at the sphere and also the focus would be the sphere. This image has opened my mind to looking on how i can use perspective to my animation and how i can create a scene more than just a sphere shaped object.



Finally there was this piece that i liked because it wasn't overly complicated and it was plain but it was a nicely created piece of 3d modelling that suited the project.

I had a few thoughts after looking at those pieces of work to what i could create in a similar fashion. I had to also remember what i could create as well being that i am only now learning to model and rig my work. my first idea was of a fly that would have spherical body/head

I had some ideas while looking at the different models which i sketched down. I also thought of how they could be animated that would make them look and feel appropriate swell as realistic. I also wanted to make them amusing so that the animation would be rememberable.

heres my ideas and images:


This is an idea of a spherical fly that would be animated so it would appear to fly down and land in the correct spot then maybe then perform an action. It could have a buzzing sound effect overlaid on the animation. i also think that this wouldn't be to difficult to create.



This idea was to recreate the classic bomb image that would roll onto spot on the screen. once stopped you would see the string burn down but instead of explode it would just split open and reveal an egg or a object. its simple and it would do something you wouldn't expect so it might me rememberable.



My last idea was a little more complicated and would be harder to make but i do like the idea. it would be a robotic while with two arms that would be in a spheres shape. animation wise i could animated the robot driving in using its wheel while animating its arms to make it appear there is a large speed.

These ideas are my first and ill will have to begin to either try to make them or until i have a full understanding of rigging and modelling keep them as ideas and build on them.