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.