Evaluation Part 2

On the 18/12/2013 a couple of my colleagues (Ross Nicolas and Ben Hayes) and I meet up to work on other projects during this time we gave each other some advice on our animations.

It was in this time I was about to get some advice on how to smooth out my animation so it didn't appear as broken and the end product appears a lot smoother and I am more pleased with it. I also added some music to the animation to make it seem less lifeless as it did before.

Animation Evaluation

I have forgot to make regular blog posts while working on my animation. So I am going to do just the one to evaluate my animation at the point of completion (17/12/13). Today I finished the animation I have been working on over the last 6 weeks and explain what I am happy with and what I feel needs improving.

So for the most part I am happy with the end result of the project and I feel that I have learnt a lot over the course of the module. I have made a 30 second animation in 12 from not even knowing the basics of 3d modelling this is the part of the whole project that I am most happy with.

The parts I am unhappy with is the overall quality of the final project I have produced.  Starting with the model of the Battlestar Galactica the model is good I feel, but as much as I tried to texture it to look the way it does in the series I could not I just did not have the skills with photoshop to put such an advanced texture on a large model. So as a compromise I gave it a gun-metal grey colour for the animation so it didn't just look like a giant white blob under the lighting that was in the scene.

The second thing that I am unhappy with is Raider model I have made, I is just far too square and doesn't have the nice rounded shape as the ones in the tv series. This comes from a lack of experience with the modelling tools and not knowing how to get such a shape without adding in lots to polygons to do so. The metallic looking texture I gave it does look nice and I am rather pleased with that part of it.

The viper is the ship that I am most happy with out of all the ones I have made the textures on it are simple and the ship itself is simple so even a novice like me can do it justice.

Moving away from the model side of the animation and on to the animation part. The full animation is okay, but the thing I least like about it is the way there isn't a smooth transition between the scenes. It ends up giving the whole thing a very broken feel to it and nothing like this would ever manage to pass in industry. I feel this again comes from a lack of experience as I have never done any video editing before in my life, and don't know how to do the nice transitions between scenes. It may also be to do with the way I did the each scene as its own 5 second animation then use movie maker to stick them all together.

On the whole I feel that the project does show my level of design skills and is a testament to why I want to going into the programming and technical side of games development. However If I where to start this project again from the beginning with the knowledge I have now I would do the following to improve it. I would put more time into the models as I feel an animation is only as good as the models in it. I would use a better video editing software to put it all together and I would make the animation longer so as to be able to tell more of a story (this is very hard to do in only 30 seconds). 

Week 5

I should have been blogging a lot more regularly than I have been, but it doesn't mean I have not been working on my 3d modelling. 

The assignment I have been working on requires modelling ships from the star wars. I have decided that I would do space ships from the BattleStar Galactica Universe instead as I find the the ships and the whole universe much more exciting. over the course of the past 3 weeks I have learnt a lot and restarted my models many times.

The 2 model that I have completed so far are the Viper Mark II and the Cylon Raider Mark II, I used images as reference planes to make these models the links to the reference  are as follows: http://hestia.wdfiles.com/local--files/visual-aids/markII.jpg, http://www.shipschematics.net/bsg/images/cylon/raider_cylon_mk2.jpg.

After completing these models I decided that I should do some practice with texturing and unwrap UVW the viper was the logical choice to do this with. Changing the colour of the cockpit and adding the stripes on the nose and around the rear was easy as it was just chaanging the texture of individual polygons. The wings and tail required uvw mapping to add the red stripes on as there where not individual polygons to change the colour of. The end result is shown below:

Week 2

This week I have done quite a bit of modelling work. Over the week I created a castle which gave me experience with tools like adding in edges and using the extrude tool. These tools where important to create the walls and the towers.

Also this week the lab exercises where to use the alignment tool, and the Boolean tool. the alignment tool is useful to make different objects all in the same place. the boolean tool it used to cut holes in objects.

The main exercises was to use 2d object to make a small town that could be use in a fps type game, I did this by drawing a floor plan of lots of rectangles and then extruding them up to form the builds.

Bellow is images of the models i have made this week in the order that i have mentioned them.

 

Week 1

This week was the first week of lectures and labs for the 3d modelling module of this semester.
The lab work was to create a ship steering wheel and a house in 3ds max.

This was my first experience using the software, I found a way to move and create everything very mathematically (by right clicking the tool). This method really suits me as a person as the way i like to do things is logical and mathematical, because of this I'm looking forward to the coming weeks and to doing a model of a Viper Mark II from Battlestar Galactica for the coming assignment to be handed in by week 6 before the animation part starts.

What I have learnt from this week is that all the models are not as complicated as I first thought they would be, you not have to be an amazing artist to do well in this model and that every thing can be made out if the most simple of 3d shapes.

The Models i have done this week are below: