Blobmesh

Here is a video i created from following the blobmesh tutorial i used within my scenes.

Links I Found Useful

Here are a list of links that i have used this semester.
http://www.cg-files.com/vrayglassmaterialtutorial.html

http://uktv.co.uk/food/homepage/sid/566

http://www2.tv-ark.org.uk/otherchannels/uktv_food.html

http://www.tutorialslice.com/tutorials/3DS-MAX/2

http://www.3dvalley.com/tutorials/creating-realistic-glass-material-in-3ds-max

http://www.xedium3d.com/tutorials/blobmesh/ - I followed this tutorial to create my blobmesh liquids in Ident 1 and Ident 2.

Mood Boards

Mood board one is a range of general ideas, images and thoughts I get from hearing the channel ‘UKTV Food’ and the sorts of things that I relate to this channel,



The second mood board is to represent the scene where the egg rolls down the pipes and splits into the pan, this mood board shows some of the things I want to include in the scene and some textures and ideas of where I go them from.


The third mood board represents the cake baking animation, included in this mood board are things to do with bakery and things I can to include within the animation.




The final mood board is the croutons in the soup spelling out ‘UKTV Food’ on the mood board are some image of things that helped me create this scene and the idea for this scene.

3d Modelling Semester 2 - Idents

This semester I have been asked to create 3 corporate idents for a channel of my choice. The animations have to be 10-15 seconds long and must show a corporate theme without so every time the user sees it they can relate the colour or the character to the subject channel.
The idents should promote the chosen channel and be innovative, imaginative and actively celebrate the ethos of the corporation they represent.


I started off with looking at a few TV idents on ‘www.youtube.com’ the ones that I liked and thought are good are;
The idents for the ‘Sumo’ channel because I always recognise the red and blue corporate colour of the ‘sumo tv’ text also nearly all of the idents for this channel that I have seen have been funny and clever so I always remember them. Also in theory if the idents are funny the channel should be funny which would make me want to watch it.
‘http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93t1H-EkUj4’


The BBC 2 idents, where the number 2 is shown doing different activities, I like this because all they use is the number 2 in a range of different scenarios. I also remember these from when they were on TV I always knew if I saw a blue coloured number 2 it was an advert for BBC2, so this means the ident worked.
‘http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA18ZkIB5i8’



The channel that I have chosen to base my TV idents on for this semesters project is ‘UKTV Food’ I chose this channel because I tend to end up watching lots of food programmes, so I thought I would find this channel an interesting one to use, also when I was thinking of channels to use when I thought of this I felt like I had a flood of different ideas that I could implement for an idents.

Some of the idea’s I have come up with are;

A chef cutting a carrot, gets faster and faster and not looking he ends up cutting his hand off turns to the camera and blood splats on the camera lens but leaves clear patches, which reads “UKTV Food”

A pressure cooker on the stove bubbling up and building pressure then exploding with food covering the room and leaving a clean path on the wall with UKTV Food written there.

The above one but the food slides down the wall uncovering a ‘UKTV Food’ sticker.

Above one but the food on the wall spells out

Above on but with the food left in the pressure cooker spelling out ‘UKTV Food’

A chicken laying an egg in the hutch and the egg rolls down pipes with the camera following and then drop out and splits with the egg contents splatting into a pan on the oven and making a fried egg cut out in the shape of the words ‘UKTV Food’

Chef mixes up a cake mix and gets faster and faster then all the mix splats everywhere either on the walls or on the camera lens.

Chef adds ingredients to food blender/mixer and then turns it on and contents goes everywhere, either splatting on the camera lens or the wall.

Same as above but pours out the soup out adds croutons and they spell out ‘UKTV Food’

Chef puts cake mix in the oven turns on the timer, timer spins round quick speeding up time and then bleep goes off then chef removes Cake/ cookies from the oven and it spells ‘UKTV Food’

Alphabet soup spells out ‘UKTV Food’ in the pan or in the bowl.

Chef makes cake mixture, pours it into a baking tin, view is from side on, the cake goes into the oven and you see it rise up (the oven timer goes in fast forward ) then when the cake is pulled out the camera moves up above the cake to see that the cake tin is moulded to the letters ‘UKTV Food’

Here are the three ideas that I have decided to implement;

Ident 1 - A chicken laying an egg in the hutch and the egg rolls down pipes with the camera following and then drop out and splits with the egg contents splatting into a pan on the oven and making a fried egg cut out in the shape of the words ‘UKTV Food’


Ident 2 - Chef makes cake mixture, pours it into a baking tin, view is from side on, the cake goes into the oven and you see it rise up (the oven timer goes in fast forward ) then when the cake is pulled out the camera moves up above the cake to see that the cake tin is moulded to the letters ‘UKTV Food’

Ident 3 - Chef adds ingredients to food blender/mixer and then turns it on and pours out the soup out adds croutons and they spell out ‘UKTV Food’




Why I chose this idea and things I want to include within the ident animations;

Ident 1:
I thought of this idea randomly but once I had started to plan it in more detail I decided to get some ideas from one of the most famous animations for their inventions – ‘Wallace and Gromit’
I liked the style of their piping and rivets in the joins from the machine featured in ‘a close shave’ and this style of invention would go well with the theme, also the egg splitting idea is similar to one within the film ‘Edward Scissorhands.’ I also like the old style riveting on the machines and inventions in ‘Edward Scissorhands’ so I am going to try base my textures and colours around those from both these films. There is a machine in ‘Edward Scissorhands’ in the old mansion created by the inventor that picks up and egg and cracks it into halves and the contents of the egg drop into a cake mixture, this I something that I thought was good and that I would like to include within the animation. One of the things that I want to take in consideration from talking to people about this scene, is how long you are following the egg for down the pipes as if it it too long then viewers will get bored and lose concentration.



Ident 2:
This idea come about from a previous idea, I spoke to Jo and asked how I could make the original idea better and we laid down some ideas added them together and this animation is the outcome, so I hope I don’t let Jo down by not doing a very good job of this animation.
I would like to use a dull brushed steel effect on the cake tin, graphite colour to make it look as realistic and metal as possible.
Another thing I would like to include it the animation are air bubbles within the sponge cake and small splash-backs when the cake mix is being poured into the mould and also tp have cake mix running down the edge of the baking tray when cooked as if to show the cake had bubbled over slightly to add realism.




Ident 3:
This idea come from a range of films and Tv, a lot of ideas like this use alphabet soup to spell out words or alphabet letter shaped spaghetti to spell out words, but I wanted to used croutons and soup.
I thought of a liquid I could do, which was soup, I then thought of what people add to soup and I though of bread or croutons, and I decided to go with croutons as they are more linked to soup generally.





Colleagues Idea’s:

I like Jess’s comic relief ideas as I think this will be quite funny and catchy, I am looking forward to seeing the final animation and how they come out as the plans and ideas look good.

I also like Alex’s ideas for the channel ‘Sky One’ I have already seen a small bit of his animation and I think it is going to look really professional once finished, two of the things I particularly like is the use and detail of image manipulation using Photoshop on his images and the growth of his trees within his animation. This looks really realistic and professional as if it was a video just in fast forward.

I have seen a few around the computer rooms that look very good and detailed but as I cant really read up much more about them on peoples blogs I am unable to comment further, but am looking forward to seeing everyone’s finished animations.

Reactor

Ball into blocks

Researching tools and techniques for creation of scenes, and playing around with different tools

The main topic I focused on this week was completing the introduction to reactor tutorial from the help menu of Autodesk 3ds max.

Grouped the cylinder and sphere, I then added them to the RBCollection





I finished this tutorial on the 2009 version of 3ds max so it won’t open on the lab computers so I will have to update the rest of this tutorial at a later date one I have the screenshots and files from the 2009 version.

MR Global Lighting

I followed a tutorial from ‘www.lynda.com’ that taught me about Mental Ray Global Lighting, this is good for bouncing light around the room off objects.
For this tutorial I used a scene of a room that I created last semester, I added a small lamp to this scene for the purpose of this tutorial, I then added an ‘Omni’ light to the scene and placed it where a light bulb would go in the light,


I then changed the renderer the same way as I done before, I changed it to ‘Mental ray Renderer’ this time,
Here is a shot of the original scene with default lighting and default renderer,



Now here is the scene with the ‘omni’ light in it and rendered using the ‘Mental ray Renderer’



As you can see the scene is very dark with little light touching the other objects within the scene.

In the ‘render setup’ window I selected the ‘Indirect Illumination’ tab, I then selected the ‘Global Illumination’ checkbox to turn it on. This works by using photons to illuminate the scene, so the more photons I adjust form these settings the better the global illumination will work on the scene, for this render I am keeping the ‘photon’ setting to default which is 500, I kept the photons at 500 and there was no change so I played around with the settings a little more and here is the outcome,

Still not the outcome I was hoping for to be honest, it has brightened up the walls behind and part of the cake a bit more, but nothing hugely impressive and you still can’t see half of the scene as it’s in darkness.
Also there are specs in the scene that should not be there, this is because the sample rate is too low, so in the next scene I fix this.

Still not the outcome I was hoping for to be honest, it has brightened up the walls behind and part of the cake a bit more, but nothing hugely impressive and you still can’t see half of the scene as it’s in darkness.
Also there are specs in the scene that should not be there, this is because the sample rate is too low, so in the next scene I fix this.

No specs as visible in this render, but I think the scene is still too dark at the front, so to fix this if it was my actual scene I would add another light from the camera view to the front of the scene and brighten up the light in the background and maybe reposition it.

Mental Ray Caustics,

This is good to used in a scene for glass or water. It deals with reflection, refraction and opacity.

Camera Shaders

This week I played around with camera shaders by using a video tutorial given to me by Jo.

Firstly I played around with ‘lens’ camera shaders, to do this I opened a scene I created last semester as a test scene, I then opened the render setup window,
Selected the ‘common’ tab and opened the ‘Assign Renderer’ drop down tab, followed by selecting the ‘Production’ button to bring up the ‘chose renderer’ window and selected ‘mental ray renderer’ and selected ‘ok.’


I then opened the render tab in the same window, then scrolled down to the ‘camera shaders’ part of the ‘camera effects’ section.
I then clicked on the ‘lens’ checkbox and the box next to it (that says ‘None’), which opened the ‘material/map browser’ window, I then selected ‘Distortion (Lume)’ from the list and double clicked it.


I then opened the ‘material editor’ and dragged the distortion map form the camera shader to a blank slot in the material editor, then a small window opened and I selected ‘instance’ to make it a instance.



I then rendered the scene with the camera shader applied.

Here is a shot of the scene with out the camera shader applied,

Here is a shot for the scene with the camera shader applied

I think the tree tops look good with this shader, but I don’t think the hair and fur worked very well with this as it looks a bit confused as to where the original path was and where one of the rabbits used to sit.
I then went on to exploring the other camera shader ‘volume’, I clicked the box next to volume and opened the ‘material/map browser’ and selected ‘mist (lume)’ this is a mist that covers the whole scene.

I then copied it into the material editor the same as I done above for the ‘lens’ camera shader.
I left the settings as default to start with, here is the outcome of the rendered scene.

I played around with changing the colour of the mist, and the transparency, here is the outcome.

This could be good to create atmosphere in scenes, for example is there is some1 mad you could have a red mist in the scene, or someone is jealous you could use a green mist, or just a grey mist would work great over a graveyard scene or something spooky to create a little more effect in the scene creating more impact on the viewer.