Croutons

I needed to create croutons as these will be added to the soup and used to spell out 'UKTV FOOD' at the end of the scene.

To create the croutons I created a box with lots of segments for height, width and depth, I then converted it to an editable poly,


I then used the move tool and the vertices selection to click and drag points of the box in to make it look indented and misshaped like a real crouton,


Once I was happy with the shape I added ‘turbosmooth’ and ‘meshsmooth’ modifiers to it to make it look smoother



I then wanted to add a material to the crouton to make it look legitimate, so I looked for a image of toast to add as the bump map and diffuse colour, this is the toast map I used - http://endingb.com/images/toast.png, here is a shot of the finished crouton.

At the end of the scene for this ident I want the camera to come above the soup and have a birds eye view above it looking down on the croutons spelling out the word ‘UKTV Food’ so I had to create the shape of the letters using the croutons, to do this I cloned the croutons and moved them into shape.

Creating The Rooms.

I created one room that i was going to use for the 3 of my idents.
To create the room I made 2 large boxes for the walls and a large box for the floor, I then went on to creating the worktop units for the room, to do this I used a box, I then used another box to run along the bottom of the unit which I used the ‘Boolean’ tool to remove it so it looked like indented skirting around the unit, which most kitchen units have.



I then cloned this unit and scaled it to create 2 worktop slabs to go on top of the units.

I took a picture of my own kitchen worktop in my flat and used this as a map for the worktop in the 3 scenes,

I added a UVW Map to the worktops and played around with the length, width and height settings until the worktop looked exactly as the one in my kitchen.

I then created a box for the drawers and cupboards and scaled them to the correct height and width to look realistic within the units, then cloned it to get several cupboards and drawers, finally I moved them into position.
I then created 3 cylinders to be used as handles for the cupboards and drawers and placed them in position, to create these I used the clone and scale tools.
Finally I created a freestanding worktop in the middle of the room for the chef to use.
I then added a material to the units so that they would look like wood, to do this I took a picture of a wooden unit of my own and used this for the map by adding it to the material editor as the diffuse colour map.

I then added a material to the floor, for this I wanted tiles, I had used an image of tiles for flooring in my July calendar scene from last term, so I added it to the material editor as the bump map and raised the amount and also added it as the diffuse colour.

I then used 2 planes on the walls so I could have a few rows of tiles on the walls and the rest wall paper.
Here are the materials I used:

Wall tiles - http://www.tilesales.co.uk/kitchen/images/large/kitchen2.jpg

Wallpaper - http://www.walltowallwallpaper.com/pics%5CPC29052.jpg

I then created a hob in the background to make it look like a real kitchen as it wouldn’t be much of one without a hob, also I was going to need this for another of my scenes.
To create the hob I used a flat rectangle box as the base, small cylinders for the flame and gas to come from and small box’s for the pans to sit on.
I wanted to go for a modern looking hob, so I added stainless steel to it but kept the cylinders black, I also used black cylinders for the settings knobs.

I found a good image of stainless steel that I wanted to used as the map from,

http://img.alibaba.com/photo/50401549/Stainless_Steel_Sheet_with_No_4_Finish.jpg

I added it to the bump map and diffuse colour map in the material editor.

Glass Material For Jug.

Now I wanted to give the jug a glass effect, so I opened the ‘material editor’ and done as follows,



I then added a ‘falloff map’ to the opacity by selecting the small box next to the opacity scale, I then selected ‘Fresnel’ as my ‘Falloff type’



In the ‘material editor’ I added a ‘raytrace’ map in the ‘refraction’ slot and set the refraction level to 80.


Also to make the jug look more realistic and so that the view can see inside of the jug I applied the ‘2 – sided’ option from the ‘Shader Basic Parameters’ heading.



I rendered the scene a few times to make sure I was creating the right effect I wanted and changed the figures until I was happy with the outcome, I will have to adjust the reflection and refraction once the scene is finished and all in place so that it will reflect other objects within the scene and so that the liquid that will go in it can be seen through the glass, here is a shot of the glass jug,
(The background library image if Tokyo is just for show purpose to show the opacity levels and reflection and refraction) I am happy with this because it reflects the inside of the blender where there is a tube which is the rotation mechanism for the blade, and as I can see this reflected hopefully it will work as well with liquid in the jug.




Here is a tutorial that I found useful for creating this glass effect, ‘http://www.3dvalley.com/tutorials/creating-realistic-glass-material-in-3ds-max’

Making The Jug For The Blender Scene 2

Also this week I worked on some more of the soup and crouton scene by completing the blender.
Firstly I added a tube to the top of the blender for the jug to click into and another tube for the rotation mechanism of the blade to attach to.

I then went on to creating the jug for the blender, to do this I selected ‘spline’ from the ‘create’ menu and then used the mouse to click and drag out a suitable shape for the jug, here was the line shape that I started with,

I then used the ‘Lathe’ modifier to create the jug from this spline line,

Here is a screenshot of the finished jug,

I then went on to creating a handle for the jug, to do this I started off with a cylinder then used the scale tool to make it look more of an oval shape like a usual handle and converted it to an ‘editable poly’ and used the ‘vertex’ selection to select the vertices and use the move tool to move them to they are joint to the jug and move the verities middle of the cylinder out to create a bend and curve shape. I then added the ‘MeshSmooth’ modifier to it, to make it look more smooth and natural.

I then went on to creating a handle for the jug, to do this I started off with a cylinder then used the scale tool to make it look more of an oval shape like a usual handle and converted it to an ‘editable poly’ and used the ‘vertex’ selection to select the vertices and use the move tool to move them to they are joint to the jug and move the verities middle of the cylinder out to create a bend and curve shape. I then added the ‘MeshSmooth’ modifier to it, to make it look more smooth and natural.

Here is a shot of the finished blender with the jug.

Week 16

This week I learnt how to create bones and manipulate them, here is how I created a human arm using bones.

I then used dummy objects such as text or spline objects to link to the bones so that when you have to move them around under the skin it’s a lot easier to find and move them within having to find the bones through the limbs.

I used the ‘IK limb solver’ to link the 3 bones together so that they move realistically when animated.
I clicked on each bone and the joint where it would move.

I then created a cylinder on the stage and scaled it to the correct size of the bones and placed it over the bones to conceal them.
I then added the skin modifier to the cylinder and used the skin modifier options to ‘add’ the bones to the skin modifier.

I selected the ‘edit envelopes’ button then used the move tool to alter how much strength and control each bone has on a limb.

I also used a ‘Biped’ to play around with joint movement and to see how it should look for a normal bone structure,

I made the biped walk by moving different bones to see how the joints would work and to make the movements resemble a humans.


I also found this online tutorial a lot of help and very simple, ‘http://www.spoono.com/3ds/tutorials/tutorial.php?id=7’

After I had played around with bones and the Biped I started creating a blender for the 3rd animation where the chef makes a soup and pours it into a bowl then adds croutons.

I stared with creating the base of the blender by using a box, I then added 4 cylinders as the legs to go under the box at each corner,

To get the slope at the front of the box I cloned the main box and angled it to the same degree as I wanted the slope then place the cloned box over the main box and used the Boolean tool to delete the cloned box and to make the original box have a sloped front.


I then created the 2 buttons on the sloped face of the rectangle, the first button I created is a knob which is going to control the speed of the blender, I made this with creating a cylinder to lay parallel with the slope and another cylinder angled at 90 degrees to the first rectangle which will be used to rotate the knob.

I then went on to creating the On/Off flick switch, to do this I created box and cloned it twice and angled the cloned boxes above the original one but tilting in towards the center of the 1st box, I then used the ‘ProBoolean’ tool to removed the cloned boxes and leave the original box with a gentle ‘V’ shape in it, so make it look like a realistic switch.


I then added text to the front slope of the box where the buttons are, I added 3 different sets of text, the first set was the numbers ‘1,2,3’ these will be used for the speed setting above the knob, the second set of text is for the make of the blender I made up a random name ‘Slick Mix 10’ and the third set of text are the words ‘On, Off’ for the on and off switch.

Once I had created the text I right clicked on it and selected ‘convert to editable poly’ then I selected ‘polygon’ then finally selected ‘extrude.’

I then clicked and dragged over the text to highlight the text I want to extrude then I dragged the text out so it was 3 dimensional to the thickness I wanted it, then I placed it onto the front of the rectangle and around the knob in the middle and above and below the switch.

Now all I have to do is create the jug for the blender, the blades and the rotation mechanism to blend up the soup.

Week 15

Morphing.

This week I learnt how to morph one shape into another shape using the ‘morpher’ modifier.
I practised making one box morph to the shape of 2 other edited boxes.

Firstly I created one box by selecting ‘box’ from the ‘create’ menu and changing the ‘height seg’ parameters to ‘2’ and then converted it to an editable poly and cloned it twice, so I ended up with three different boxes, named; box01, box02 and box03.



I then selected the second box and used the ‘vertex’ selection to select the top points of the box and then used the scale tool to drag them into each other and create a point. I then used this same technique on the third box but scaled the bottom points and pulled them into each other.



I then selected the first box and used the modifier drop down menu to select ‘morpher’




Once I had selected the modifier I then completed the following steps seen below within the image.

I then selected auto key button at the bottom of the window and used the slider to select what fame I wanted to morph my shape on, I chose frame 20. I then went to the ‘morpher’ modifier and channel list and changed the percentage next to ‘box02’ to 100%, this means that the original box will morph 100% of the shape from box02.

I then repeated this for frame 40 and box03, once I was happy with the movement I deselected ‘auto key’

I then rendered this and saved it as an ‘avi’ file and played it to make sure it was working correctly and as I wanted.

This is the original shape of the box,

This then morphed to the shape of ‘box02’

Finally the box morphed to the shape of ‘box03’

I was happy with the outcome of morphing as it went as planned and morphed to the right shapes at the right times.

I then played around with morphing different shapes, but the important thing to remember is that morphing will only work with shapes that have the same number of vertices.

Here is the video of the morphing animation,

Week 14

Following a path.

This week I learnt how to animate objects to follow a path .
Firstly I used a sphere to follow a basic circle spline shape, to do this I created a sphere,



I then created a circle spline and placed this around the sphere,

I then selected ‘Animation’ from the top toolbar, then selected ‘constraints’ from the drop down menu then finally selected ‘Path constraints’


I then had to select my path, so to do this I clicked on the circular spline, this attached the sphere to the path I created from the spline.



I then rendered the animation and played it, it worked successfully with the sphere moving round the circular path as planned,

Here is a shot of the rendered AVI file being played with the ball moving around the path.

I then wanted to make a rectangle follow a wavy path, so I created my rectangle from the shapes toolbar and then I created my path using line spline.
I attached the rectangle shape to the line path the same as I did with the sphere and circle path. I then played the animation and the rectangle moved along the path, but not as I wanted, the rectangle stays at the same flat position whilst moving up and down gradients,

I wanted the rectangle to point down whilst going down a gradient and to point up whilst going up a up gradient, to do this I selected the box and opened up the ‘path parameters’ and used the ‘path options’ to select the ‘follow’ and ‘bank’ check boxes to get the box shape to follow the path how I wanted.

I then played around and used this technique to get a camera to orbit around a stationary object so that you can see all sides to the object.
To do this I created a teapot in the middle of the scene, I went to the ‘create’ toolbar, ‘geometry’, ‘standard primitives’ then selected ‘teapot’ and dragged it out onto my scene.
I then added a camera by using the ‘cameras’ tab under the ‘create’ menu. I selected target camera and dragged it out onto my scene pointing it at the teapot, I then added a circular spline to the scene same as I done before, then my scene looked like this,

I the selected the camera and got it to follow the path of the spline just like I done for the sphere, I then rendered this,

Here is a screenshot of the AVI file being played, this was also successful, and the camera orbited around the teapot on the circle spline whilst staying focused at the teapot.