Work Handed In!

Today I handed in my assignment and I just wanted to add a couple of things about the DVD content and the way the assignment is presented.


The DVD includes:


- A folder with the Textures used in the animation.
- A folder with the Sounds used in the animation.
- A folder with the Scenes I set up to get the whole animation (the textures will be missing though as 3ds Max will not find them because the path has changed)
- A folder with the Models used in the animation (I made sure 3ds Max could find the textures for all of them)
- My Blog in PDF format (being Blog 1 the newest posts and Blog 3 the oldest) in case the link does not work.
- A text file with the link to my Blog in it.
- The animation in AVI format.
- The credits in WMV format (windows media player files)


Playing the animation from the DVD:


It is possible that the animation frame rate is not completely stable since it is read from a DVD and not the hard drive of the computer. If this happens the link in Youtube for the animation is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK3KBrCehAU


Assignment Presentation:


To present the assignment, like with the models assignment, I used a plastic folder with a pocket for the DVD. Unfortunately, the guy from the iCentre told me that I was not allowed to hand the DVD plastic case open so he stuck it into a piece of paper and put it inside the plastic folder. To open the DVD folder you will have to rip a plastic tab so you can get the DVD out so I hope this is not too tedious but it was not my intention to hand it in like that.

Credits For The Animation

I just decided to make a short clip displaying the credits of the animation. I simply used one of the scenes of the animation and set it up so the rests of the X-Wing are scattered around the snow, with some smoke coming from the engine and my name as a Text shaped with the extrude modifier.

Week 10 Exercises. Reaction Manager.

This is the last technique we have covered in the lessons. Basically this technique allow the user to control one or more objects (slaves) from a single object (controller). In the tutorial I will control the Z rotation of a box (the slave in this case) with a rectangle spline (a spline is used to save memory because it will not be rendered).

Week 9 Exercises. Skinning.

Bones


They are a great technique to animate limbs and anything that work as a limb such as a mechanical arm. The objective is to use the bones system to create as many bones as joints are needed. Then use the HK solvers to make the movement of all the bones similar to a limb. Without the HK solver the bones could also be animated but it will take much more time because what the IK solver do is to tell all the limbs to move accordingly with the bone the user selected and animated.

Skinning


In this skinning tutorial I learnt how to attach a bone system to a mesh in order to animate the mesh. Once the bone is attached to the mesh (a cylinder this time but it could be an arm or a leg from a character for example), when I animate the bone the mesh follows all the bone's movements. I did not sue this technique for my assignment animation but I found it extremely useful for character animation, which I plan to work on at some point.


This is how I attached the bones to the mesh:

This is what happens when I animate the bone. As you can see, when the cylinder bends there is a big gap where the "joint" would be.

And after moving some vertices this is how it looks like. Not perfect but at least the gap is gone.

Scenes

In this post I will briefly talk about the scenes I created and animated for the final animation. In order to achieve the 30 seconds limit I had to exclude some of them and shorten some others. All the scenes include animated vegetation and snowflakes falling.

Scene 1 (Excluded)

This was supposed to be the first scene of the animation but I decided to remove it since it was almost the same as scene 2. A  target camera was used following the X-Wing.

The ships simply pass by in the background trying to make the viewer understand that the TIE fighters are chasing the X-Wing.

Scene2

In this scene I use a free camera  that will focus on the Antenna and in the ships passing by in the background.

In the animation, the Antenna will detect the ships after they fly by and will alert and activate the turret which will wait for the X-Wing to be in fire range. When the Antenna detects the ships the glow on its point becomes red.

Scene3

This scene uses a free camera placed in the ground which will record the animation where the camera comes to live and moves its rocket launchers to the sky.

In this scene the turret, previously activated by the Antenna, will "come to live"  using a glowing effect to emphasize the fact that it is activated.

Scene4

This scene uses a free camera attached to a path that will face the X-Wing and will show the TIE fighters in the background shooting laser beams at the X-Wing.

In this scene the chase continues and the X-Wing dodges the laser beams shot by one of the TIE fighters. Note the importance of the ground vegetation and rocks as a reference point to notice the speed of the ships.

Scene5(Excluded)

This scene uses a target camera attached to a path. The focus of the camera is attached to the same path as the X-Wing to focus on this one. This scene was also excluded because I thought it did not follow the story line properly, it was kind of out of place and it did not match with the previous nor the following scene.

In this scene the X-Wing performs a mix of a barrel roll and a loop to try to get rid of the TIE Fighters.

Scene6

This scene uses a free camera that follows the trajectories of the X-Wing and the TIE fighters and also shows how the X-Wing flies towards the canyon.

This is the scene in which the X-Wing gets inside the canyon and the TIE fighters decide to stop the chase because they know that the turret is waiting for the X-Wing at the end of the canyon.

Scene7

This scene uses a free camera grouped with the X-wing, placed in the cockpit, and all of it attached to a path. So this scene uses a camera from inside the cockpit which attempts to give the effect that the camera are actually the eyes of the pilot.

In this scene the X-Wing will get inside the canyon, perform a couple of evasion movements to dodge a couple of boulders and then exit the canyon.

Scene8

This scene is recorded through a free camera that will show the turret in one side and the X-Wing exiting the canyon in the other side. It will also shows how the turret aims its rocket launchers to the X-Wing.

In this scene the X-Wing exits the canyon unaware that the turret was waiting for it. The turret will aim its rocket launchers to it and will wait for a couple of seconds before it fires to give a feeling of ANTICIPATION to the viewer as it is obvious what the turret is about to do.

Scene9

This scene uses a target camera that will follow the path of the rocket once is fired from the turret.

In this scene the turret will finish the aiming and will shot one rocket to the X-Wing leaving a trail of smoke as it moves towards the X-Wing.

Scene10

This scene uses, once again, the cockpit camera using the exact technique as in Scene 7.

In this scene we find ourselves once again in looking through the eyes of the X-Wing's pilot. Suddenly a red light (glow effect) will flash in the cockpit which accompanied by an alarm sound will announce that the X-Wing is being targeted by a rocket which is about to hit the X-Wing, using once again the ANTICIPATION factor.

Scene11

This scene uses a target camera that moves slightly and focuses in the path of the rocket.

In this scene the rocket is simply flying through the air in the chase of the X-Wing.

Scene12

This is the second part of Scene 11 and uses exactly the same camera.

In this scene the rocket will keep flying through the air towards the X-Wing until it hits it and creates a explosion that will make the X-Wing disappear. This is the final scene.

Animated Trees and Grass.

Even if I added this feature to the trees and the grass some time ago, after watching the animation and seeing that it might not be very obvious to the watcher, I decided to make this short post mentioning it.


The scenes with a still free camera where there is vegetation around seemed a bit "dead"  so in order to make the scenario a bit more alive and to accompany the sound of the wind, I decided to animate the trees and the grass. They simply move slightly sideways during the whole scene which creates a more "credible" scenario.


Because it is not too obvious it might have been a better idea not to add this animations to save me some time but because I have already rendered and edited the animation I thought it would be a good idea to say it.

Video Edition & Sound Effects

In this post I want to talk about the edition of the animation in Sony Vegas Pro 11.


I have no real experience in video editing and from the beginning I was thinking of editing the video using Windows Movie Maker which is a program that I had used before for putting together videos of my surf trips with some of my friends.
However, Windows Movie Maker has a big weakness which is the sound. You are only allowed to use one audio track which was fine for my surf videos as I only added some music but for the animation I needed many different sounds for each element in the animation.


That is the reason of why I decided to use Sony Vegas Pro. Sony Vegas allows me to add as many audio tracks as I want in the animation which is very useful for some of the scenes in which I need to include up to four different sounds.
If you do not have in consideration the sound, for the rest of the edition Windows Movie Maker would have been enough as I simply split some of the clips to make them shorter and merged the end of some clips to the beginning of the next ones to be able to achieve a 30 seconds animation. What I want to say with this is that I have not really gotten into Sony Vegas Pro and only used its basic functions to complete the edition.


Here are some screen captures of the edition. As you can see the video clips go in the top track and the sounds go in the rest of the tracks.

So thanks to Sony Vegas I was able to add as many sound effects as I wanted to. All the sounds (except the imperial march of course) are loyalty-free sounds taken from http://soundjax.com/.


The list of sounds I used:


- Wind.
- Music.
- Antenna Moving.
- Antenna radio sound.
- X-Wing and TIE Fighters fly by sound (it's a jet sound)
- X-Wing and TIE Fighters engine sound (it's also a jet)
- TIE Shooting Sound (Original from the films)
- Lasers beam flying by.
- Atmosphere sound inside the X-Wing cockpit (a minor wind)
- Rocket Launcher shooting.
- Rocket woosh.
- Incoming alarm in X-Wing Cockpit.
- Explosion sound.


I really wanted to add all the necessary sound effects into the animation because even if sound is not part of the module, it makes the animations look much better and be more "alive".

No Skydome & Lights

Appart from the exercises some weeks ago, I have not been talking again about lightning or adding a skydome in the final animation. This has a very simple explanation: There are no lights or skydomes in the animation. This is not something I did out of laziness and here are the reasons why I decided not to use any of them.


This is a bit of a boring post but I think it is important to understand why I did not include lights or an skydome in the animation.


Why no Lights?


All started with the first animations I rendered. Obviously this test animations only included the essential for the animation to happen (the camera, the animated objects and the terrain). Once I was happy with the rendered scene I started adding the rest of the things such as static objects like trees, rocks and grass (which if watched carefully they are also animated since they move to simulate the wind), lights (spotlights and omni-lights), snow and a Skydome.


For the kind of animation I created (quick camera changes, objects moving very quick and considerably high) I could see almost no difference, lightning wise, with the test animations (apart from longer rendering times) and that is why I decided to not to include lights in the animation. Note that the light effect on the turret, the antenna and the cockpit are Lense Effects > Glow and no lights.


Why no Skydome?


The reason for the Skydome not being included is a bit different as I could clearly see the difference between skydome and dark empty space in the result animations. The main reason that made me take the decision of not including an skydome is the texture confusion between the objects and the skydome, and this is when the borders of the objects (the spaceships in this case) are not completely clear because of the background texture (the skydome). I'll put an example to explain it a bit better:


If the camera position made the object's background the terrain (with a snow texture) the object was clearly visible but if the camera make the object's background the Skydome the object, specially its edges, were not that clear. In an animation where a camera angle does not last for more than 3 seconds and where the object move very fast, this edge problem can cause the watcher not seeing in time some of the objects in certain scenes.


Now you might ask to yourself: so, if both the terrain and the skydome have a texture applied to them, why did the terrain gave me no trouble? The answer again is quite simple: The terrain texture is homogeneous (all the same with little variations) which allowed me to TILE the texture by 10 and MIRROR the tiles. This made the texture "particle size", or pixels to be 10 times smaller than the spaceship's texture therefore the edges were properly visible.
However, because the Skydome texture have parts of clouds and parts of sky in it I was not able to TILE it without getting a terrible result. And because the texture image of both the skydome and the ships are the same size (about 2 mega pixels) but the ships are much smaller, the pixels of the skydome were considerably expanded which gave me trouble with the edges of the ships.


Then I added two elements to the animation that helped me with the decision of not adding an skydome. The first element was the snow particle effect which contrasted with the black emptiness of the sky very well and created a very nocturnal atmosphere. Also, because the white colour of the snow, the contrast against a black sky has a much better result than the contrast against a bluish colour sky.
The other element are the planets and the moon I added. They helped me to give the scenes a cooler look I think. I tried to keep them always the same size to try to avoid the fact that the spaceships are actually getting closer and closer. I did this simply scaling the planets down and moving them a bit further every time the spaceships advanced towards them.




In other words, I did not add an skydome or lights because I think the animation look better as it is.

Animation Completed!

After many weeks of work, days and days of rendering and many many tests to try to make the scenes look a bit better the Animation is Completed.

This means that even if I might change small things from it if I feel anything needs to be changed, the big part of the animations is completed, edited and uploaded in Youtube.

This does not mean that I will stop posting in the Blog as I still need to say some important things about the process I went through to complete the animation but from now on I will be focusing a bit more in my other two modules.

Thoughts

I am very happy with the overall process of the animation and this subject is definitely something that I will keep working on by myself to improve my skills in 3ds Max and 3d modelling & animation. It was my first time using 3ds Max and  doing 3D models to animate them after, and I think I have been learning a lot about different methods for modelling, texturing and setting up scenes to animate.

I am satisfied with the final result of my work and I am glad that I got a taste of what making a 3D animation from scratch feels like. Nevertheless, when comparing my work with other animations in Youtube I can clearly see that I am far away from a "decent" animation but I'll keep working to improve my skills and I am sure that in some years I will be able to create very cool stuff.

From the game designer point of view I think I have acquired enough skills to create my own meshes (probably not characters yet) that I can import to UDK and use in future projects. Also, I am happy that I have developed my skills in animation which from now on I can use to create my own game intros and all sorts of in-game cinematic.

The Animation:

Camera Shake During Edition

For the two scenes where the camera is inside the cockpit I wanted to add a camera shake to simulate the turbulences during the flight.


To do this I have created lines with bumps which later became the paths for the cameras to follow which created a slight vibration during the animation. However, I tried to apply camera shake while editing the animation in Sony Vegas Pro, just to be able to compare both results. After some tests the result of this second technique was way better.


I am working on the edition of the animation already (I have all the scenes except the credits) so during the edition I applied camera shake.


Camera shake in Sony Vegas Pro is almost like animate the camera. What I did was to set different key frames moving the focus of the camera. The result was a very credible and noticeable shake effect. Also, I needed to zoom in the focus (which is simply to make it smaller) of the camera so I did not get any black borders in the final result.


As you can see in this screen capture, the focus is easily moved and rotated and they key frames work exactly as in 3ds Max or UDK's Matinee.

Changes After Feedback

After getting some feedback from the animations I rendered so far, I decided to change a couple of things.


Duration


Since the beginning of this module the limit for the duration of the total animation was 30 seconds but when I put together all the scenes I rendered the total time goes over 40 seconds. Also, I was thinking of, after the explosion of the X-Wing, adding two more scenes in which the X-Wing would crash in the snow.


However, due to the 30 seconds limitation, I will have to, not only skip this last two scenes, but also remove some of the scenes I already done. Nevertheless I will post those scenes in this Blog in a couple of days.


Terrain


The general feedback I got from what I showed of my animation was focused on the simplicity of the terrains in certain scenes and some of the "horizons" being obviously created by the end of the plane where the terrain was modelled.


So what I have done is to create a terrain putting more care on the bumps and the mountains it has. Then I cloned the terrain and placed it all over the scenes so the horizon problem is solved. I re-rendered 3 scenes to fix the terrain problems.


Here is the terrain that I used (100 segments by 100 segments)

And here are some screen capture to show the difference:

More Details on Cockpit

As the title of the post says, for the X-Wing cockpit scenes, I have "improved" the cockpit slightly. Well... I am not sure if improved is the right word as the only thing I did was to add two items to the cockpit.

The first item is a radar box to the left. I had that empty space and I thought I could add another tool that will make the cockpit look more like a cockpit.

The second item is a black and white picture of Marilyn Monroe on a frame placed to the right. I was debating with myself if using this picture or not as I am not completely sure about the reaction of the person that will mark my work, and I finally decided that, since I don't find it offensive in any way, adding this item to the cockpit.

I hope anyone that watches the animation will appreciate the joke as I only added this because I found the idea funny... I mean... a picture of Marilyn Monroe on the cockpit of an X-Wing Fighter from the Star Wars films? it is quite out of place but at the same time it does three things I am glad of:

1- It adds a comical feature to the animation.

2- It kind of amplify the fact that the camera is inside a cockpit since in other films the pilots always have a picture of their loved ones (girlfriend, family...) on the wind shield.

3 - It may distract the viewer from mistakes in the cockpit model.

Here is the picture I used:

And here is how it looks like in the cockpit together with the new added radar:

Explosion!

Right, so I was worried that explosions would be very hard to create. I need an explosion when the rocket hits the X-Wing so I was looking for some tutorials in Youtube and I found this one particularly useful: http //www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDGUaw0XrDg.


In this video, the person that made it show how to create an explosion using ATMOSPHERIC APPARATUS (SPHERE GIZMO) to create the fire explosion (which comes integrated with 3ds Max) and how to create the debris from the explosion using the PARTICLE SYSTEM P-ARRAY.


Just using those two things and changing some of the settings from both tools I managed to create an explosion that looks quite decent in my opinion.

Moving the Pivot

For the scene where the rocket approaches at great speed to the X-Wing I wanted the rocket to perform a spin at the same time as it moved forward. Oddly, when I selected the rocket to create the spin animation the pivot (the point in the object where the object can be moved and rotated from) the pivot was out of the object so when I span it, instead of spinning around itself, it performed a rotatory movement (like the earth around the sun).


I followed a simple tutorial in Youtube that explained how to move the pivot so I thought I would post about it.


The solution is very simple (once you know it of course hehe). I just had to click the Angle Snap Toggle and then go to Hierarchy and click on Affect Pivot Only. Then I just had to move the pivot to wherever I want.

Rocket & Smoke Trail

So, I have reached the scene in my animation where the Anti Air Turret will shoot a rocket to the X-Wing. In order to do this I had to work in both a rocket and the smoke trail.


The Rocket


The rocket was quite simple to make as it is made from a simple cylinder. As usual I have been extruding, scaling and moving the side polygons of the cylinder until I modelled a rocket I like. I do not have to say anything else about the rocket so here are the screen captures:

When I had the model I applied an Architectural (metal, flat) material with a texture taken from Google Images.

The Smoke Trail.


The tools that 3ds Max offers the user to work with particle system are numerous, but because I know exactly what I was looking for (the trail of smoke a rocket leaves behind when flying in the air) I followed a great tutorial I found in Youtube who helped me to get the grasp of the SUPER SPRAY particle system. The link for the tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLmhinne0BU.


The two features that I had to play with are super spray settings and materials. In the Spray settings I had to choose and change the following things:


- The size of each single particle.
- The shape of the particles produced by the spray.
- The amount (or intensity of the smoke) of particles produced by the spray.
- The time frame where the spray starts producing the particles.
- The life duration of the particles (depending on how long do I want the trail to be)

About the Materials I had to create a standard material with the MASK property. I did not use any textures for the smoke, it is just a mix of three colours combined together (white for the new particles, light grey for the medium aged particles and dark grey for the old aged particles) that will create the final colour of the smoke.