Week 9

Reactor tool

This week in tutorial we learnt how to use the reactor tool, i've been practicing the reactor tool for a couple of weeks, as i want to use it in my animation, so i was able to complete the task quite quickly and help others who were stuck.

To use the reactor tool is complicated at first as there's more than one step but once you've done it a few times you don't forget it. I began by creating a wall from one polygon and copying along the x axis then copying on the z axis making sure none of the polygons are touching each other. Now create a plane but making sure it doesn't touch the other polygons otherwise the reactor tool won't work.

Once the wall is made, create a sphere and use the auto key to make the sphere pass through the wall.

select the bricks that you want to be knocked down, and select customize, show UI, floating tool bars. discard the tool bars except the reactor tool bar.

With the bricks still selected open the property editor which is on the reactor tool bar, and change the properties to mass 20, select inactive and bounding box, then close. Now select the plane and change the properties to inactive and concave mesh, then close. Lastly select the sphere and change the mass to 20, select unyielding and mesh convex hull. Now save, as once the reactor tool is animated i can't be undone.

Now selecting the bricks, sphere and plane we can add a rigid body selection which is on the reactor tool bar, This tells the reactor tool what is part of the animation.

NOW HERE'S THE FUN PART!

Select utilities, reactor, havok world 1, and change the z axis to 150, and the world scale to 15 and the collision tolerance to 1, and select create animation on the reactor tool bar.

Once the animation has rendered, when played the sphere passes through the wall, but the wall is knocked down by the force of the sphere.

Week 8

In this weeks tutorial we were shown how to use the auto key, set key and key filters and bipeds. I've used these tools before but not quite understood them so i learnt alot from this tutorial, as i will need to know it to produce my animation.

Auto key

I firstly put my name across the plane and selected auto key the screen goes red, this indicates hat i am animating, i then moved the frames to 100 and moved the x axis across the plane, taking auto key off and pressing play i made the text move from left to right across the screen

Other techniques can also be applied when using auto key such as making the text spin across the x axis, this is done by rotating the text while auto key is on.


Walking Bipeds

I've never used bipeds in animation before but i found them very easy to use and to make the walk across plane. i firstly selecting systems and biped in order to make a simple person on the plane. Now i want to make him walk, this can be done by selecting motion and footstep mode, create multiple footsteps, i only put eight but can have any number. You can now see that there are footprints on the plane, this is the path your biped will follow. To make the biped walk along the footprints i pressed create keys to inactive footsteps which can be found under footsteps operation, i then pressed play and my biped walked along the footprints which can be seen in the image.

Week 7


Further Animation Techniques

For the past 6 weeks I've learnt alot in modelling techniques and I'm now looking forward to animating my models, the camera techniques that we were shown this week in tutorial are very useful to know, as path constraints will play a major part in my animation.
  
Using cameras

Target and free camera

I started by placing a cube in the center of the plane, i then added a target camera and highlighted the target at the end of the camera, this can be placed anywhere in the area and the camera will follow it. I then put the target at the center of the cube and moved the z axis up slightly. Free camera works in a similar way apart from it doesn't have a target to follow, the camera has to be controlled using the rotate and select and move tool, this can be awkward when animating as you have to use the auto key to tell 3d max where u want the camera to be in the animation. In order to view what the camera see's i selected the camera 01 view port


Using Path constraints

Path constraints are very useful as the give a much smoother camera flow when playing the scene is played out, rather than using free camera. To achieve this i firstly selected circle from the shapes bar, and making a circle on the plane. then selecting the camera and going to animation, path constraints and selecting the line, the camera instantly attaches itself to the line. when played out the camera moved 360 degrees around the cube.


 Curve Editor

I found the curve editor and dope sheet more complicated to use as I've not used this tool before, so it took a few tries before i understood it. I firstly made a sphere and selected auto key and moved to 50 frames and moved the z axis up, then moving to 100 frames and dropping the z axis. Taking auto key off, then right clicking and selecting curve editor you are show a new window with blue, green and red lines. These lines are the axis of the sphere and can be adjusted so that the sphere doesn't just move up and down it can go side to side, or up and down at an angle. We were then shown how to assign controllers to the z, y, x axis, including waveform float and noise float so that the sphere shakes when it goes up and down.

Final Renders

Machine Gun

Barrels

Target

Third Model - Target

For my third model I am making a target for my machine gun to fire at, I was going to make a person as the 12 barrel machine gun was designed to take down several enemy troops at one time. I decided to make a target instead as it's easier to make, and i can have several lined up in my animation to show what the machine gun was made to do in target form. 

To make the target itself is very simple and only takes a few steps to achieve. I began by making a frame to hold the target in place and converting them to editable poly mesh to narrow the tops so they fitted in place.
 

Once the frame was in place I placed a small cylinder through each part to act as a pin.

I then Built the bottom half of the frame to support the target and placed another cylinder pin at the back. The frame is now complete and ready for materials.

 I used a plain wood texture for the frame and increased the tiles to reduce stretching.

I then made a large cylinder and positioned onto the frame.

Now that the target is in place i added thin tubes and used the align tool so that the yellow circle is exactly in the center of the larger cylinder. I then changed the colours on the target accordingly and grouped the target to the frame so that i could clone.

Using the array tool i then cloned the target four times to show how i want my target to look in my animation.

Final Render of Target

Second model - Barrels

For my second model I will be making ammunition barrels, which will sit beside my machine gun in my animation. I will be following a YouTube tutorial to make one barrel, I will then copy the model several times so that they can be stacked.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSWbXYKopK0 

The first stage of making a barrel is to make a tall thin rectangle about 15 segments high, and convert the shape to editable poly.

Then using the array tool ( see tutorial week 2) copy the shape 20 times leaving a gap of about 5 between the axis, this shape will make the outside of the barrel.

I then attached all the shapes together, and used the bend tool to curve the y axis 360 degrees, to make an oval shape.

 The next stage is to highlight the shape, and scale the shape to create a tube.

Once the tube has been made, the metal rings for the outside of the barrel can be made. I began by making a tube around the edge of the larger cylinder. 

The next step is to align the outer tube to the larger one; this is achieved by selecting the outer ring and clicking 'tools' 'align', and then select the shape you want to align with, in this case the larger tube. I then changed the current objects position to 'centre' and the target object to 'centre'. This aligns the outer ring perfectly around the larger tube. I then used the scale tool to reduce the size of the ring to sit on top of the larger tube.

Once the ring was aligned I copied the shape three times and spaced them out evenly.

 I have now made my basic outer casing for my barrel, which I then grouped.

 Now that my shapes have been grouped, I can now change the dimensions of the model to make a shape of a barrel. I did this by firstly converting to editable poly then selecting 'modifiers. 'free form deformers' then 'FFD cylinder'

 
 
The FFD cylinder modifier then puts a wire frame around the shape in which each vertex can be edited. Using the side view port I highlighted the two middle sections of the frame and pulled the axis out, this then bends the shape into a barrel.

Now that the shape of my barrel has been made, I just need to add a lid to the top and base, just by making a thin cylinder and positioning it just under the edge of the barrel frame.

  

 Once I was happy with the positioning of the lids, I ungrouped the barrel so that I can add materials to each section.

I used a dark wood texture for the barrel, as I want them to look used, and the same rusty texture for the rings as I did on my wheels for my machine gun.

 

Now that my materials have been added I can select every shape of the barrel and copy several times to make a stack. I removed one of the lids, and laid a barrel on it's side so that I can have the contents spilled on the floor.

The cannon balls are made by using spheres and then adding the rusty texture material, and then positioning them around one of the barrels, to make it look like they've been spilled.

  

 The trickiest part was to position the spheres inside the barrel, which took some time, as I had to work from many angles to make sure the spheres weren't sitting in one another, but make sure they were still positioned correctly as the barrel is curved.
 

Final render of barrels

Week 5

Machine Gun - Development Continued

Now that my model is complete I can add materials to the shapes, the next few screenshots explain how I got to my final rendered image.

Materials

I started by searching through images of wooden textures to use as a bitmap for my wooden frame, once I found the right texture I saved it and open it up on to the material editor. I then dragged the material to the frame which holds the cannons in place. Each shape is a different size, so the material may be stretched and look distorted, so I increased the amount of tiles onto the x axis.

I had to use several empty slots with the dark wood bitmap as each part of the frame needed adjusting by either adding more tiles or selecting uv.

Now that the wooden frame is complete, I looked for a rusty metal texture to use on the wheels and cannon balls; I then applied the same steps to add the material to the shapes.

 Once all the materials were assigned to each shape the model is now complete and ready for render

 Final Render of Machine Gun