My Thoughts on our project.

Group projects, ah don’t you just love them, the more and more I participate in them the more the complexities unfold, and this was no exception. It was hard for me to connect with the whole group as I live outside Chelmsford and they live within walking distance from each other; they could meet up, discuss and flip ideas around and maybe work on the pump and then go home before my hour and a half bus service could get to Chelmsford, so some of the discussions I have missed out on, emails were sent and we saw each other a few times each week but some decisions were made without me, I have no complaints as I did not take a leadership role within the group, I participated in group discussions, was asked my opinion and views and then the group made a decision both fairly and productive. Deadlines were met and the whole process started to move forward, when the group discussed the modelling process and divided up the pump Aaron took the main section, Richard took the wheel and Tom took the gauge with pipes and I took the air cylinders, in a short amount of time the pump was complete, these students are fantastic modellers and grade A students and as a B student I found it hard to feel proud of my work. I think the other members of my group understood this and that is why they gave me tasks that I could do and suggested more creativity from me and congratulated me for my attempts and made me feel part of the group. Tom was a great motivator for me; he would make suggestions and keep me on track, and take an interest in my contribution to the group. I was taken back by Aaron creativity and Richards modelling expertise and everyone’s dedication to this project and although there was an ability barrier I would like to think my work contributed to this group project. It was decided very early on that Aaron and Richard would take the animation of the wheel and pistons, Tom would take on the textures and I would be modelling. I would have liked to have taken part in the animation because I am limited in these skills and am interested in the whole process but deadlines had to been set and as a client was involved the group decided that this would not be a good idea. Even though i was not part of the animation i have picked up some valuable skills and techniques that will be useful to me for future projects, I liked to watch what my group members were doing, and questioned their way of thought to gain some insight on the animation process.I was given the task of building my part of the steam pump, the environment and find a narrative to accompany the animation and I have done this to the best of my ability. I feel the group made the best choice because if I was to be animating we wouldn’t have got where we have today. We assessed each others strengths and weaknesses and found roles accordingly, which was spot on, we have an animated steam pump, beautifully textured with environment and a narrative and are finalising the product to hand to this ‘client’ in a presentation on Thursday.

Week Eleven - Landscape

Landscape

In order to create a landscape i wanted to do something i have never done before and a technique of doing landscapes is by using height maps, height maps give 3ds max a way of calculating elevation, from black the lowest part to white the highest part, if i was to create a heightmap in photoshop just by painting one would it work in 3dsmax, well i set out to find out.

I started by opening up photoshop with a 256 x 256 document with greyscale selected.
The next part was the creative bit where i tried to create a plateau with various shades of grey.
In 3ds max i created a plane about 200m x 200m and split it up into 75 segments for height and length the reason for this is i wanted max to give me lots of triangles.
Once the size of the plane was calculated, i added a displace modifier and then selected my plateau heightmap and set it as the bitmap for the displace modifier panel.
then started to play around with the strength and my plateau was born.
I decided to clone the object, i want two different textures to be broken up by each other.
On a plane clone i decided to try out the noise modifier and play around with the settings.
For materials, i have tried to use the default grass, and dirt materials that ship with 3dsmax, so by clicking on the grey globe in the material panel then selecting get material and then searching through the materials until i find one then i double click it to select it, then i play around with the opacity map and select a falloff for it, and further tweaking is required.
I do it again for the dirt material.
Still not happy with what is being produced, i have tried to add the noise plane to the heightmap plane and scaling and moving them around to fit together. I have converted the noise plane to editable poly and then moved its edges to protrude through the other map plane. still it does not match to what is in my head, further tweaking is required.
ok here is what i have finaly made using the techniques above, i have added my outhouse scene to see what the both of them look like, and if any of the members in my group think they can come up with a better landscape i would like to see their attempt.

Week Eleven

This post will show the final objects i have made for the outhouse scene, and i will try to tackle the landscape part that i have been dreading. Hopefully when the scene is finished it will look good whith the animated pump we have created. The Pump was used in Wales so i will have to check out the Welsh landscape and try to model something along those lines. So lets begin with the final objects to get them out of the way.

The Rusty Bucket

Making a rusty bucket was a lot simpler then I thought, the line tool was used to create a simple line in the front viewport.
After I applied the lathe modifier I selected the axis option in the lathe tree then moved the axis to where I want the lather to begin.
When the lathe was applied all the way round, the ‘bucket’ still wasn’t right, a shell modifier was used to add a thickness to my model,
Then I have to scale the bucket to the correct proportions,
And add a handle using the same process, drawing an outine with the line tool
Then under the renderer parameters check the boxes enable in renderer, and the enable in viewport and add a radial thickness to make the handle a little more clear.
Finally I made a base for the bucket out of a slim cylinder and scaled it to fit within the buckets base.
Here is the final image of my rusty bucket, I had to add a UVW map modifier to get the texture to sit cylindrical on my bucket, it seems to hjave worked to great effect.

Metal Angle


This model required some though process until someone in class showed me a simple way of creating what i want; Using the 'wide flange' button in the extended splines panel i created the very shape i wanted.
I wanted to manipulate the object so i converted it to an editable spline and selected the vertices.
Now i want to select all the vertices and apply a fillet of 1.0 and then i extruded the object to a length i was happy with.
A simple metal texture was required and a UVW map modifier with the mapping set to box and the texture fits very well.

Wrench

And finally the simplest tool left to last the wrench, this was modelled by using the line tool and drawing the shape of the wrench the selecting vertices and moving them to a better position.
Now i add a bevel modifier to the object...
and finally select a texture and tweak for effect.

More to add to the outhouse scene

Boxes

This post will show how to make a simple crate, with textures just to add to my scene, they can sit next to my house just to fill out the scene.
I have selected the side polygon and clicked on the inset button and inset by 0.6cm
This will allow me to extrude just a part of the polygon by -3cm
I do this to all of the sides inset and then extrude and the polygon for the inside of the box extruded it by a little more.
I have created a box the same dimensions as the original one but made the height less; this is to create the lid, and have rotated it and placed it at an angle for visual effect.
Here is the final image with the crate textured, this should look quite good, when they sit next to the house I have created.

Drum barrel

In this post I will create a drum barrel to sit next to the boxes/crates in my scene, to start I will create a cylinder with quite a few height segments.
In this image I have selected some of the polygons of the cylinder and will extrude them out a small bit, and then add a turbo smooth to give the impression of the bands one would see on an oil can.
Finding a texture for this oil drum has proven quite difficult so I had the idea of using a blend as the default material requirement then in the 3 material slots I have entered three of the same texture bitmaps just with different colours to try to get a blend of all three.
The final image textured does not look that bad although I am not happy with the final result I will probably return to ‘tweak’ with the texture.

Hammer

This simple task was to model a hammer to lie in my scene as clutter this simple tool was made up from primitives (boxes) and I positioned them as close together to form the basic shape of the hammer head.
I have started to move the edges on this box to get a claw hammer effect basic but effective,
In this image I have deleted the polygons where the boxes will meet each other, and will attach the two objects together then using basic commands join the two objects, these basic commands are the weld vertices command and the cut tool to add more geometry (vertices) to be able to weld and lastly the bridge command to join the edges together.
This image shows me doing the same process with the other objects in the model, having all the boxes modelled with equal segments helps line up and weld a lot easier then trying to do this process ‘freehand’.
This image shows all the parts attached to each other, welded vertices, and bridged gaps
After cloning the object and moving it above the other my hammer head is formed it may need some scaling down.
I need to create the handle for the hammer, under the extended primitives tab; I select the chamfer cylinder, add a taper modifier and then spend a few minutes tweaking.
The finished result a hammer, as the default textures as they look quite adequate for what I need.