Week Ten

In this post I will show how I was to create the ‘outhouse’ scene, step by step. This first thing to model was the house; I started off by creating a box with the following properties. My method for this model will be extruding the polygons to form the next part of the wall.
I start the process like this, extruding the box the same width as itself.
Finally after thirty extrusions later I have a wall; at this point I will delete some polygons in editable poly mode to create a window or two and a door.
Ok here I have carried on the process and have created the walls to my house and have the holes cut out for the windows too.
Around the windows there were holes in the model where I had cut out the holes, in order to fix this, I had to select the edges and use the bridge command fill the gap. This was a time consuming task as I had to do each one individually; I could not select multiple edges and bridge them together without anomalies appearing.
This is where the fun part began; I wanted to build the wall as if it was falling down, with edges protruding and sections of the wall missing, in this following image I have selected the house as an element, selected the slice pane and cut a new edge straight down the mid section of a wall so I can start extruding the wall to my liking.
In this image I have started to manipulate the wall section pulling and pushing the vertices to try to get the wall to look like a section has fallen off.
Here I have used the connect command to add more geometry to the wall to make my job easier allowing me more vertices to move to get the look that I am looking for.
With a lot of work the basic structure of my house is complete, I have moved the windows in the walls and added some more and moved the door nearer to one end to let lots of light to be able peek through the model. The extruded parts of the building could have been manipulated a little bit better but this has been a time consuming task. Further tweaking may be required.
In this image I have added a simple texture without doing the UVW coordinates as it seemed to lie without any problems.
Here is where I start to make the roof for my house, I create a quick plane with several segments and line it up more then half the width of the house, and rotate it a little bit.
I will start to modify the plane deleting the polygons and moving the vertices to represent a hole or a section of the roof that has collapsed.
At first I thought it would be simpler to add a symmetry modifier on the plane to make an exact replica of the first roof section that I have made, this did not really work as I could not extrude the other roof section out a little to make it look a little bit different to the one I had already made. So I had to recreate two different planes that I had modified and attach them together to make a simple object.
With the roof complete all I need to do is to add a roof texture and move it into the required position.
Although I am happy with the end result, the building needs for details to become effective, so I have decided to add more ‘components’ to the scene, some wooden slats to hold the roof up, and maybe some lying on the floor as if they fell from the roof.
After creating a single wooden slat I applied a symmetry modifier and by using the gizmo on the modifier I am able to move and rotate the new slat in a precise place.
A simple plaster wooden texture is added to complete the effect.
Now I have added the slats randomly to the model and have created smaller slats random sizes to sit on the floor plane I will create.
And here is the finished scene with textures

Week Eight

Ok this week we continue with the model we created last week, the base of the air cylinder steam pump part, will be created by using just 2 cylinders and a box, and with the attach and cap and bridge commands transform it to one object which will help the other members in my group as they will texture it, so step one try to position the shapes where we want them to go.
The next step is to delete the polygons we don’t need in sub object mode,
Right now I need to weld the outer box and cylinders vertices together and attach the pieces to make one object. Now I will bridge the ends and cut new geometry with the cut tool.

Next thing to do is to make one side of my object deform a little to match the shape the base has in the reference photo, this is easily made my moving the vertices in soft selection mode.
Ok the base is getting there just a few minor touches needed like maybe a mesh smooth and some tweaking and the final model is complete.
Here is the completed part I have done, showing all the modelled pieces together.

Week Seven

Lets make a start, I have decided to start my modelling by setting up some reference photo’s in 3d studio max, I know that the photos that were taken are not good enough for a proper reference from front view and right or left view but that they are only set up on planes in 3ds max so I do not have to Alt-Tab windows all the time every time I want to view the pump. I will create a cylinder the measurements do not really matter at this stage as I just want to experiment with different methods and try and get the basic shape of the object I am trying to create.
In this next picture I have created a sphere in the top view port and have tried to set the radius of the sphere the same size as the width of the cylinder.
Using what I have learnt while modelling my face and the problems that were uncovered by not lining up the geometry of two shapes I have made sure that the vertices on the cylinder line up and match exactly the edges of the sphere. The plan is when I get round to joining the two objects it should cause me no problems at all.
The next step was to delete the bottom half of the sphere.
Now I attached the sphere to the cylinder to form one object. Then came the tedious but necessary task of selecting both the cylinder’s vertices and the sphere’s vertices and target welding them together.

Now with the cylinder in editable poly mode and the vertex option selected I grab the very top vertex and move it down to the other vertices to try to start the flat top that I can see in the pictures.
Now I select polygon mode and using the paint tool selection and with ignore back facing switched on I paint the polygons I wish to extrude upwards.
I am starting to get a shape similar to the one in the model, I have changed the colour for a visual guide but I think it is looking good so far.
The next step was to try to create the base of the object a little further down and try to ‘tuck’ it in like a skirt, this was relatively simple I selected all the edges toward the base of the cylinder and then scaled it all down to a nice radius.
Now I select the object at different parts and reshape until I am satisfied with the end result.
Next I want to create the triangular plate that holds the cylinder this was fairly easy to create, I made a box in the top view port, then I converted the object into an editable poly and then selected the vertices of the box and reshaped into a nice diamond shape. The next two pictures show what I mean.
When I come out of isolation mode and switch to the perspective all I had to do was adjust the height of the box and size it to fit underneath the cylinder.
I like to work in isolation mode as it lets me concentrate on one specific object and the other object do not get into the way, I now start to selet the horizontal edges of the box and click the connect button to start to add new edges to my object. This in turn starts adding more vertices to the object allowing me to mould the object into a better shape.
Now when it is back on the cylinder it is starting to look much more like the one in the photo.
This next step is to use a sphere and pro Boolean it out of the box to add the screw holes to the plate that I have created, maybe the next image shows what I am trying to do a little bit better then I can explain.
With the pro Boolean complete the cylinder complete with base plate and screw holes concludes this part of modelling.
My next task is to try and model the funnel type object that joins this cylinder to the base object, all I did was clone the object and delete everything apart from the polygons I have selected in the next image. Then I rotated what was left of the object 90 degrees and pushed it towards the base of the vertical air cylinder.
I am happy with the result so far, it has not caused me any problems and the construction of the cylinders has been very straight forward. After cloning the air cylinder I have positioned the new one where I think it should be in proportion to the other, to try and get a shape-scale-perspective even though it is not possible to scale the thing accurately.
I have also changed the reference images.
I have now cloned the base plate (the triangular plate) that I created and have rotated that 90 degrees and positioned that against the ‘funnel’ I have created just like it shows in the reference image.
The next step is to create more cylinders this time to represent the plates on the back of the machine, once created I have moved them into a position I think they would be in the real image I have tried to keep them to the same scale and proportional size of all the other objects in the scene although this was a difficult task to do without accurate measurements.
I want to add a little more detail to my model it is all simple shapes so I have decided to isolate the funnels triangular plate and select its main face polygon (in sub object mode) and extrude it out a little bit, then scale it down a small amount and then extrude and scale once more the next image shows clearly the end result, one which I am happy I have added.
I will leave this post here, I have made a considerable start and have left my model in a happy progress state, and one I am fairly delighted with. In the next post I will need to create some nuts and bolts to add a little bit more detail to my model, as just in the photo I can count at least twenty that join all the objects together.

The Museum Of Power, Week Six

Hello and welcome to the next stage of my Virtual Environment module, I have teamed up with Tom, Aaron and Richard in order to model and animate a Joseph Evans Reliable Horizontal Pump, shown below.
It is a unique pump and having never come across one before and I am compelled to find out more about this remarkable invention. This pump is presently on display at the Museum of Power, Langford, Maldon, Essex and regularly runs on air. Our group has visited the museum and have taken quite a few pictures to use as a reference while we try to model the individual parts. We have split the group into different areas of the modelling process and split the pump into four areas where each of us will tackle a section; my section will be the ‘green’ end which I presume is some sort of air cylinder compression unit.

This week we did a presentation to the class trying to explain our workload and who was tackling what, we also tried to point out some of the weaknesses that will cause us a problem or two, some of the areas we identified would be animation timing where all the moving parts move as one; synchronous to each other, the detail of each moving part and its timing in relation to all the other moving parts, is going to take a lot of work. Modelling the pump shouldn’t be to difficult a task, each one of us have learned a great deal in the last year and we have gone from complete novices in 3ds max to accomplished users, we can navigate around max fairly easily while bouncing ideas and concepts off each other has become an invaluable part of our team work attitude.

Summary

Having only five weeks to create my whole face seemed like a very short amount of time to do anything, and it has been hard to try and fit all the sections to the tutorial in and give each its allocated time, of course some areas like the modelling itself; creating the mesh for the face, following the topology for both head sections and modelling the head all took a lot longer then was first thought. I would have liked to get the whole lot completed and with a little bit more time I will, the areas that I missed out on are the bump and specular texture painting and modelling the ear. I did try to model the ear but this area confused me to the point of giving up and continuing with the other areas that needed to be created as I was just wasting time and not getting anywhere.

The problems that I have noted during this long and arduous task were mainly caused by the topology and the mesh’s not lining up correctly and me rushing this process, had a more relaxed approach been taken then I am sure these mistakes would have been missed out. I was too far ahead to start the process again and have had to just try to overcome these problems by adding more and more quads; thus increasing the technical process more and more and making the whole task more and more complex.

The most annoying part of this assignment is that I was constantly rewinding the videos back and forth trying to mimic the tutor and areas he did not explain left me screaming at the monitor screen asking for an explanation and getting none. Of course looking at the other students work and asking them questions did help me to some degree, but not all the time.

I have learnt a lot about the process of making a face in 3ds max, and all in only a short amount of time! I have had quite a steep learning curve in Photoshop too, as I did not really know how to navigate the software and what most of the tools did, again the tutor in the videos was a good help he actually did say most of the time what he was doing and why. I have learnt how to map the face, create 2d objects in max then make them into 3d ones, edit a UVW map and plot texture coordinates; this area always had me wondering how that is done, and now I know and in my spare time I will finish the tutorial and learn how the bump mapping process and specular texturing is done too and hopefully finish that ear that was giving me all them problems.

Over all I have thoroughly enjoyed this assignment, it has taught me new skills I can use from now on, and a technique for modelling faces that I never had. It has made me more artistic in the way I do things; I am becoming more patient and not rushing and have taught me that mistakes in the topology can really be seen well into the modelling process. All these skills will definitely be working with me as I carry on this module and proceed with the next task at hand.