Water?

I finally got 100 frames and decided I couldn't wait any longer. I imported the 'water' into Max and rendered this:

It doesn't really look that much like water, but at least the flow is realistic. To improve it I would probably just have to increase the number of particles and decrease the viscosity or something like that. I do know that doing that will MASSIVELY increase the render time, and thats time I don't have.
I don't know why it flickers though, probably a problem importing the mesh. Next time I'll hopefully have more time to perfect it.

Fire and water... (particles)

The next part in the tutorials was water. It showed exactly how to make a waterfall in Max using simple particles. Basically, it was just particles to show the flow of the river and particles to show the flow of the actual falling bit of the water. This is how it turned out:

This is a good method of making a simple waterfall (very simple for water) and I didn't have any troubles following the tutorial. Something like this would be perfect for water that's just in the background of the scene (i.e. not massively important or very easy to see). However, I wanted to know haw to make actual water.
So, I looked for some tutorials on the internet and found a rather nice video tutorial here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXbuiIXu8gY
So I followed this tutorial to make this:

This was a much better version of water, and I was happy with this. That was, until I heard about RealFlow. I saw some very nice videos on YouTube of all the amazing water effects you can make with this piece of software. So I thought I'd try it out! The official website have a download for a 10 day trial with all the features and I found a couple of videos explaining roughly how to use it. (This one in particular: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZvPraO02E4&feature=fvw)
I think, so far I like it. I just have to wait for my test scene to finish rendering... ¬.¬

While I waited I made some fire in Max. After one unsuccessful tutorial I found http://3drockstar.com/creating-realistic-fire-using-particles-in-3ds-max/ which also had a material tutorial linked. My end render:

I was actually pretty happy about how that one turned out. I'm especially glad I learned how to change the colour of the particles through age.
That's all for now, hopefully I will post my RealFlow render soon. As long as my computer can stay alive...

Lattice transformation - Free form deformation (FFD)

I watched the video on Lattice Transformation in Blender and after a fairly long search I found out it can be done in 3DS Max, but it's called Free Form Deformation or FFD. I also found this nice tutorial that showed me how to do it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBIEPNaIlHg
So I then tried to do it myself. I spent a while fiddling about with random shapes and deformations and decided I was ready to make a proper animation.
I tried to make it as different as I could from Marie's video as she said to do that, but it didn't end up all that different. I did get to deform a few different shapes, and here is the finished render:

I came up with a simple idea of some random objects falling into some kind of automatic crushing squisher, kind of like a playdough squishing machine.

Path Animation and Curve Editing

The next task was two things, animation along a path and IPO (Interpolation Psomething Osomething [Curve Editor in Max]). I found a pretty good tutorial for path animation in Max at http://billysalisbury.com/Learn_Max/chapters/lecture9a.htm. I spent a short time fiddling with the Curve Editor and got familiar with the basics but I spent most of my time on the path animation.
I started off making a plane (flat one, not the flying one yet) for the ground and then some random rectangular boxes as buildings to fly in between. I thought I would then add a nice, grey material to them all to make them more building like but it ended up making them all blend in to each other and you couldn't really differentiate between them. I was then astonished that there was no easy way to remove a material from an object! After a bit of searching I found that typing 'Geometry.material = undefined' into the MaxScript Listener (F11) removes all materials from all objects in the scene. A useful thing to know I guess but not really necessary as you can just replace the material with another. Anyway, I now had a nice colourful city to fly through, I just needed the plane. I made a (very) simple model of a plane and then drew a fairly windy line around the buildings [Note: Click for straight lines and sharp corners, click and drag for curves] and went through the necessary steps to animate the plane along the path (the tutorial talks about going to the motion panel and doing something in there but I couldn't follow it so I found out that it can be done by selecting the plane and going to Animation>Constraints>Path Constraint and then selecting the line). Adding a camera was just the same to constrain it along the path but I decided to differ from the tutorial and make a target camera as there were lots of quite sharp corners.
After experimenting with the % along path, the banking and the smoothness options, I finally rendered it:

There were two problems I noticed after rendering and watching it back.
The first was the lighting. In some places it goes quite dark and you can't really see. I was just using the default light source, I hadn't added any myself. Next time... next time, I will have to find out how to add light sources :S
The second was the banking. I don't really understand how the banking was done. I thought at first it would just bank into every curve (eg. in a left turn, bank left and in a right turn bank right) but in a couple places where there was a left then right turn (or right then left turn) the plane banks into the first turn but then doesn't bank into the second. Not a huge problem right now but definately something to check out if I use banking in my final animation.

Animation test #001 - Keyframe animation

Ok, so I finally got my extra monitor that I ordered over a month ago, and believe me, 1920x1080 is so much easier to work with than my tiny 1366x768 on my laptop. Well worth the wait. So, if you were wondering, this is why I post my first animation blog 9 weeks into the semester.

Enough with the excuses, onto the animating! The first step towards making my very own version of Avatar was keyframe animation. It was a fairly easy task to begin with, I watched the Hirsig tutorial just to get a taste of what is expected, and then found a nice tutorial for it in Max. (I decided to go for 3ds max as I heard it was used in the industry, and also a little bit because I despised Blender with a passion)
I did more or less the same thing as the Blender tutorial said. I made a box and a sphere and just made them dance around each other for a few seconds. Here is what it looks like: :)

Seeing as I found that pretty simple animation so easy and boring to make, I thought to try out my own idea for an animation. So I came up with the genius idea to model and animate a Rubiks Cube. Little did I know, this would be incredibly difficult and in the end, would not work. Before we get to that however, I will tell you exactly how I got to that.
I started off making a small box and then cloning it 26 times, and successfully made a Rubiks cubey looking cube. Then came colouring the faces. At this point I didn't know how to assign a material to a single face so after about 10 minutes of finding out, I converted them all to an editable poly and then selecting the face and assigning the colour. I don't know if I was doing it the slow way or the only way, but I had to select and colour each face individually. After 54 individually coloured faces I was quite good at it though.
So I have a pretty good looking Rubiks cube now, with all the colourfulness. But then came the fun part of animating it. Well, I thought this would be fun, and relatively easy. First thing I had to do was move the pivot points of all the cubes, I tried rotating them but they all just individually spun round. So after a bit of Googlizing I found out that I had to go to Heirarchy>Pivot>Affect Pivot Only and then just move all the pivot points to the centre of the cube. Now I thought the rest would be a simple task of just, well, keyframe animating. So I selected the one side of boxes, toggled Auto Key and rotated it by 90º. I watched the animation back and it looked fine. When I tried to animate it any more than that though, it all went horribly, horribly wrong. Random boxes seemed to forget where they were before and some went in wrong directions, some disappeared and then reappeared on the other side of the cube, and there was just a mass of disorientated boxes. So, after trying everything I knew (which I'll admit is very little right now) I could not solve this mysterious problem. I managed to render the best one I could get after I manually set the keyframes, but it is by no means working.

I won't be giving up on this idea, just keeping it in stasis until I have a clue of why it went wrong. I would like to see it done after all that time I spent modelling it.