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.

Week 5 - Apples, bowls and bananas

This week I found the tutorial on how to model apples using the proportional editing tool. I started off with an IcoSphere and began with moving the mesh to get an overall shape of an apple. This didn't really take too long, they didn't need to be perfect. All I did was moved the points around randomly until it resembled an apple. Then I applied a simple red texture to it. I then tried to model another apple but this time using a UVSphere. This one I found a bit more fiddly as there were a lot of points in exactly the same place and I ended up with an extremely jagged apple. I soon realised that I could actually select all the points at the same time. This made it a lot easier and I actually produced a better apple than I did with the IcoSphere. I coloured the UVSpheres green.

The bowl I found extremely simple to make. Just by creating and deleting a cube, I could still add vertices to the cube from scratch, even though the cube wasn't there. I created a line with three points and spun it 360°. This made a plane in the shape of a bowl. I then extruded it down slightly and added a brown woody colour to it.

The next part of the modelling fruit tutorial entailed 'box modelling' a banana using a background image (View>Background Image...). This meant starting by finding a side-on image of a banana, placing it into the background of the window and extruding and subdividing a cube along the length of it. To do this I had to put the cube into wireframe mode (Z) and then subdividing it in edit mode. I then moved the points around the banana and then extruded a new set. When this was done I was left with a very square banana. I smoothed it until it was a bit more rounded. However it still did not look right. I needed to scale the ends so that they tapered to a bananary point. The way I did this was just by scaling the vertices around the circumference of the end (Alt+Right click to select the edge loop). I continued to do this to every point individually until it looked just right. I later realised that I had done it the extra long way as I'm sure I could have used proportional editing to get a better result. I had already done it though, and I didn't really want to remodel the whole banana. I'll just bear it in mind for the next time I model a banana or similar shaped object. With that done, I added a texture to the model (F6>Add new>Texture Type: Image>Load) that I had found on the internet (FilterForge.com).

I had saved the bowl of apples in a separate blender file though, so I had to import the banana into it if I wanted it to be together with them. This was not as simple as I thought it would be. First I had to go to 'Append or Link' in the File menu (or Shift+F1). I then had to find the blender file with the banana and select the object in the file and import that. Eventually I found it named 'Cube' (I guess I should name my objects from now on) and clicked 'Load Library'. I then thought I at last was done and went to save the rendered image. I then discovered that I had a very grey looking banana. The texture I had applied earlier had not been imported into the fruitbowl file. So I retextured it the same way I did before (I guess it was good practice) and saved the final render. Here it is!

Course 3 – Render options & Proportional editing

This weeks tutorial was all about changing the options of the final render and a new technique called proportional editing, hence the title.

The render options didnt really require any modelling, it was simply changing some numbers and pressing some buttons. It showed me how to change the resolution of the final render and I also learned all about oversampling/anti-aliasing and how to make it work efficiently.

The proportional editing part of the tutorial showed exactly how to make a mountain scene from just a simple plane. It started with creating the plane and increasing the number of vertices it had from 4 to about 289. I could then move each of them independently of each other, making my plane very spikey. To make the mountains/hills though, I had to enable proportional editing. This meant when I moved a point, it would affect the points surrounding it. This created the mountain shape. It was still very blocky though. To fix this, I had to smooth it out using SubSurf (Subdivisions Surface). This tool smooths the object for you. An extra special thing it does though is that you can set a different smoothness for editing and rendering. This way you can work on a simple object but when you render it it is smoothed out. This would be very useful on a computer with low cpu power. After messing about with what I had learned this is what I ended up with: The challenge after this tutorial was to create an egg holder using what I had learned. This didn't take too long as I had spent quite a long time on my mountain scene, familiarising myself with it.

Course 2 – Mesh and vertex editing II

Week 2 - Not much to say here. The tutorial explains how to make a pill using just the UVSphere and the steps I felt were pretty self explanatory, I didnt really have any problems as long as I stuck to the instructions.
I did discover one thing though, when I came to saving it. I said in my last blog that to save you can use Ctrl+S as well as Ctrl+W and they both do the same thing. When I tried to save using Ctrl+S however, it thought I wanted to shear the selected face. So, I guess I will be using Ctrl+W to save from now on.
Anyway, here is my finished pill:

The challenge to make the salt shaker though, I found a bit more tricky. I found out that I can't do anything the tutorial hasn't told me to do. I wanted to squash the sphere on the top so it was more oval shaped that round. How you do this though, I have no idea. I tried pressing some buttons that I thought it might have been but ended up completely distorting the whole thing and had to start again. I guess thats one thing about Blender that is different from Maya (which I have also been learning), there's no obvious button to press for everything you might want to do.
So I just did the simple bit, extruded half the sphere, resized it, deleted the half-sphere that I didn't want and then filled the space.
Here is my finished salt shaker:

Blender Course Basics - Course 1

Tutorial: http://mojo.csd.anglia.ac.uk/~marie/docs/BlenderCourse-Basics_EN_v1.0.pdf

I started from scratch with this tutorial. I have had very little experience with 3D modelling software although it has always been something I wanted to learn to do. I have recently been trying to get the hang of Autodesk's Maya but I have literally scratched the surface of what can be done with it. I found it difficult to find a decent tutorial I can work through.
I think I'm one of those people that can learn how to do something just by trying it out and randomly trying things, I have a lot of patience when learning I guess. These 3D programs like Maya and Blender however do not work that way, at least not with me, so I was quite pleased to find a 3D modelling module on my course.

Following the step by step instructions in this PDF, I very quickly learned the absolute basics from the first course and got the models made fairly easily. I wouldn't have minded not getting it right first time, as I would probably have discovered some extra tips but I'm sure I will find them eventually.
I didn't really have too many problems making the house, other than pressing the wrong hotkey every so often. A quick Ctrl+Z undo sorted that out. One thing I did think was odd was that Ctrl+W is the default save shortcut and not Ctrl+S, however Ctrl+S will also save.After the house was done the castle was the next step, and since I had learned everything I needed making the house, this was a piece of cake. It was simply a matter of duplicate, transform and repeat. When it came to the tops of the towers I cleverly reshaped one and then duplicated that to make the others.

When it came to rendering, fortunatly I had discovered from another students blog that pressing F3 will allow you to save a JPEG of the render.

For future reference, this is what was covered on this course:

Moving, rotating and scaling objects

Locking axis

Editing vertices of an object

Duplicating objects

Saving files

Rendering scenes