done

Well my animation is done, and just in time too. For a moment it looked like I wasn’t going to make it even after I had cut back on loads of what I originally wanted to do. For one there is no archeologist. after 32 hours awake and just a few hours to deadline I was stressing that it was not going to be done because of rendering times and I was planning on stealing all the Macs in the lab for a few hours first thing on hand in day. It was then that I remembered someone telling me that Mental ray renderer is faster than scanline and as my scene was taking 3 mins per frame I thought I would try it out. What can I say, it tore through my scene like it wasn’t even there cutting the time down to 10 seconds per frame. This was my first good piece of news in ages.

Over all I am relatively happy with most of the animation but there are a lot of areas that need improving, envelopes for one. They are the hardest thing in the world I swear. They sort of work on the Hanan but the boy is terrible all round. I think on this module I seriously over estimated my abilities and gave myself far too much to do, more so than usual. That is defiantly something to think about and remember when undertaking projects in the future.

Anyways, enough rambling, here is the final piece, try and enjoy.

inca clothing and an epiphany

I’ve been clothing my Hanan and I felt the urge to write a small, basic, tutorial on how I went about it. There is a modelling technique that many people don’t seem to know about using the surface modifier and it is a real easy way of creating complex geometry quickly.

I started by wanting to build the thing round the Hanan's neck (I have no idea what it is called), while I could have used a tube and deformed it this method gives you a lot more control over its shape and makes future refinements stupidly easy.

I first created a spline for the outline the object and made sure it went round his body without going through it.

Next I clicked refine in the panel on the right (remembering to check connect) and then added some segments between the outer and inner rim. This is so that when the surface modifier is added it makes it easier for max to work out the curve, otherwise it creates the liens to straight. It is important to be aware at this time that using this refine method does not create one point where you click but two, one for each line and it is important that these two points remain in exactly the same place or the surface modifier will not recognise it as a closed path. For this reason you need to turn on area selection to make sure when you click on one point all the points in that area are selected

Next I added the surface modifier an already, just like that I have the shape I wanted (almost). But being me I’m not happy with just that, there is more

The surface has no volume so I added an Edit ploy modifier to the stack so that I could select the polys and extrude them a bit

Next I added a Symmetry modifier for obvious reasons.

This left a gap at both the front and back where I had not lined them up properly so on went another edit poly modifier, delete the end polys and weld the vertices together.

Lovely. all done (ish). Using this method I created all the clothes on the Hanan. Now if something later on doesn’t work quite right i can just drop down the stack and edit the spline and its done.

Quick bit of UVW Mapping later.

No this is where what I think is a moment of genius came to me. I had planned to just attach the clothes to him so they would deform under his skin modifier but I really didn’t like the idea of losing the stack for the clothes. So in what could turn out to be a moment of madness I have added a Skin modifier to the clothes and used the same bones that the Hanan has:

It only took a small amount of tweaking of the envelopes to get it working ok. Below is a test of how they all deform with the skin on.

AAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!

I hate to use expletives here……… so I won’t, but the situation really is calling for it. My school kid is giving me so much grief. I did a whole load of animation with him and noticed a bucket load of errors that I shall now bore you with. It started with the morph tool not working which I assumed was due to the large modifier stack.

So I set about trying to reduce it by collapsing it down, turns out this had to be done in a very precise order or I got more of those polite crash reports I have previously mentioned. So anyway I have now collapsed the stack but it turns out that has caused vertices to weld to things they shouldn’t have, particularly in the hands. This led to things not separating/welding whilst trying to sort it. This led to most of the faces being deleted and redrawn, to the tune of ‘Illegal new face’ every 2 mins from Max’s apparent new found sense of humour. After hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of messing about with that I got it all working. Now the problem is this:

Now I am still not entirely sure what is going on here but it seems to be something to do with un-welded vertices that just will not weld stopping the turbo smooth from doing its job. More deleting pollys and recreating them to solve the problem. Finally to top it all off now when I smooth it he gets some massive holes in his chest that I can not for the life of me find the culprit and fix.

Also when applied to the original walk cycle the verts in the arms go all over the place and it all goes wrong

When I try to cut the verts about AGAIN it crashes every time. I can’t take this anymore. I am going to render out the animation that I had to start with and be done with it because I am out of time. Here is the preview scene I created, I know the running in the middle is a bit long but bear with it.

How’s this for a critical evaluation:

What’s wrong:

The arms are too rigid

The stride isn’t long enough

He is bald

The belt deforms with the legs

He has no facial expression, ever

He doesn’t appear to be breathing

When he is sitting down the cuffs have gone wrong

The arms swing through the body

The spine and head done move during the run

Whats right:

the scene looks prety good

I’m having a particular annoying problem that I may need to do something about before long …… I’ll keep this brief because you have all heard this before from me, but my character’s face keeps mashing up during the symmetry process.

I believe this is being caused because I create the head separate then attach it to the body mesh before the symmetry modifier in the stack.

To combat this problem today I added an edit poly modifierAbove the symmetry but below the turbo smooth (otherwise I would be there for weeks moving millions of verts). Then using this new edit polly I set about deleting a hell of a lot of segments down the middle of the face that were all over the place and would not weld together. Like above the nostrils in the picture below, thats the middle of the face and should be a nice straight line:

I then set about recreating all the pollys that I had deleted by manually creating new pollys. This is all well and good but it has been bloody time consuming and annoying. Helped along by the fact that it kept crashing and corrupting the file, after a lot of crashes I decided to begin counting by not dismissing the error reports and seeing how many I could stockpile.

23!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This whole process I have gone through to ‘bodge’ together a problem that should not even exist is going to give me a headache later, I can already feel it coming.

Right, after a long break it was straight back at where I left off. As you may recall my Inca had a hell of a lot of polly’s in him and I could not find a computer to handle it. To solve the problem I have added an ‘optimize’ modifier to the stack which has taken the count down to a slightly more manageable 90,000, at the expense of some detail. (not too sure how this will come out on here):

One of the biggest troubles I was having was using the cloth modifier to add his clothes to him but even the Mac’s at uni couldn’t handle the work even with the model optimised. For this reason I have decided to just create the cloths around him, then add attach them to the mesh and have the skin modifier deform them correctly. Not ideal as I would have liked to learn how to do this but I guess I have enough learning to do for the moment.

Learning from my previous mistakes I have begun to model my school boy but going about it slightly different. First I have just modelled his clothes as part of him rather than model him then add clothes later.

Second I have kept the whole modifier stack, not losing the symmetry which gave me a whole world of problems with the last guy.

Finally I have mapped the pollys to their relevant material ID’d in a multisub material map. At the moment they just have standard colours from Max in, I might have to leave it like that, we shall see how time pans out.

Just one more thing, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ME???????? You may recall that previously I had modelled the last character with his palms face out, which is the wrong direction for it to be skinned. Well this time I mad him palms down but I have in all my madness managed to put the thumbs on the back of his hands! Doh.

The scene is set, well one of the scenes

I have been working on the school scene these past few days and was planning on keeping it simple. In true Chris Cook style I have over killed it, fire alarms & sprinklers, door numbers and room names, lockers, street lamps, interactive white board..........everything a good school needs (just the children to go!)

The lockers and the marble floor are total over kill as this scene too 1:19 to render on the uni Mac's, add a character and render times are going to be long, but I will persevere.

On the interactive whiteboard I am going to have a teacher write up the title of the animation. For this I intend to make an animated material in Flash and us it in here, more onm this as I create it.

I now need to get on and add the child and teacher to this scene. Tune in next week all.

Inca Hanan clothes

Here is an idea of how I want my inca Hana to be dressed. I like the shoulder pads witht he open torso as it sugests he is strong ang powerfull, he has no need for armour because he is allmighty. this is a still form the film apocalypto:





In modelling the clothing I am also going to draw from the three pictures below in creating the clothing and the war paint.