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.

Skinning and boning at last (although its not been as easy as I had hoped)

Where to start? How about the beginning?

So as you are all aware I have finished modelling the Inca Hanan and he now need the means to be animated.

Boning.

I have decided to use a biped as I have not used one of these before for my animations (at least not in the proper way). Here is where I noticed my first problem, a long time ago I had added a mesh smooth to the character which caused problems with the symmetry, turned out the best way to solve the issue was to collapse the stack and weld vertices together, I now have a man at 200,000 polys and believe me when I say it is slow going getting this all done, lesson learned, never collapse the stack until you are done. Moving swiftly past my, errrm, error, I have got the full joints in my character so my biped has them all too.

Boning turned out to be the easy part, as my model is defiantly a symmetry I simply lined up the left hand side of his body, then using the copy and paste opposite pose option I cloned the pose over. Done.

Skinning.
Now the hard part, First off I set some keyframes 10 or 20 keys apart of the biped moving the arms and legs up and down so that during the skinning process I can jump to various poses to see how the mesh is deforming. Problem 2 was that when I moved to the first pose this happened.

It looks like the skeleton’s soul is trying to pull away. This problem took me hours to figure out but I eventually opened up the weights table to look at all the (200,000) vertices to see what was affecting them all. Turns out one of the fingers was affecting every single vertex. As you can see from below, with the finger selected none of the body should be affected but, it is affecting the weight of almost every one, strongly too.

Somehow the envelope for this bone ended up miles away from the body, encompassing everything. (That’s the body in the middle, just really far away).

Once I had this problem under wraps the rest fell in to place with relative ease, it was simply a case of resizing envelopes and adding drifting vertices to their relevant envelopes.

Now, from the next image you can see that the shoulder is not deforming correctly, I have tried and tried to fix this problem but it will just not have it so I am going to cloth over it to hide it, cheap fix to a problem I know but its week 7 and I really need to crack on with this. Finally, from the same image you will notice the left shoulder (his left) has a crease down it, this is because I have not changed the vertex weights on the left, I am going to mirror them from the right using the mirror panel in the skin modifier settings.

Wooohooo, done (I hope)

Right, let me tell you a little story, a story about a man created in 3D max then max decided TO TEST MY PATIENCE!!!!!!!!!!

So as you are no doubt aware I have been modelling a high resolution character for my animation, muscles and all ( I was going to tell you about the nails but well let’s face it that is boring and you all know how to do it. They were modelled as separate objects, cloned and attached to the body mesh but remain their own element.). I have had no end of problems with this. I managed to get all the pollys flowing in the correct directions and a lot of definition after two solid weeks at it, it has been a long slog.

The problems

First off I had to keep detaching different parts of the body to turn it all around and then re-attach them all, this would have been easy if it was not for the fact that I created the character so small that the weld tool welded the whole model together if I selected all the vertices, let me explain this a bit. As I created him small, the distance between the vertices is so small that even the smallest weld attempt pulls in all the vertices around it. When using the scale tool to make the character bigger you do not actually change the distance between the vertices, merely a sort of zooming the scene in to (it’s complicated but it’s true, this is why you should not use the scale tool to resize objects). Anyway, the problem. I had to weld all the vertices one by one. Below in the fingers you can see lines in them, this is where the mesh is detached, I manually attached them one by one.

Next problem came with the symmetry tool. For reasons I am not even going to try to pretend to understand the symmetry tool was doing this to the mesh.

After hours of trying I could not solve the problem and again had to resort to the long and boring process of manual welding. Long! You will also notice that his nipples have disappeared, this was caused by an earlier smoothing process, these needed to be rebuilt. Below is an image of the weld tool on a very small setting ruing all my work.

Problem 572! After sorting the welding on everything and building new nipples this happened to the nose, again I have no idea how bit it was too late to go back, it needed to be solved from here. My problem was that the cut tool was not working and I struggled to get the holes filled. Paul spent ages helping me trying to 'trick' max to create new pollys. This involved creating a polly, slicing it in half, deleting a quarter and redrawing a new quarter. Cheers Paul.

Smoothed he is 264,298 pollys, but looking good. Just as well the uni has the new 8 core Mac's for rendering, if they could only sort out the backburner render farm were well away.

Anyway it is now done and he is ready to be rigged, this is going to go wrong I can smell it.

Eye appear to be missing a head

So this week we had a crack at doing some eye rigging using the FFD ox. This is basically a box that will deform multiple mesh’s in exactly the same way without affecting the pivot point. This is useful for eyes as it means you can still close the eyelids when the mesh is deformed. Another benefit is found when using it in conjunction with the morpher tool, you can keep polygon count down if you order the stack correctly. Here is the explanation:

Consider a sphere with 18 segments, this will give you 288 polys (trust me), then you add a mesh smooth with one iteration, now you have 612 polys. If you deformed this, Max would have to deform 612 polys every frame. Now if you do it the other way round, deform the mesh then mesh smooth Max only needs to deform 288 polys and then smooth it, giving you the same result, making it render quickly.

Architecture – an insight in to the mentality

I have been looking in to the architecture of the Incas to see what sort of buildings I am going to need to create for my scene.

Although there are not many ‘speculative’ images out there as to what the Incas building and settlements really looked like, there is more than enough of it still standing to get a very good idea.

The villages tend to be high on mountain sides and made almost entirely of stone. The stone is likely to be for a couple of reasons.

1) Because they have it in abundance on mountains, more so than timber.

2) Being up so high it needs to be weather proof, which leads me on to the first character trait.

Why build so high up? Well I believe this could be because height gives an incredible defensive and offensive advantage against enemies and unwanted visitors. This would suggest they were both reclusive and hostile to outsiders at the same time, and possibly have many enemies. Secondly, the settlements that remain are all surrounded by strong stone walls, and lets face it walls are only built to keep things in or out. The possible reasons for this include (as well as the reasons mentioned above) that the want to keep their community in and other out so they are quite reclusive unless they have to be.

The second character trait I have is from research. The Incas were known to be strong proud peoples who valued their social status, both in their community and in tribal standings. They would often engage in fights with local tribes over land disputes and power issues, and they usually won. I believe this is reflected in their archaeology, strong tall building built in strong places with heavy fortification. The Inca Hanan was the top of the social chain, he would always be a strong proud warrior, someone who no other would dare challenge.They seem like a bit of a scary bunch, especially when trying to create an animation for children. For this reason I want to try and add some light heartedness to the Hanan but I am going to have the archaeologist to be the guided tour, he will keep the information factual but act as the Hanan’s opposite and keep the animation fun rather than a horror film. As I discussed in an earlier post about there always being two characters who together complete the requirements for a good animation, the archaeologist will be one of these people and the Hana the other, here is their traits:

Hanan
Traits: hero, big, strong, fearless, easily frustrated
Story attributes: Main story line, suspense, peril

Archaeologist
Traits: Small, easily amused, easily side tracked
Story attributes: Humor (unintentional), happy for the Hanan

Well, thats it for that reasearch for the moment, lots more to follow soon.

In case you’re interested the character is going well, I have some really well defined biceps.