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