Evaluation

Well what can I say about my first few weeks learning 3d modeling techniques? Well for a start I can safely say that I have learnt rather a lot. As I said before, mainly through trial and a lot of error have I managed to find my way anywhere near completing this module. If I was to have my time over again I would definitely not under estimate the amount of time it takes to create an animation and to render out each scene. I tried to preview the reactor animations I had created in the poker room scenes and that every time I tried this 3ds max crashed, whether it was in the labs or on my personal computer. I realise now looking at it, it was probably due to the amount of objects and polygons in my scene that caused this problem. Anyhow, due to not being able to preview the reactor, I tried it out in an external scene and then tried to import the situation into my scene. This didn’t work as well as I’d hoped which I found out by my dice, rolling perfectly in the external test decided just to drop through the table, fly off into oblivion or by just dropping onto the table like rocks. I then (instead of importing the test) tried to recreate the test scenario from scratch using the same process, which I followed in my test. I am still unsure as to why this didn’t work either. I found that when creating the animation it took a ridiculous amount of time to create, roughly 45 minutes for each reactor animation. Again I put this down to not realizing how much 3ds is affected by the amount of assets in a scene.

I would very much like to have my time again, knowing what I know now. Due to the unforeseen circumstances of having to remodel my assets and the various trouble I have had with even understanding the physics behind reactor and similar issues I found that I ran out of time and am not at all pleased with the animation that I have produced. I had high hopes when I embarked on this module and am disappointed to say that I am not a natural 3D modeler and I intend fully to practice and improve my skills in this software which I feel still leave rather an awful lot to be required!

SWOT ANALYSIS

Strengths

The ability to visualise a brief into a storyboard effectively. At the beginning of this project I drew up around eight separate storyboards of different ideas, combinations of films and inspiration. I found this relatively easy and I enjoy drawing and sketching out my ideas before putting them into production. I tried to keep the storyboards I decided upon quite simple as I had no idea what my abilities to create in 3Ds Max would allow me to do at the time. In hind sight this was probably a wise decision considering the amount of time it took me to acquire the basic skills I have now.

During this module I have come to realise that my strengths are;

I have a keen eye for detail and am very much a perfectionist. Although I have included this in the strengths area, I do realise that this could be seen as somewhat counter productive in the sense that looking back at my time I have probably spent far too much time on manipulating numeric values for materials, reflections, refractions, friction and so forth that on the whole didn’t really add to the piece, and rather just increased the render time!

I can generate quite a few different ideas when approached with a brief. Again I have listed this as a strength, although like my previous strength I feel that this hindered me during my time management as I may have spent too long deciding which direction to go.

I feel that now I have recognised these qualities within my way of working, I can be more aware of the way I work and therefore use them to my advantage rather than let them over ride areas in which I need considerably more time.

Weaknesses

During this module I feel that primarily time management and prioritising my tasks have been a major weakness of mine. I have not come across this issue before personally, however, I hope that now I have realised this can be an issue, I will be able to address it in future projects and assignments.

Naivety regarding system requirements and technical aspects. This has been a weakness of mine before, but never has it affected me so acutely. During this module I completely had no point of reference as to how long rendering just a couple of seconds of animation could take. The only animating experience I have previously had has been in flash and although occasionally Flash may decide to ‘quit unexpectedly’, 2D animations can have a great deal of assets pieced together relatively quickly to create a desirable effect compared with 3Ds Max. I also did not foresee my models that I had previously created would be unusable. I have decided in future that I will put aside at least a week within each module to allow for any unforeseen circumstances to be dealt with!

I also dedicated a large portion of my time trying to partition my hard drive on both my macbook and imac so that I was able to download and run 3Ds Max on either machine. This was unsuccessful for a variety of reasons and therefore to work on my project away from the university machines I had to download the program on my 4 year old laptop which did not have the capacity to run the program and so inevitably had major issues with crashes and freezing screens during productions and renders.

Opportunities

Opportunities I feel I have gained through undertaking this project are that having now acquired a very basic knowledge of 3Ds Max and it’s limitations, I fully intend on continuing to practice within both 3Ds Max and other 3D platforms to better improve my own capabilities and I hope that I won’t be scared away from trying new programs no matter how daunting they may be. In the past I feel that unless I have a real need to learn a program, if I find it unbelievably complex, I will most likely try to complete a project in a different way.

A major opportunity I feel I have gained during the past twelve weeks is that no matter how many snags, troubles, problems and unexpected abnormalities that arise, if you persist, there will be a way around the problem, even if it is not how you first expected or even to your liking. This module has helped me to persevere with things that I really struggle with and I am sure that this will help me with future obstacles that I will inevitably run into.

Threats

Threats. Well for a start I feel that visiting family in America although a once in a lifetime opportunity and something I will treasure for a long time, I do not intend on taking so much time away from a module again, in particular one that is incredibly time consuming!

Another threat I feel affected me quite acutely with regard to this semester is family commitments. Due to an immediate family member in a state of deteriorating health I found that I visited home much more regularly than I would have in previous semesters. This I feel could be seen as a threat with regard to my work commitments however life will always be a big influence in your life and I guess I will just have to learn to adapt to circumstances as they arise and spread myself more evenly between the two areas of work and family.

Cameras

Initially for my animation, I wanted to use quite a lot of interesting camera angles. I intended my piece to be more of a teaser for the audience, for them to wonder what film is being advertised with only hints towards 007 rather than obvious scenes from the actual film. Due to this simplistic idea I wanted to add some dynamic aspects with some close-ups and various camera angles I did add a few different points of view rather than a static camera that would give a more 2D approach, although, again I would have liked to include some further shots.

FAR too many polygons!

I assume that a great deal of my problems were down to the very intricate nature of the assets that adorn my stage that are really only for aesthetic reasons, assets such as the poker chips that sit on the ‘unused tables’ of the scene. These screen grabs give an idea of the amount of objects and polygons that could have added to my limitations during my work.

Snake Eyes - The troubles and traumas of animating dice

This was my test scene of the dice rolling which I was pleased with. I liked how the dice fell and looked realistic when coming in contact with the table. I then tried to import this into my main scene through merging it with the other objects in the room, which unfortunately was not as successful as I had anticipated!

This was my first attempt at merging the dice roll with the other objects in the scene. For some strange reason I have yet to discover, one of the die slides backwards along the table. I was pleased, however with the way the dice landed displaying the 5 and 2, showing 7, which gives a nod towards 007.

Never under estimate the power of gravity! (or render time!)

Here is a video clip of my animated dice, after spending about 2 hours rendering on the old laptop. The next attempt at rendering this particular section of animation, the dice made it to the table however this time they decided to fall straight through it! It seems that silly mistakes are a habit of mine and after this module I can safely say that I have learnt a great deal through trial and a great deal of error!

This video was particularly annoying as after I rendered it out I realised that the wall behind the dice to the left of the scene had the material attached to the opposite side of the wall and therefore was not visable upon finishing the animation.

 This video was from a different angle to the previous one and it shows the dice coming towards the camera more which was my intention, however this time the table plane holding the texas hold them bitmap shifts slightly. I am unsure as to the reason for this, I can only assume that in my manipulation of the reactor scene I must have moved the plane holding the image unwittingly at some point.

I am quite pleased with how I have manipulated this poker chip to look as though it is running along the table towards the glass. I particularly liked how the holographic style material I have chosen for the extracted edges of the chip reflect the scene around it. The timing is how I wanted it although I did try to rotate the chip as it moved. This did not have the desired effect, rather than ‘rolling’ along the table it seemed to spin and wobble in the air. I took this to have something to do with the pivot point of the object however I did not have enough time to accomplish the ‘rolling’ effect that I intended.

Dice

As mentioned before with regard to the trouble I had with importing my existing models into my new scene I recreated my casino dice. This was pretty straight forward as I had created them once before it should be easy to do again right? Well perhaps. The model was easy to recreate, the problem came when I had to recreate the red perspex material that I created for my earlier model. I couldn’t quite remember how I had altered the refraction and reflection amounts and so spent a long time trying to get the dice to a similar standard of my previous model! 

Using reactor, in a similar way to the bowling scene I animated in a previous tutorial, I assigned different properties to the elements of the scene. The dice I gave a mass value of 10, the table top a value of 0 and I increased the friction values slightly due to the premise that the table top would be made of some kind of felt covering, and therefore would create a higher degree of friction than for example a polished surface.

Poker Room

Here is an aerial view of the poker room in which my animation will take place. I created five tables so that it had a feel of a casino setting, added a wooden floor and some patterned wallpaper for a different texture. I felt the whole room looked a little flat and so to give a feeling of space and a more dynamic look, I created a large mirror for the back wall, which I hoped would work quite well with certain camera shots within my animation.

Although the action within my animation would all be taking place in or around the centre table, I added various assets to the surrounding tables so they didn’t look unused or sparse in comparison when panning into shot.

Here I have added a rug to the scene as I felt there was a lot of exposed wood on the floor and it didn’t really feel like it had enough substance as a scene. Adding the rug I felt was a simple way of bringing another texture and visual impact into the room, although as the floor would not be seen very much I felt this was all that was required.

I created my poker chips and stacked them outside of my ‘poker room’ scene and imported them in, realising that they were overly large I then scaled them down to size.

Modeling - Poker Chips

Poker Chip Model

Here shows my model of a poker chip with a bitmap used from an online source to get a realistic look for the model. I wanted to assign my own materials to the other sections of the chip to get a feel of different textures – similar to how a real poker chip would look like without the need for using bitmaps for the entire model.

I found that when assigning the same material to the rear facing side of the poker chip the bitmap I had used felt the need to mirror the image on the opposing side. I just allocated a new material flipping the image in photoshop and assigning the ‘new’ bitmap to the back of the chip. I selected a red material and a black rubber-like material for the rest of the chip to correspond with the inner bitmap. On looking at the chip I felt that the red was very flat and looked rather less than realistic so I looked online for examples of poker chips and found quite a few with holographic decals which I decided to use to give a different texture to that of the black ‘rubber’.

Although I was relatively happy with the look and style of my poker chip model it did look a little bare around the edges. To add some more embellishment to the chip I decided to add dice markings similar to those I had seen on real poker chips. I felt this gave the model a little something extra that was missing before.

An example of the finished red chip, which looked rather flat and unrealistic.

Here is my poker chip after I had changed the red material to an attempt at a holographic material. I chose the gold colour to be in keeping with the colour palette and think it looks much better than it did previously. With more time I would probably try to create a few different valued chips for a more intricate and satisfying look to the scene, although being limited with time I decided to work on the actual movements that would be seen!

The holographic chips stacked, ready for play.

Here I created some cards to adorn my poker table – how do you play poker without cards? I did this by creating a plane and adding a bitmap via the materials editor to give a realistic look. I made sure that the deck of cards said ‘Casino Royale’ of the back so that during the animation the audience may glimpse them and be reminded of the films title for which the trailer is for.