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.

More Modeling - Martini anyone?

Importing the martini glass into the scene.

I had various problems when I had created the scene and it was time to merge my other models into the scene. Firstly the three main models I had created for the first hand in failed to merge, then likewise upon trying to open them separately to ascertain why this happened they then wouldn’t open at all. This posed a considerable problem as it meant that I had to model every asset of my animation from scratch, which understandably took up a considerable amount of my time that I had hoped to assign to actually animating! A couple of other snags that I came across were that a few of the materials I had assigned to certain models kept disappearing. There was a relatively simple solution to this problem when I realised that I had saved them in different locations and from switching from one machine to another I had not brought them across with me, felt a bit stupid when I realised my mistake!

Here is the martini glass complete with martini, however I felt it looked a little flat and so played around with the glass material I had created for the actual glass and decided that it needed some ice and a lemon spiral as dictated by bond when he creates his perfect drink in the film Casino Royale – shaken not stirred obviously!

To create the lemon spiral for the martini I used the lofting technique to assign a shape to a path, which gave the 3desque feel of my lemon ‘peel’. To create a textured look for the ice, I created some cubes and added a noise modifier so that they weren’t perfect cubes, instead had a bit of realism to them.

Bowling with Reactor

Playing with reactor using multiple objects, we created a bowling scene. Similarly with the previous post, the floor had a mass of 0. The pins were given a mass of 10 and the bowling ball was assigned a mass of 20. To actually get the bowling ball to have some forward momentum, I moved the ball's position in scene 5 and edited the start frame in the reactor modifier to start at frame 3.

I found this tutorial very interesting, how just by manipulating certain attributes you are able to drastically change your bowling score! After playing with the different attributes, missing all the pins, having the ball fly off at such an angle I had no idea where it went, I then added a rotation to the ball and some finger holes.

I created the finger holes with Proboolean.

Using Reactor

During this tutorial we were using reactor to manipulate the gravity, mass, friction and elasticity of objects to create a sense of realism within the scene. This is my first successful attempt at using reactor, as you can see the red box has been given a mass higher than 0 and the pink box (acting as the scene floor) has a mass set at 0, due to it not moving within this scene. I played with the red box's default settings regarding the friction and more so, the elasticity so that the box would bounce on impact with the floor.

As I mentioned above, I have tried to use reactor before. When creating my martini glass model I did try to follow a tutorial that included setting up a concave object so that the ice would fall and land inside the martini glass realistically although when I tried this my version of 3D Studio Max decided to throw a wobbly and crashed each time I tried. I now, (through following this tutorial) feel more capable of using reactor and how it could potentially benefit my animation, with particular reference to the dice that I intend to roll realistically towards the camera is the opening scene.

Emotions in 3D

Within this tutorial we learnt how to create a head that was capable of displaying emotion within the face. We started with a rather gormless looking head which we converted to an editable poly. Next I cloned this head a few times for which to create different expressions on. I chose a wink, open mouth, raised eyebrow and a closed mouth which looked like a smile. In the modifier list, I was then able to select the original head (which I had left in it's original state) and added a 'Morpher' to it. This then gave me the opportunity to link all of the heads into the original model and by varying the percentage on each expression I could change the face of my model. Having done this, I then added a Turbo smooth to the original model and added some animation using autokey and assigning key frames along the time line in positions that I felt added to the animation.

After adding a Turbo Smooth

I particularly enjoyed this tutorial, probably as it was based on human expression and emotion, which I enjoy sketching in my spare time anyway. It is incredible how varied you can create a look on one face through a series of seemingly simple steps. I hope to use similar techniques in my finished animation. My rendered animation for this tutorial however did end up looking rather seedy!

Tutorial Animation

Kettle Roller Coaster(ish)

Here I have been experimenting with an object (kettle) following a line to create a path for the camera to follow. I have used a target camera so that we can view the kettle following it's path from a static point. Next I tried to experiment with a free camera to follow the kettle around the path in a rollercoaster-esque scenario.

Adding Stretch and Squash

To add a little more realism to some bouncing balls I have edited the spheres using the scale tool at the bounce point, whilst using set key, keying in each change of scale with the key button. Before adding the 'squash' I moved the pivot point so that the balls looked to squash at point of impact rather than at the centre of the ball. I ensured that my 'stretch and squash' curve (found in curve editor) matched the duration of the bounce of the ball. I found this was important as before I did this, my balls were stretching and squshing much more often than when they were bouncing.. which was not the intended result! This was a first attempt and so again, is a little primitive, although it does look more realistic than my previous video.

Animating Objects

During this tutorial, we learnt the very basics of creating an animation in 3D Studio. Above you can see some bouncing balls, created by manipulating the timeline through Set Key, adjusting the curve editor to add a sense of realism to how the balls fall (adding a sense of gravity) and also by editing the dope sheet and ranges to make the balls bounce separately from one another different start points) and at different speeds/durations.

I found this tutorial very interesting and impressed at the effect that can acheived after adding only a slight amount of animation. I know the animation above is very primitive, however it has shown me that any object can 'come alive' with just a simple application of movement.

I look forward to generating animations on my 3 models can't wait to have a play around and see what effects I can acheive.

Neon Sign

For my third object I picked a neon sign, to show a different style of modelling and to use different techniques and to give me a bit of a challenge with regard to the materials that would be used.

Initially I created an arrow using the line tools and a lofting technique, which I also used for the wiring. I then used a text tool to create the ‘coming soon’ bulbs. Following this, I generated 42 hooks to ‘hold’ the bulbs onto the backing and positioned them around the bulbs. I initially created a case for the sign to be held in although towards the end of creating this model I felt that this was unnecessary. I created a backing for the bulbs to be held against the wall with and inserted some wires and an electrical box. I then applied various materials to each object, to create the neon glow and manipulated various settings to get the desired result I was looking for. To give the sign something to be hung onto I just created a plane to which I added a bitmap of a wall. I was quite pleased with how this model came out as I particularly wanted to use neon lights due to them being a significant trend in Las Vegas, the setting of my chosen film. Also in the closing sequence of my storyboard there is a scene in which some neon lighting would light up ‘Bond’ then flicker as realistic neon signs do, to briefly say ‘James’ for a split second, to return to ‘Bond’ as a nod to the famous Bond quote.

Although I have faced many obstacles so far in my experience with 3D Studio Max, I feel that I am slowly beginning to understand at least some of the techniques that can be used within the software, and the set backs that I have had have only helped to increase my interest within 3D Modeling. I just hope that I can pick up the animation side of things a little quicker!

Hand

After my previous rather shameful attempts at organic 3D modelling, I decided that to contrast the very geometric tone of my dice and martini glass models, I would create the hand that throws the dice towards the camera in one of the scenes for my second model. It turns out that I still require quite a bit of practice with organic models, even with the use of tutorials I found this quite a challenge. 

I began by following a tutorial using extrusion techniques to modify a cylinder into a hand shape. The palm of the hand I found that I managed quite well, (to my great surprise!) however I then hit a stumbling block when I had to extrude the fingers. My hand looked more like a glove that had been lost than a hand.. I tried to modify it to look more realistic but in the end I had altered it too much from which to return and so I started again from my last safe point and tried using a technique that I felt more capable with.. using cylinders to modify into fingers. I was not happy with the way that this looked, as the techniques were so different for each part, so I attempted to create a hand using shapes modified within 3D Studio and then grouped together. I am still not entirely satisfied with the final outcome and will continue to work on it and my organic modelling skills in general which I am not pleased with. 

Dice

For my first model, I have decided to create some realistic casino dice to accompany my martini glass (shaken, not stirred!) That will be a main part of my final animation. This was my first attempt at using Boolean technique and I used ProBoolean to cut out each of the spots on the dice by using spheres. I then tried to recreate a realistic looking material for the red translucent dice. Especially since they will form a significant role in the final trailer. This proved to be quite time consuming, as I wanted to try and recreate the look by changing the settings rather than relying on a predefined setting. I then selected each of the ‘spots’ of the dice and applied an opaque white material. To give a sense of setting I added a craps table bitmap to a plane for them to rest upon which I hope to model into an actual craps table, which will be in one scene of my piece.

Martini Glass

For this model I found a tutorial on creating a tumbler of water with ice in. I drew half of the martini glass in Adobe Illustrator and imported it into 3D Studio, using the lathe tool to create the actual glass. I then created the water by using a cone shape and added some ice cubes made from boxes and chamfing them. Next I assigned physical properties to the objects on the scene using reactor and a solid body modifier. I gave the ice cubes a weight of 5 and positioned them directly above the glass, so that on previewing the animation they would fall realistically into the glass. This proved more difficult than I anticipated as the animation preview caused 3D Studio to crash on every attempt I made at getting this to work. In the end I placed the ice into the glass myself and hopefully in the coming weeks I will learn what went wrong and how to rectify my mistake! To the glass, ice and ‘martini’ I added different materials to try to recreate a realistic looking scene. I added some omnilights and a Target spotlight to set the scene.

Silhouette - Failed attempt!

This is my attempt at creating a female body to use as a silhouette figure in my trailer. I must admit I found this very taxing and the chest in particular. I realised after many hours of attempting this model that perhaps trying this first was not one of my better plans and that I needed more practice within 3D Studio Max learning both the interface and what I can and can’t create. So, unfortunately, so as not to waste further time I decided to leave my figure for now and hopefully I will be able to complete her to use in my animation in the very near future.

The tools that I tried here were modifying standard primitives, using a bitmap on a plane as a reference image, extrusions, using soft selection, rings, loops, connections, and the cut function.

Storyboard and Research Board

Right, here’s an update of all the work that I’ve been doing over the past few weeks.

STORYBOARDS

This is one of my storyboards for my final animation. I am torn between two bond films with similar themes, Diamonds are Forever and Casino Royale. I say they have similar themes as both involve casinos. Diamonds are forever was filmed primarily in Las Vegas and the Mojave desert while Casino Royale (2006 version) was set in Montenegro for the poker scenes but has a lot of casino references.. the title being a bit of a give away here. As I am so torn I have toyed with the idea of combining the two films for my animation if I could to give more of a trailer for James Bond films in general, rather than one particular film. As I am still undecided I have created two separate storyboards for the time being. Below is my storyboard for Casino Royale. 

As you can see from each of my storyboards I have decided to go for a more ambiguous design rather than attempting to recreate scenes from the films. I have two reasons for this choice which are that, personally when I watch film trailers that have a great deal of action in them, it makes me feel that I know what will happen. I much prefer trailers that intrigue the audience and almost create anticipation for what kind of film it is. Secondly I must admit I’m not a great James Bond fan, usually only watching the films when they appear at Christmas and such, however my favourite part of James Bond films are definitely the opening sequences. With this in mind I felt that I could tease the audience with some themes of the film whilst retaining an air on the opening sequences in the trailer.

Each of the storyboards are rough ideas at the moment and I am leaning towards the Diamonds are Forever one, for which I will generate a more detailed version to help me plan out my final piece shortly.



Here is my research board on everything 'James Bond'.

Mood Board - Casino Royale

This is my mood board for another of the films I have been researching for this project - Casino Royale.

I have mainly been looking at the 2006 remake of Casino Royale in which Daniel Craig portrays our hero, "Bond, James Bond".

Bond achieves his double "0" ranking by killing his second of two hits required for this status at the start of the film. It is in this film that we see Bond win his 1964 Aston Martin at a game of cards, which he uses to his advantage as a chip to win a night with another man's wife, Solange. Bond's nemesis in this portrayal is one 'Le Chiffre'. Bond foils a plot of Le Chiffre's to destroy the prototype of a large airline called Starfleet, which Le Chiffre thinks would make millions. To avoid being killed by his investors, Le Chiffre must earn back the money he has lost and sets up a high stakes poker game in Montenegro for 10 players with entry fees of $10 million each.

The main love interest in Casino Royale in Vesper Lynd, the government agent sent to keep an eye on Bond during the poker tournament. Through a series of dramatic scenes including Bond losing all the money, almost dying from a spiked drink and being captured and tortured, our hero, as ever is triumphant and wins the tournament, the money, gets the girl and invents his signature martini (“shaken not stirred”) in the process.

Many of the images used in this mood board were sourced online, a list of these links can be found below. Additionally to the sourced images, I took some of the photos personally and edited them within Photoshop.

Links to images used within mood board;

http://www.wizardsmagicchest.com/magic-shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=707

http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.007museum.com/Aston_Martin_DB5_007JB_1964.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.007museum.com/Aston_Martin_DB5.htm&usg=__objAjgbFW-DcnuHaJQ1cgn7osHs=&h=968&w=2025&sz=436&hl=en&start=0&zoom=1&tbnid=Er1DKAtkR5QcZM:&tbnh=107&tbnw=224&ei=Hi9tTb2pJMKo8QPuvaWUBQ&prev=/images%3Fq%3DDB5%2B007%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den%26biw%3D1280%26bih%3D639%26tbs%3Disch:1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=500&vpy=112&dur=1399&hovh=155&hovw=325&tx=177&ty=100&oei=ES9tTZjGDoWCsQPxmuTGBQ&page=1&ndsp=15&ved=1t:429,r:2,s:0

http://roulettescience.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Set_of_Poker_Chips_in_Case.jpg

http://www.bestinternetshopping.com/embroidered_patch/gambling.htm

Mood Board - Diamonds are Forever

This is my mood board for one of the films I have been researching for this project - Diamonds are Forever.


Sean Connery portrays Bond in this iconic film of 1971. The nemisis for Bond in this film is Ernst Stavro Blofeld, an iconic 'bad guy' complete with his long-haired white cat, and various henchmen including an almost comic pair Wr Wint and Mr Kidd. The women in this film are Plenty O'Toole ("Named after your father I presume") Tiffany Case, portraying the main love interest and of course a brief appearance by Miss Money Penny.


The storyline is an in depth plot revolving around diamond smuggling and various cases of mis-identity, through accidental occurrences and planned deceit with Bond of course saving the day.


Diamonds are Forever is shot mainly in Las Vegas and I will be trying to incorporate this into my 30 second trailer. The connotations of Las Vegas are obviously casinos, gambling, and neon signs, along with these themes I will be using items specific to this film, e.g. diamonds and sets used in the creation of certain scenes. I will also be attempting to recreate items and themes iconic to James Bond. These may include cars, women, guns, martini glasses, suits and in a similar theme used in the earlier Bond films, I will try to involve a touch of humour. 


Many of the images used in this mood board were sourced online, a list of these links can be found below. Additionally to the sourced images, I took some of the photos personally, in particular, the Las Vegas sign, dice and cards and edited them within Photoshop.




Links to images used within mood board;

http://www.bespokediamonds.com/guide.php

http://ffffound.com/image/1da4ef22d0f989b55dfe0cbbeabb9c5ef975cbf1

http://www.007.info/ImagesFull/DAFMustang2.htm

http://www.klast.net/bond/daf.html

http://topforeignstocks.com/2010/06/20/the-worlds-top-diamond-producing-countries/

http://www.layoutsparks.com/1/187783/aces-cards-diamond-heart-31000.html

http://www.suite101.com/view_image_articles.cfm/529409

http://www.buypokerchips.com/paulson-poker-chips-1.htm

http://www.enterleisure.co.uk/page2.html

Tutorial Two - Helix

Helix


In this activity I used the lofting technique to create a spring like helix effect. I found this quite simple to follow and quite effective once created also, although currently I am not sure in which situation I would use this technique.




Upcoming Weeks
For the next two weeks I will unfortunately be out of the country due to family commitments and so will not be able to update my blog each week as required, I will however endeavour to post my work that I will complete on my return.

Tutorial Two - Chess Piece

Chess Piece


In this tutorial activity I used Adobe Illustrator to draw half of a chess piece and importing this into 3D Studio I was able to use the Lathe modifier to create a 3D shape. I found this very interesting and quite quick to achieve a shape that I was happy with. I feel it very beneficial to be able to use other software to support my design ability in 3D Studio as I am still very much a novice in this area.

First Attempt

Tutorial 1 - Building using primitive shapes

• This is my first attempt at creating anything within 3D Studio Max. I found the controls quite hard to get to grips with to start, especially getting my head around the different views, however once I had figured out how each view related to the objects I was creating I found that aligning, scaling and rotating became much easier.

Assignment Brief

"You are to select a James Bond film, and produce a 30 second animated  trailer for your selected film.

The assignment is in two parts.

Assignment 1 – Weeks 1 – 6

You are to produce a moodboard, research board and storyboard. From your storyboard, you are expected to model at least three artifacts which will star in your trailer. You should also show three different specific modelling techniques, ie lathe, chamfer, boolean etc.

Assignment 2 – Weeks 6 – 12

You will now continue to make your trailer incorporating your models and animating them within an environment. You are expected to make use of three animating techniques such as reactor, morphing, fly through, key framing etc."

• My initial reaction to the brief is that I am looking forward to the module and what it entails. Although not a fan currently of the James Bond films or books, I feel that this brief has a lot of scope for variation in design and aesthetics. I think that film I select will be essential in determining what kind of feel and look my final assignment will convey.