Nelsons hand animation

After I had made the gun deck model and mapped it, I uploaded it to
humyo and then mr. wedgburrow worked his HDRI lighting magic on it ;)
After talking to Sam, I decided to do abit of animating as well, since
quite a few of the scenes still needed to be finished. One of the
sequences left to do was Nelsons hand covered in blood, after he had
been shot. I decided to do this because the models had already been
made, all I had to do was bone and skin the hand and create the blood.
Oh, and a portion of the deck as a background.
I started off by modifying the model of Nelson, so all that was left
was his hand and a little bit of his sleve. i did this by first
downloading the file from Humyo, converted the model to an editable
poly in max, then selected the bits i didn't need and deleted them. I
saved this as a new file, so that the complete model of Nelson wasn't
overwrited.
Once I had the bits I needed, I then boned the hand. I boned each
individual finger seperately, so I could get the most relistic movement
out of it as possible. This was particulary important as the scene was
going to be up close and personal on the hand, so detail was
everything. Once the bones were in place, i made fins come off them so
that they interact with the hand model properly, and added a skin
modifier on the hand. A quick test showed that it was working properly,
so I saved it and got to work on the blood.
At first, I thought that the blood was going to be dripping off of
Nelsons hand, but after talking with Keiron, Ben, Tim and Panos we
thought that this wouldn't be very relistic. Mainly because in this
scene, Nelson gets shot in the shoulder (ish) area, and his hand just
touches the wound so any blood thats on his hand would have been wiped
onto it, and would be more of a rsidue than anything else. I orignally
made the blood as a blob, and was intending to add a particle system to
it to make it drip, but it looked rubbish. It looked as though he had
spit his chewing gum onto his hand! Not good at all hehe
After talking to Keiron abit more, he suggested to make a map for the
blood and apply it to one side of the hand. Then, just mess around with
the uvw map settings and the gizmo to position it correctly. I thought
this was an awesome idea, and made a map based on the existing skin map
and a picture of some blood from devientART. Lightly edited in
photoshop and simmered for a few minutes, here is the results -
Original map -


New map 1 -


New map 2-
After
adding the map, I wrestled with the animation & camera &
lighting settings for a while, added a path for the camera to follow
(many thanks to Jo Bowman for the help with that) and rendered the
scene to produce this short clip for the final animation. The end may
drag out abit but that was intentional, so that the finishers had a
little extra to play with for video editing and stuff. Enjoy! -

Gun Deck models and problems

The first attempt I made on modelling the gun deck was, in one word, crap. Pretty much everything on it was wrong, nothing on it looked right at all. The floor was far too 'clean', and didnt look as though it was made in 1805 at all. the walls were perfectectly straight instead of being slightly curved, so they didnt follow the curvature of the ship at all. Basically, it had the hydrodynamics of a lead brick.

So, after nearly 4 hours working on it, I scraped it. Completely. Grabbed a coffee, recomposed my thoughts, did some more research, worked on it for two nights and came up with this little beauty -




The cannons arn't made by me, they were modelled and mapped by James Tickett. I just added them to see what the deck looked like when armed :)

The floor was a real pain in the ass, mainly because the reference picture was so small and at a weird angle, making it really hard to judge the dimensions to make the floor with. Also, another thing about the floor from looking closely at the pictures showed that it was made using different sized planks, that were offset from one another. At this point I thought that I had bitten off more than I could chew!

I made the floor, by making it out of seperate planks with individually modelled nails as well. After mapping it, it seriously slowed down the machine I was working on. the poly count was immense, and after discussions within the team we all decided that yes, on one hand it looks really good, but on the other it is too much. In the end the floor was replaced by a plane, with a bitmap map on it of a screenshot of the old floor. This greatly decreased the rendering time, which was esssential to getting the whole animation finished by the dealine.

Batten down the hatches!! Gun Deck progress

Damn, another overdue blog post! Just want to say though, top effort to everyone on the project - the work produced is excellent and the team on the whole were a great bunch, even though my blog has been redundent lately, communication within the group has been stronger than ever before. thanks again guys, been fun working with you all!

Now, onto the Gun Deck of the H.M.S Victory

After struggling to model the whole of the Victory and failng every time, I decided to concentrate on one aspect of the ship and make it as good as I possibly could. I chose to model the gun deck, not only because of my interest in machines and instruments of war (old and new) but also because I thought it would be a challenge.

After doing abit of research, I discovered that the H.M.S victory had several gun decks, each a different colour, with different weights of guns and also with different structural features, to support the decks above.

I found quite a few pictures of the 'lower' gun deck, which showed quite abit of detail. These are the pictures I used as reference points when creating the model -

Progress!!

Well the my head is now in its early stages of being 3d, there are still a few things that need tweaking but the face is coming on nicely. At present one side of the face is done, here I have simply mirrored a copy of it and alligned it for the purposes of the screenshot to illustrate what it looks like. Theres still plenty more to do to it though, such as the rest of the head, the shoulders and lastly the ears, plus the mapping needs to be done as well. Man I need a drink!

Max is driving me spare :(

I am seriously having problems with max. I don't know why, but so far everytime I try to make my head 3d something either goes wrong or I'm not doing something right, its driving me crazy, just can't figure it out.

When I apply the topology picture as a map, it looks extremely pixelated and I can't use it to create the mesh since its too distorted to see the topology lines. However, when I render the plane its crystal clear! Decided to leave it for the time being and get some sleep, I'll have another crack at it tomorrow when my brain is working properly.

Night-night

General Concerns with the assignment/team + problems with my blog

I know this may sound like I'm moaning and may sound like a bit of a rant but its not I assure you, I'm just generally concerned about whats going on and i'm trying to express it in a way that dosnt come across as being harsh and rude. Its actually quite difficult so please don't take this at face value. I am in no way trying to get at or offend anybody here.

Last firday's meeting to discuss what was going on was (in my opinion) a total shambles. To be honest, I pretty much agree with everything James Ticket said in his blog.

The whole thing was in essence, a shouting match. Nearly everyone who was putting forward contributions was just talking over other people who were also putting forward ideas, and the cumualtive effect resulted in people shouting progressively louder in order to be heard.

When I tried to forward an idea, I just got ignored which resulted in me not wanting to participate. To be honest I wish that I had a pair of headphones at the time because the noise level made it hard for me to concentrate. This is the sort of thing that is all too common in nursery school, we are all adults so we should start to sit down and discuss this as adults without cutting each other short. It was quite pathetic to be blunt.

Also, the whole thing about having teams is'nt really going to work. We should ALL do the modelling between us first, EQUALLY and also ensure that everyone knows EXACTLY what they are doing. Once the models have been done then the makers of the models skin them (ie if person A made a cannon then person A also skins that cannon).

This way everyone does an equal share, and people arn't left twiddling their thumbs waiting to skin and animate stuff, and will also stop people saying 'oh, i've done my bit so I don't have to do anymore'. It will also make the best use of the time we have avaliable, because if we all do modelling first then thhe models will be made in no time, leaving time left over to animate and finish the whole thing off.

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I'm having a little difficulty with my blog, I can't seem to add links to the rest of the team properly, its as if the menu has been disabled or something. Is there any way around this?

My Head In 3d

Well, this post has been long overdue. Heres the reference pictures for creating my face/head in 3d using max with the topology done in adobe photoshop.

I gave up with trying to re-create a ship in the end, mainly because I felt that it was too challenging for me and I was a little out of my depth there.

The main problem I had with it was recreating the hull, its curvature and shpe are dead hard to recreate in 3d (with my current abilities anyways) so instead I am going to recreate the main gun deck on the H.M.S Victory including things like the retention for the cannons, the floorboards and other things that make the ship seem as though it was actually in use by those serving aboard, such as tables etc.

Experimenting...

Been toying with making a 3d model of Nelsons flagship the 'H.M.S Victory' in Inventor lately, and its been proving difficult to achieve.

The main problems are -

1. The shear size of the thing, its massive
2. The awkward shapes its made out of, its curvy structure is proving hard to recreate in 3d.

Might have to go about maing a wirefame model of it first, and build on it from there I reakon. Tried to make it using extrude tools but couldnt fillet it enough to make it look like it can cut through water as easily as the real thing can. have to make it look as realistic as I can

First Thoughts and Ideas

My first thoughts about having to model and animate the Battle of Trafalgar were along the lines of ''Bloody hell this is gonna be near impossible!'' My main concern is recreating the famous warships from the battle, since they are very complex and comprise of complecated shapes, and making them look relistic is going to be very challenging, especially when it comes to making the sails ripple in the wind and things like that.

Will be fun blowing them up though :)


My other main concern is modelling and animating people. I've never done it before, so its going to be difficult, and what worries me more is having to model them moving, stabbing, shooting and generally kicking the living shi* out of each other on nothing less than a great big warship.

I am looking forward to making particle systems for their entrails though, had an idea to have some music accomplying the fighting and have it stop just before the final blow strikes Nelson, but the fatal blow isnt shown. Instead, the camera focuses on a sail and a blood splatter covers it just as the music stops, think it'll add a nice dimension to the animation.