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 -