7 posts tagged “3d”

The YouTube Awards have been announced and one of my favourite animations won 'Most Adorable'. It's a gorgeous 3D animation by Dony Permedi about a Kiwi (a flightless New Zealand bird) trying to fly.

Nearly finished! I presented my two TVCs yesterday and the irony is that they liked the simple one, the fish, better. So now I have to re-do my bird TVC before the graduate exhibition and make it better by making it simpler. Which will take a fraction of the time it took to make the initial version. If only I'd known in advance, I could have saved so much time and effort!

I won't post the birdie TVC until I've redone it, but for now here's the Fish TVC. The only change that may yet happen is if I get a real charity organisation to agree to put their name to it.

Now I just have to print the documentation, get in bound and submit it. Woo hoo!

Nearly there!

We presented our group project today so there's only one more project and presentation to go. The individual project. The big one. Eek.

I've revised my deliverables - had I known how difficult Maya would be to master there's no way I would have planned to do three TVCs (television commercials). I had anticipated that animating the models would be the most difficult part of the process - in the end it was pretty easy and quick, it was rendering that was an utter nightmare. So I've abandoned the third of the TVCs, but to look on the positive side of things the remaining two TVCs are thirty seconds each instead of the originally planned 15 seconds.So my overall quantity of output is actually higher than expected. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it, anyway!

I've almost finished rendering (did I mention how god-awful rendering is?) so it's just a matter of editing the footage and adding sound and motion graphics. By tomorrow morning. Hahaha. Bloody hell.

The fishie footage is together so I'll upload that right now. I'll add updates as the day progresses. Any feedback would be welcome! I'm having to use a fictional charity group as the focus of the ad because a certain homeless charity in Melbourne (which shall remain nameless) didn't return my emails or calls. I'm planning on calling the pretend organisation 'Aegis Victoria'. If anyone can come up with a better name that hasn't been used, and they're willing to let me have non-exclusive use of it for these ads, I'll be your friend forever! :-)

Well, I'm slowly getting through it. From my lack of posts for the last few days you may have already guessed that I was insanely busy with homework. Thankfully many of my smaller tasks are out of the way, quite surprisingly I'm on track for my individual project (the 3D animations), and our group work is slowly getting there.

I thought I'd post one of the latest exercise we had to do in our Maya class. It concentrated on particle systems, deformers and layered shaders. The tutorial can be found here: Maya particles tutorial

I wish the tutorials were podcasts, though. The Flash tutorials at Swinburne Uni are podcasts, which means you can download them and play them at your leisure. This damn Maya tutorial crashed my browser countless times and always in the last five minutes of the video - meaning I'd have to wait another hour for the bloody thing to download again so I could get back to my place in the tute. Grrrr. It ended up taking me six hours to complete this thing and three quarters of that time was spent wandering the house while waiting for the tutorial to load.

In yesterday's 3D class we did more on particle systems and used Expressions for the first time (which is like programming - more correctly 'scripting' - for Maya). We learned techniques that could easily be applied to leaves on trees so that I can get them to ripple in the breeze. Woo hoo! Unfortunately that means revisiting those bloody leaves again, but if it benefits my project I'm willing to do it. I think I mentioned how with my initial attempt at particle systems all my leaves faced the same way and were the same size? Well with Expressions you can set random size and rotation. I'd seen a bit on the internet about it but I'd always thought it would be too difficult. Turns out to be very similar to Actionscript so it's not too hard at all!

Aside from that, I'm in the process of applying for a Masters scholarship. I've probably got Buckley's chance of getting it, but I might as well put the application in!

Okay. I'm finishing for the night and going to bed, but to prove that I've done everything I've said I'd do here's a quick update.

Modeling - DONE!

Comic pencilling - DONE!

The only thing on my to-do list for today that hasn't been done is recording the dialogue for my sound project since it's far too late in the day for that (my swearing loudly into a microphone may disturb the neighbours slightly). Given that should only take a few minutes to do (HAHAHAH I still believe it when I say that!) I'm not too worried about leaving it until tomorrow.

Screenshot of wasp model

Crab with shell

One of the comic panels

I'm finding this blog is an excellent way to hold myself accountable for getting homework done. So I'm going to continue to bore the crap out of young and old and post my homework tasks of the week, then upload proof that each task has been done. And boy is there a list! I found out today that we have a presentation next week for our individual projects. Most people have their footage ready for editing, but most people are doing video instead of 3D. Guess how many idiots picked 3D? One. Me. So I'm weeks behind and I've only just figured out how to put leaves on the stupid tree. On the upside I have my fishie's water bottle modeled.

Water bottle

Now I have to get everything else done so I have at least some footage to show at the presentation next week. Eek!

Tasks for the week:

Monday

• Do rough copy of my comic poster for the group project
• Phone Port Phillip council's Urban Art officer to talk about locations for the posters
  Done! But she's away on leave (>_<). Left a voice-mail message and I'll send her an email with the project details.
• Complete first two tasks for the sound editing class

Tuesday

• Nothing. Classes from 8:30am to 8:00pm. No way I'm adding homework on top of that!

Wednesday

• Complete minor character models for individual project (evil crab, bad bird, mamma bird, wasp) and any remaining objects (soft drink can, bird nest, fish's sign)
• Create animatics to judge timing

Thursday

• Do UV maps for models
• Do backgrounds for animation

Friday

• Figure out how the hell you do character rigging in Maya
• Test animations with walk cycles

Saturday

• If character rigging and animation works in Maya, start doing the Birdie animation.
• If character rigging and animation doesn't work in Maya, export the damn models into 3D Studio Max and curse Maya to hell, continuing the project in a program that doesn't baffle and bewilder me at every corner.

Sunday

• Finish off what's possible of the bird animation
• Create a digital presentation for Monday's class

Remind me why the hell I want to stick around next year for Masters?

I've just discovered a great side effect of blogging my 3D project progress - it forces me to render early on and therefore uncover hideous rendering problems!

I spent today modeling trees. Incredibly dull work until I got to use Maya Paint Effects to make the leaves. I was very impressed by the look of them, and it's the first time I've ever tried using the paint effects so I was quite pleased with my work. Until I rendered it, that is. While the leaves show up fine in Maya, when rendered using the Maya software renderer they come out as black little smudges. And it's even worse when rendering using the Maya hardware renderer and Mental Ray - the leaves don't show up at all! Thank god I discovered this early in the project - imagine how devastating it would have been to discover it just before it was due!

So far no luck in tracking down what the problem is. I'm going to do a bit more modeling of objects I know will show up, then I'm going to settle down with a glass of wine and check out the CGtalk forums to see if anyone knows a way around this problem!

My other option would be to create a simple leaf then using the particle system to create more leaves. It means they won't be as realistic, but it's possible they will render faster and I will be able to create a stylised arty look (always a good thing when you're trying not to rely on technical excellence that just ain't there!)

Tree test render

In the meantime, if anyone has any idea why my leaves aren't rendering, or a better and simpler way of creating leaves, please let me know!

UPDATE:
I've figured out how to render the leaves using Mental Ray or any other renderer that takes my fancy.

1. Select the paint effect (the leaves)
2. Modify > Convert > Paint Effects to Polygons

Test tree render

Mid shot test render

As you can see, the leaves render perfectly. And that's my new problem - they're too perfect! I'm going for a quirky, artsy cartoony feel and these are too realistic.

The other downside to using this method is that it blows the poly count WAY up. Not only does it take a very basic scene with no UV maps nearly three minutes to render at 800x600, but just to roll the camera takes an eternity. I'd hate to think how long it would take to render a 15 second animation were I to use this technique!

So tomorrow I'm going to try something else, maybe just rendering leaves and making them a lot larger and therefore fewer, or maybe using particle systems. I'll keep you posted!