Finished Animation

The animation has been finished and exported out from Premier Pro into AVI format. Now the final animation can be copied onto disk.
The battle of Trafalgar is finished :)

Creating the Animation

Monday the group came in and we all put together the animation. The scenes and the music were imported. The scenes were then fitted together and transitions were added. The music was added and fitted with sound effects. The animation will be finished Wednesday evening.

Music

Yesterday I researched a few pieces of music which I thought might fit. I will bring them in Friday so you can all say what you think.

Todays animation

Today I have created an animation of nelson walking down stair, and Nelson pacing scene is complete. I have also created the scene where Nelson is shot. This still needs blood added where he was shot.

Friday 30th jobs creating Nelson walking

In lecture I have been creating Nelson walking. There were a few problems as the top of nelson was not attached to the biped. I have re-connected the biped and adjusted the envelopes so Nelson moves correctly.
I have also been adding the sail movement to more ships within the scenes. The mapped Victory has now been re-scaled to fit into the scene.

Friday 30th Minutes

Hello All,
If you have any problems downloading files use firefox not Internet explorer.
All the ships are mapped and ready on humyo.
Animation needs to be finished for Friday morning, all scene complete and rendered.
scenes completed
scene 1 - Marc
Scene 3 - Lara and nine and ten when re-angled

Jobs assigned for animation
ship movement using reactor - Lara
Sail movement, sea/wave movement and fire- Leah
Explosions - Sam

All animator are gathering and animating the scenes. Help is being given by the other team members to animate.

Scenes which can be removed 11, 14, 16

Scene to be created by
Scene 12 - Ben
Scene 13 - Tim
Nelson walking Scene - Leah
Nelson Being shot Movement - Leah
Blood for scene above - Tim and James T (I think please let me know)
Nelson's Face - Kerion
Cannon Motion - James S
Scene 21- Explosion by Sam

Scene to be created by anyone
Scene 20 - Mast Breaking
Model and animate the Shooter
Crew Memeber Needed - In the process of being made

Please will everyone help with animation. Thank you Tim for taking scenes home to render.

Note to Tim. I forgot to mention please render the nelson walking scene from two different angles. sorry I forgot, Thank you

Help Needed

I am currently working on scenes 3 of the view of the ships, scene 5 of the crows nest and the scene of nelson walking. However none of these scene are possible to create.

For scene 3 I scaled original sea and ship with nelson but apparently was not correct so I need the correct way to scale the enemy ships in the scene correctly.

For scene 5 I need the crows nest and the biped for the sailor in the crows nest.

For the scene of Nelson the final mapped nelson is not available yet, however this is due to a saving error which I was aware of yesterday and I have uploaded nelsons biped onto Humyo to be remapped.

Please can you let me know when these parts are on Humyo and I can start animating before Friday. Can someone also let me know the scale and I can complete scene 3 on Thursday morning when I will be in doing extra work.

Downloading

I have downloaded the final victory with textures. I will also download the new scaled items as mine weren't correct. I will then create the scene three and five when the crows nest and biped, and nelson mapped is uploaded.

Uploads to Humyo

All the sails that have been uploaded on to humyo are now animated and have been loaded into the ships file and in a new folder called animated sails.

Scaled waves

I have now scaled the waves to fit into the scene. The waves and the victory ship were scaled to the size of Nelson.

Creating a Biped for the Crows Nest.

Today a biped had to be created for the crows nest. Only the top half of the biped was required. First I created the the biped and positioned it with the crews clothing. Next The bones of the biped were adjusted to fit the model by moving and rotating the individual bones. Next the fins of each bone were adjusted to fit the shape of the body. Once all the bones were adjusted to fit the body. The number of fingers on the biped was upped to five and the finger links were change to three. Once all the fingers were positioned the biped needed to be linked to the body.
Next the modifier physique was used and a node was create to the pelvis of the biped. Now the biped and the mesh are linked the mesh is effected by the movement of the biped bones.
Now the envelopes on the bone need to be adjusted so the effect the correct vertexes on the mesh. This proved very difficult on the hands of the sailor. After a lot of trouble I created several successful envelops on the hand however I could not attach the lower vertex on the fingers. Due to these problems James West had a go at fixing the problem.

Sails Movement

Nelson walking

Today James west finished the biped structure on Nelson and i have been looking at creating the pacing scene on the deck of the victory.

I have created footsteps from the biped and moved them to create the effect of Nelson walking down the stair of the victory. I am still waiting for Nelson and the victory to be mapped and baked.

Once this is completed I can completed and render this part of the animation as I am also on the finishing team.

Uploading to Humyo

I have now uploaded the water effect and the final animation of the sail and the sea on the background ships.

Getting files from Humyo

This morning I have been getting the rest of the ships I need to animate of humyo. However when downloading the files they all have no link to their maps as only the max file has been uploaded with no attached map files. We need to some how load up the maps with each scene. I have seen that James T and Tim were both organising the files with separate folders so this morning I have added an animation folder, a videos folder and a nelson folder. I have also put all the ship is into the ships folder. I did this as I could not differentiate which piece of work was for which stage of the animation. Hope this ok. Any ideas on how to categories the work would be brill.

Report Writing

Today I am begnning to write my report for this module.

Todays Update

Today i have completed the sail movement part of the animation and added the sea. However this has a few difficulties as I don't know how big the animation needs to be. The size of the sea can change how the plane needs to be affected, for example the phase may need to be changed etc.




Today I also looked at how to make a biped walk. This part of the animation was meant to be completed by James West, however if he leaves I would like to animate Nelson walking. James W. will finish rigging Nelson and I can then create the Nelson Walking sequence.

Sail Animation

I have completed an animation of the sails on the ship and have saved the animation. When creating this effect i copied the sails and rescaled them to fit the same size as the original pieces. After completing the sails in this way i found they all looked to similar and blended together. To change this I changed the seed in the noise parameters to create a separate timing for each sail movements.








In this video I have added the sea effect created in Friday's lecture. One problem i am still having is being able to see the sails effect as there are no textures on the sails they still look a little flat.

Animating sails

I have now been animating the sails of the ship. The modifiers used to this were wave and noise.

The picture above references how the modifiers were used and how I selected the falloff before adding them.
By using the falloff I have set were the modifiers will effect sails and add the wave and noise.
When creating the movement using the wave modifiers the amplitude was change and adjusted to make the movement size look realistic. The phase of the amplitude was then set using the autokey.
The next modifier added was the Noise. In this modifier I selected Animate noise and changed the scale and the strength of the noise.
This created my first sail movement which I then needed to create on the other sails.

Animating

This morning I am going to start animating Marc's ships sails for the final animation.
I have downloaded background_ship off our shared storage space and I'm now ready to go.

Before animating the first thing I had to was name all the parts of the ship. Please will everyone start naming the parts as it will make it a lot easier when animating.

Creating Smoke

To create smoke first create spray in the top view port and rotate the spray so it points upwards. Then change the render type to facing. Next drop the size to fifty.

Now the spray has been create a map needs to be created.

In the materials editor select a new material and change the opacity map to mask. Then change the map to a gradient and changethe gradient type from linear to radial. Change the noise amount to 0.5 and the size to 3.5 and select fractal. Change colour 3 to two-hunred RBG which should be grey.

At this point the size of the spray was dropped to 75.

Then go up to parent on the material editor and change the Mask to a particle age map. In the particle age drag colour one down to colour three and select swap.

Then go back up to parent level and select the opacity map, gradient and click on the autokey. Drag the key to the last frame and up the phase to five. Turn off the autokey.

Next select the diffuse map and select smoke. Change colour two to pure white and colour one to 141 RBG grey. Change the size upto 100. Change the phase in the same way as on the opacitiy map using the autokey.

Attempting water

I have been creating water with James w. so the technique can be perfect before he leaves.
To create the material first i change the material from standard to raytrace.
Next click the reflection map and enter a falloff map.
Then click the checkered icon to view the background in the material.
On the falloff map under front side and flip the black and white using the arrow icon.
Then go to parent and select the environment where is has a box saying None. change this material to sky dusk(duskcld1) , this is under the materials library.
Then click and drag the material so far onto the water plane.
Next select the the bump map select noise. Change the noise to fractal. Within the noise parameters change the size to five.
To make the water look less silvery change the reflect map down to seventy-five.
Next change the diffuse colour to an indigo blue and bring up the specular level to one hundred and twenty.

Now the material has been made the modifiers need to be added to the plane.
First up the segment in the plane so their even in each direction.
Next add a noise modifier to the plane. Change the strength in the Z axis to around five and change the scale to around twenty. Finally select animate noise.
Now add a wave modifier and change the amplitude one and two to five.
To finish the effect use the autokey an change the phase on the last key.

Friday 16th Meeting

I have just blogged the minutes from our meeting on our new group blog. I am now going to have a look at the sea texture and animation.

Premiere Pro

Today I have got a few books out including one on the use of Premiere Pro. I have been reading up on this book so when we come to finishing the animation it will go together with ease. I have also taken out a studio max book to gain more knowledge on effects for the animation.

Creating a wave from the wake ship

The next effect we tried was creating a wake wave from the ship passing through the water.
This effect works quite well but will look better with a ship behind the wave and textures.

Ripping Sail

We have been working on the animation of ripping sails. This has proved difficult as the hole just appears and it does not look the cloth actually rips. This video is what we have so far but needs some help with this as it is not realistic enough.

Billowing sails

I was having trouble working out this effect and could not find a tutorial.
James W. and I have had a go at this this effect and worked on our first sail.
First we changed the sail to an editable poly and set the soft selection and the falloff on the planes vertices's.
We then added a animated wave modifier set the amplitude and the phase of the waves. On the wave modifier we also moved the gizmo to set the direction of the wave.
The final modifier used was a noise modifier to the plane. On this modifier we havled the scale, changed the strength and turn on the animate noise for the final effect which is shown below.

Fog

First attempts at creating fog with my sea animation.

The fog looks ok but needs to be a bit more spars and random. I will make this effect better this afternoon.

Website

I have a very good website which has an A-Z on max tutorials including fire, bodies, hair and many more useful things.

http://www.infinitee-designs.com/Tutorials-3DSMax-1.htm

Have a look it might have something you want to use.

Explosions

Whilst looking for a billowing wind tutorial i found a tutorial called a Matrix bullet-time tutorial. This tutorial freeze a complicated animation ( in this turtorial an exploading teapot ) but the camera must move aroud the frozen explosion. The main problem doing this in 3D Studio Max is knowing how to freeze the explosion, but I've found the solution in this tutorial. This tutorial uses cameras around the animation and then creates one image of each wanted frame from each camera.

Whilst using this tutorial I will need to learn about studio max vido post, from which i have found out is under rendering > environments.

This technique can be tried on our exploding barrel as when the barrel explodes it happens so quickly it is a bit difficult to see the full effect. This technique will pause the animation but still take frames from moving cameras.

Storyboards

Ali has completed some brilliant storyboards and look really effective. I have now printed them in Photoshop and their going to go on the wall in the lecture room so we have something to reference too.

Creating Billowing Sails Effect

I have created a flag effect in max but now I need to create the movement of the ships sails. The animation team will also need to look at how to make a cannon ball burst through a sail and what effects could be used on this.

The Final Fire Effect

The final fire render looks quite good. I could still improve on this if anyone has any hints or tips.

Creating a Realistic Fire Effect

To create fire start by creating a blizzard particle system and place it in your scene so its pointing upwards. Under the modify panel, change the emitter size to 45 x 45.

The percentage of particles displays in the viewport are a certain percentage but the amount of particles rendered will always be 100%.

Next under particle generation choose a user rate of 3 (This controls how many particles are to be created per frame).
Under Particle Motion

• choose a speed of 1.97
• a variation of .276
• Tumble 0 and Tumble Rate 0

Under Particle Timing make your Emit start a negative number. By making the number negative the particle generation is constant throughout the clip.
My frame count is 250 so I chose an Emit Start of -250, Emit Stop and Display Until of 250. Chose 36 for Life and 34 for Variation.
Under Particle Size choose 2.24, Variation 2.39, Grow For 5 and Fade For 29.

The speed of the particles determines how fast the particles are moving. The variation allows for various particles to travel at different speeds. Life determines how many frames the particle will live for. One particle will last for 36 frames in this case.

Next under Particle Type choose Instanced Geometry. This allows the particle to be any mesh or geometry created in the scene. By doing I have created a custom particle.
Next create a sphere of a radius of 3.625 and 32 Segments and add a noise modifier to the sphere.
Under the noise parameters, choose

• Seed 0, Scale 4.777,
• Roughness 0,
• Iterations 4.48

Under Strength make X: -2.87, Y: 5.59, Z: 12.182.

Go back to the particle emitter parameters, under particle type, it should already have Instanced Geometry selected. Scroll down until you see a button that says Pick Object. Click on that button and choose the sphere you just created. Right click on the sphere and choose hide selected. Now the particle emitter should emitting many little spheres.
To see this change your viewport Display from dots to mesh. (be careful as this could crash your computer) then, switch back to dots to save memory.

Add the material to the particle emitter.I then did a test render, this looked very effective. Finally under the Material ID Channel, change the ID from 0 to 1.

In this tutorial it says to render using post which is not on this machine.

Creating a Fire Material

To create my fire map i started by creating a new Standard material. Under Shader Basic Parameters I chose Blinn. In the Blinn colours I chose an orange color for Ambient/Diffuse Color. for this orange I chose an RBG of Red:255 Green:120 Blue:0 Hue:20 Sat:255 Value:255

Then i clicked the self illumination box on and select a slighter brighter orange color (Red:255 Green:174 Blue:0 Hue:29 Sat:255 Value:255).

Next I chose diffuse color map and picked Particle Age and hit ok.
For Color #1 chose a red color, and set Age #1 at 20%.
For Color #2 chose an orange color and set Age# 2 at 50%.
For Color #3 pick white and set Age# 3 at 100%

Once done go back upto parent level. I then checked diffuse map was set to 100. Then changed the self illumination map and choose Smoke. The Smoke Parameters need to be set to size: 40 and make color 1 an orange color and color 2 a yellow color.

Go back to the parent level. Under the opacity map also choose Smoke. Under Smoke Parameters choose size: 40 and make the two colors pure white and pure black.
This will create a fire material.

Still Looking At Effects

I still looking at different effects but mainly I am concentrating on fire. When i find a successful output i will blog the results.

Fire Effect

We are now looking for a fire tutorial as we are not 100% sure how to do this. We are going to search the internet for helpful hints.

Websites found
http://3dflashworld.com/3ds_max_Creating_Particle_Fire_using_Max_particles.html

http://www.phoenixbit.com/site/tutorials.asp?view=R3JhcGhpY3MvM0QgU3R1ZGlvIE1heC9maXJl

Spoono fire material http://www.spoono.com/3ds/tutorials/tutorial.php?id=4
Spoono fire Animation http://www.spoono.com/3ds/tutorials/tutorial.php?id=5

http://www.feedoffcreativity.co.uk/Tutorials/3D/MaxCampFire.php

This site shows realistic fire and also has a link to create the material.
http://3drockstar.com/index.php/creating-realistic-fire-using-particles-in-3ds-max/

This website has several key tutorail we could use to create fire, the sea, rope and billowing smoke
http://www.tech-faq.com/3d-max-tutorials.shtml
which after trying I found out do not open correctly, not happy as they looked very effective.

Sea effects

This is my first attempt at a sea effect. The boat is just basicso I can get a ruff idea of the effect. I have used a noise map and a wave effect. There is still room for improvement but I will keep working on it.

Creating a flag Movement

I have created this effect using a wave modifier. This was very simple to create by changing the phase and the amplitude of the wave. I also had to add falloff to the flag so it did not have movement where it joins to the post.

Animation Effects

Half the animation team, James.W and I (Leah) are now going to look at different effects which we will need in the animation.

Effects Needed

• Smoke
• Cannon Fire
• Water, Sea Waves
• Wood Splinters
• Wind in the sails
• Sails ripping
• Fire
• Gunpowder pouring (maybe?)
• Blood
• Ship Movement
• Rag Doll Physics - Dead People
• Musket Fire

For some of these effects we will be using reactor. We will also use such modifiers as wave, noise and particle systems.

Final Character Profile

I have now styled the hair and mapped the eyes. I styled the hair by moving the end vertexes of the hair and upping how many hairs there are to make it look thicker. I have mapped the eye and tiled it to fit. i rotated each eye so the are looking in the correct direction.



My final character now looks like Bon Jovi.

Creating Hair

I have now finished my neck on my character. I might add some shoulders but i want to add some hair first so it looks a bit more realistic and it might also make the forehead smaller. When adding hair i came across several problems. My first problem was adding the hair in the correct place. When adding the hair i found i had to select the polygons in the edit poly mode and go to the top of my stack before adding the hair. If you do it by adding the hair in editable poly mode when you turn on the symmetry and turbo smooth the hair moves to these modifiers.

The reference planes also created a problem when rendering as the showed up slightly and cast two lines of shadow. To solve this problem I went to their properties and deselected the render function on both parts. This made the show in my view ports but not in my render.

This is how it rendered out below. I now need to style and modify the hair as my character looks a little to punk like.

Creating a neck

I am quite happy withe results on the neck i have created. I created the neck by copying polygons and shaping them to my neck topology. I welded parts to each other as i went along. I found the neck a little difficult as in the tutorial he skips a lot. I will create the back of the neck the same way.

I have also improved my top lip by using the chamfer tool on the top line to make the shape more distinctive. I found this technique when watch the tutorial to create the ear for my character.

However when creating these parts my modifier stack has collapsed together and only shows the editable poly section. This as caused me a problem as my face does not have the symmetry modifier and create the same changes on both sides of the face.

If anyone has an idea how to fix this that would be brilliant, if not i am going to start this part again.

Todays efforts in studio max

After quite a few attempts and hour working on my character profile i have had a little bit of success.

I created the back of the skull using a sphere. I rotated the sphere so the pole lined up with the ears. This technique was used when creating a character by using a sphere from the beginning, however this seemed to help when lining up my polygons.
After creating and rotating the sphere I turned it to an editable poly and selected the lower polygons of the sphere. I also selected the inner circle of triangles as these would cause problems later. These polygons were deleted.
Now i had a basic shape of my skull I lined up the polygons to join my skull to the face. I did this by making the amount of segments in the sphere smaller. Once I had the correct amount of segments i used the vertex snap tool to join the point in the two parts together. I found when using this snap you need to click on the point your moving itself and dragging it to the other point, if you only click near the point and drag ruffly it picks the wrong point which was a little messy.
Once i had joined the points all that need to be done was attach the parts and weld the point if necessary.
To finish the skull I copied new polygons to join the gap. The vertex of the new polygons had to be welded to the other side of the skull, I did this using the snap tool to be more accurate.

My face still looks a little stretched as the forehead seems very long and the face looks very thin. I had some trouble when creating the neck as some polygons I created only had three sides or five which would cause me trouble late. After rectifying this problem the skull formation looked quite effect, however the computer froze and deleted it all. The practice gained today help the process become quicker and this is my last attempted below.

My next parts to create is the neck and the ears. I also want to create some hair as it can cover up my ears if they look really terrible.

I tired to create a face map today on the front of my character. This was very simple to do. I used UVW mapping and then unwrapped the UVW map and edited the map to fit my face.

Adding the mapping and editing it was very simple but as I have had trouble since the start my map does not fit my face correctly. I am going to work on this more before lecture on Friday.

Afternoon Meeting Minutes

Friday 26th 1pm - 5pm
This blog shows the minutes take from the afternoon lecture.
Final Groups & Their Jobs

Modellers
- Kieron

- Ali
Jobs –Small British ship, Nelson
- Tim
Jobs - French ship, Spanish ship, Riffles, Seagulls
- Richard
Jobs –The victory ship outside hull
- Ben
Jobs – Ammunition, Gunpowder sacks/barrels, barrels, driftwood
- Marc
Jobs – Nelson’s office
- James T
Jobs – Cannons, Uniforms British & French
- James S
Jobs – Cannon Deck

Ships include rigging, flags, ropes, cannon holes/port holes.
Other items to be modelled are dead people, the sniper, powder monkey, crows nest and driftwood.
Cannonballs need to be modelled in several forms, normal, chain cannonballs and grape shot.

Animation
Sam, Leah, James W, Marc, Lara
- Effects Needed – Smoke, Fog, Blood, Splinters,

Animation Sequence
- Scene1 the drawing of the plan by Nelsons hand on parchment.
- Scene 2 Fade into an overview of the battlefield and how the ships are positioned in the plan.
- Scene 3 shows the bow of the French ship close up to the camera with British ship line up in the distance.
- Scene 4 a shot of the look out in the crows nest looking at on coming ships. Camera pans round to the front to show the reflection in the telescope.
- Scene 5 shows telescope point of view (POV) shot of enemy ship with a flag raising. The raising flag show it is time to fight.
- Scene6 The lookout shouts down to the people on deck who prepare for battle.
- Scene 7 Panning shot of the side of the ship showing the wooden cannon holes. As the pan continues the port holes open and the cannons emerge. The camera swings round to show all the cannons.
- Scene 8 A shot of the powder monkey filling the cannons and lighting the fuse.
- Scene 9 A shot of cannonballs firing between ships and bursting through a ship sail creating rips and hole, lots of wreckage.
- Scene 10 Front view shot of the bow of the ship sailing towards the enemy. Sows waves crashing against the ship.
- Scene 11 Panning shot of two ships passing each and firing at each other. The front of the British ship crashes into each other breaking off the bow of the other ship.
- Scene 12 POV shot from the powder monkey through the cannon hole. An enemy ship passes and the cannon fire and the cannonball goes through the ship showing the insides.
- Scene 13 POV shout from behind the fired cannonball as it hits the ship.
- Scene 14 Nelson is show pacing up and down the deck.
- Scene 15 A man is shown being shot of the rigging by a musket and falls out of shot.
- Scene 16 A ship being shown under cannon fire. As the ship is hit there is a huge explosion and it begins to sink. There is lots of wreckage and driftwood from the ship in the water.
- Scene 17 Nelson is shown pacing the deck again but from a different angle.
- Scene 18 Panning shot as seaman are shot and fall overboard off their ship.
- Scene 19 As the battle get more intense this scene show the cannons firing and showing the detail of the jerking motion as they fire on passing ships.
- Scene 20 Reaction shot of the cannon fire breaking the mast of the enemy ship.
- Scene 21 An angled shot of sails ripping by a grape shot cannonball.
- Scene 22 Nelson final pacing shot, Pan round Nelson into a POV from his right hand man Hardy.
- Scene 23 Zoomed out shot of the sniper ready to shout Nelson. Zoom into shoulder view then the sniper fires.
- Scene 24 Slow motion shot of nelson being shot and falling to the deck onto his knees. As this happens the gunshot echoes and all other sound fades out.
- Scene 25 POV shot as looks at his hand which is now covered in his own blood.
- Scene 26 French ships sailing away with an audio over the top ‘we won the war, we won the war’.
- Scene 27 POV of nelson’s eyes blurring and slowly shut.
- Scene 28 Scene fades out and writing is shown explain who won the war and other facts about the end of the battle.
- Final Credits of everyone involved in the sequence.

Map Makers
Tim, Panos, Kieron, Ben, James T, James W
Jobs
- Ship Mapping
– Flags, canvas, French flags, British flags, beginning fight flag
– Rigging – Ropes, hooks
– Wood – Hull, masts
– Anchor – Iron/metal
– Ropes
- People
– Skin
– Hair
– Eyes
– Uniforms – French, British, Nelson’s Medals, shoes, crew uniform
- Weapons
– Swords – blade, handle
– Cannons, Muskets – metal, wood
- Surrounding Environments
– Sea, sky
– Wreckage, driftwood
– Dead people
– Birds

Finishers
Leah, Richard, Ali, Lara
Jobs
- Render out animations
- Find sound effects
- Find music
- Order animation in Premier Pro
- Edit animation length
- Add transitions
- Edit music
- Bring Audio and video together
- Add final credits

Research
The flag to begin the battle.
Detailed facts about the battle.
Look at the uniforms work by officers and the crew.
Look at the detail of the ships used by both sides.

Needs to be decided
Lighting to be completed by modellers or animators?

Wow, but you need 3D glasses!!!!!

Next attempt at creating a body in max

My new body created in Max looks a lot better. I going to try boning and skinning again.

Boning and Skinning Second Attempt

I have now created a new body with a a few helpful hints from James W and i have started boning and skinning the character again. This work worked a little bit more successfully than the first attempts in lecture.

I have also started looking at using a biped and the physique modifier to create a character as i am having a bit of trouble with boning and skinning.

I am going to put a picture of my new character when i change it into a Jpeg tomorrow as i do not have Studio Max 9 on this computer.

Boning and skinning

Todays lecture we were learning boning and skining techniques. First we create a charater body shape and smootthed the mesh.

We then added a bone structure to the body and adjusted the fins to fit the body shape. Then the bones need the envellopes adjusting.

Now a HI solver can be added to the individual parts. The solver can then be linked to a dummy to make movement easier to control.

Afte adjusting the bones the bodu could be skinned in the modifyer panel.

When using this tehcnique i had problems with the envlopes being to large and linking to the other parts. After changing the envelopes the moved more freely and seperate. joining the bone to the skin also brought forward problems as the did not join and move how i expected them to.

I have attempted the nose on my profile a couple of times, this is the best so far. However my nostrils are rather larger so I'm going to add an extra set of polygons and reshape the nose.

I have also created the lower lip which looks a little pointy but the top lip was a complete failure. I am now going to reshape the nose and attempt the lips again.

Creating the Nose and Lips

I have downloaded the online tutorials for creating the nose and lips. My next task is to create these parts on my profile which will be tomorows task.
Fingers crossed it will go better than my original profile.

Storyboarding

After talking about storyboards in lesson i can feel the project coming together. I think the opening sequence sound great and will bring forward the idea of nelsons plan. This battle was the first to change the strategy of how ships fought.
I think in the storyboard we should include several particle systems as I think they could be very effective.

Problems

Since I have now attempted to create the profile many time i have decided to try the other method to see if it is any easier.
The second method uses a sphere as the beginning shape of the head. The centre point of the sphere is lined up with the middle point of the ear.
After this point in the creation of the profile it became very difficult, even though I thought this method would be easier. I the sphere needs to be pulled out and the falloff changed around distinctive part of the face, such as the chin, ear centre point and nose. This part was not to difficult but continuing on the next part was very frustrating.
Defineing the the face was very tricky as my profile pictures are not aligned perfectly which made this process more difficult.
After a lot of time spent on this method I went back to my last profile created (which is shown in the blog below) and found it easier to continue with this profile.

My character Profile

I am finally getting there with my character face profile. After three attempts and little bit of help it is nearly there. The many problems with my original attempts in Max was the vertex not welding together. Also I found my pictures were not quite in line with each other.

Now tha many outline has been created I am gooing to go on to create a nose, lips and eyes.

Creating a 3D Face in Studio Max

My first attempts at creating a 3D face were not fully successful. After distorting and lining up my profile pictures i created the node shapes to make up the face.
The pictures created were used in studio max on the reference planes I have created, this part was simple to do.
After creating lines to follow the front picture created in photoshop I turned one spline into a editable poly and welded all the splines together. Now the spline were welded together creating one mesh.

The problems started to occur when creating the profile from the side view. First I found it very difficult to pull all the vertex into the correct position as the view looked very confusing. The vertex looked like they were pulling in the wrong direction and position. As the first attempt went wrong and i could not define which of the vertex had been moved so this part of the process was started again.

The second attempt worked better as i pulled the vertex out in a memorable order. Yet when looking at the profile in a perspective view i found several of my vertexs had not welded together creating a misshapen face in the final profile.

My Profile Pictures

After creating my character profile i added the topology to my face using the same technique as shown in the tutorial complete previously.

Researching The Battle of Trafalgar

Whilst researching Trafalgar I have found several key events which occurred during the battle. I have also found an animation of the strategy used by Nelson.

http://www.nmm.ac.uk/searchbin/searchs.pl?flashy=et1740z

The animation shows the movements of the ships during the battle which led to the great victory.
This strategy differs from the how battles of the time were normally fought. At this times ships would sail alongside each other and fight, whereas Nelson sent two rows of ship forward into the row of enemy ships.

First Attemps at Creating a Character Profile

Building a Charcter Profile

First i took pictures to make a character profile, one from the front and one from the side. Once imported into Photoshop i created lines on the photos to make up the polygons in max later.

When making a character profile for the first time I realised how difficult it was compared to the tutorial we were shown. When creating the lines on the face in Photoshop it was very difficult to create smooth lines. It was also difficult not to end up with straight lines or triangles withing the nodes of the character. The different colour lines were created on separate layers to make the line easier to erase or change.

Now I have had a go on someones profile I am going to take a picture of myself and create my profile to made into a character. I will create this profile using the same technique as the first profile created in Friday's tutorial.

I have also been researching the battle of Trafalgar. From this research i plan to create a lifestyle board and gather further knowledge into the main events during the battle of Trafalgar. These events could be included in the storyboarding of the battle.

Virtual Environments

When first reading the brief for this module I realised we have a lot of work to do in a very short time. The first six weeks of individual work seems a bit daunting as I am not the best at 3D Studio Max. The second six weeks of this module may be a valuable learning curve as we have to work in teams within the group, I feel i will learn a lot during this time.