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.