first render output tests on over ground rollercoaster scene.

here are a few previews of my track above ground. to down size the file's im doing 3 renders where im joining up the files on final cut pro to make the complete animation. this enables me to do individual lighting for each scene rather than having to do it on one land scape. hopefully this will work better than what i've been doing before.

here's a picture of my finally modeled robot. iv got a few more things to do to him but he's pretty much done =D

part of tutorial lesson in animation. just a quick test to get used to the movement of the robot rig

unreal tournament level update

After posting up my drawn out designs of a computer game level. here are a few pictures of the main floor that i've constructed and started putting in static mesh's. its only rough working at the moment but I'm pretty positive that this is going to be a pretty awesome level so I have high hopes on how it's going to turn out when it's done.

this is a pic of my concept track. just to bang it down on my blog as a work in progress.

Mental Ray light testing

Here's a light test that i did with mental ray trying to emulate a ocean scene. Im currently doing a tutorial i found on the net to add rays into the lights which ill post soon. I recon this is the effect that ill be looking for when i do my final animation of the rollercoaster. adding some density into the lights will give the cloudy effect of water and changing the enviroments colour should give a better over all look.

Computer Game Level Design

These are a few of the pictures of draft levels iv done. they are a fairly rough but a start but i think this has been a better concept than my last one. I'v still got to present it to brad my games lecturer to see what he thinks but im going to still build the base geometry. when i run round it ill know how well it flows as a game to decide what kind of level type it cou;d be used for.

robot animation, the foot

with the continuation of building my robot here's a post showing the foot segment of my robot design. after the leg tutorial it helped to pinpoint hwere pivot points had to be placed in order to be put together for the final model.

Game City is back in nottingham again! After a brief visit to the tent in the market square i came across a mass gaming experiment, 50 players playing a ever changing flash style game. every 5minsthe game is changed by the players voting for a game of choice from a selection screen. i sat down to try it out playing a game called fall down. The game is pretty simple fall down the gaps in the floor as the floor moves upwards towards spinning disk blades..... sounds simple? Well with 50 players spotting your avitar is really hard and with a ever increasing speed of the floor it becomes a frantic battle for survival. The game went through various changes with the avitar speed being accelerated and decreased challenging the player in a stratigic route or just blinding speed choice making. The game was halariously great and really worked because of the mass communial play. If you haven't been to it get yourselves down there and check it out!

This is one of the quick tutorials that i did for visualisation with soft selection. This is going to be a large portion of whats going to make up the enviroment accompanying my rollercoaster enviroment maybe lofting a tube round the track and using soft selection to manipulate the tube into a more natural organic look. I used NURMS subdivision to give a smoother out look. thou i don't think that'll be needed when i do the inside of the cave as rocks are more jagged and sharp shapes in a cave enviroment.

after doing the hand rigging tutorial i felt like i needed to go through the tutorial again to get a better understanding of the process of putting it together. after finishing the construction i wanted to try my hand at some animation to get a feeling for it. here's one of my test runs. i found that there's alot more to animating than i thought. there's alot to concentrate getting the movements in a organic way.

Roller coaster concept cont....

With a good stock pile of images being a basis to work off when modeling the enviroment i wanted to get a better idea of what kinds of roller coasters were actually out there in real life.
youtube was a great resourse to dip into to get actual on coaster footage.
this was one of the video's i came across

roller coaster concept.

Just to get some of the ideas down that i think will be things for me to consider whilst doing the rollercoaster enviroment and design i thought it'd be best if i just blurted it down on here.
With both space and underwater their is alot to consider with the lighting and enviroments in mind to make the scene believeable and work in a rollercoaster animation.
Lighting underwater varies alot dependant on depth so i decided that it'd be best to get together some research on enviroments by stock pilling some photo's off the internet to get a feeling as to how things are in real life.









Here are a few of the pictures that I aquired from searching off the internet. These photo's show the specular propertys of light being refracted by the waters surface to create quite a beautiful lighting. Within 3dsmax im not quite sure how i'd go about recreacting these kinds of effects but this will be something to look into but I think doing something in after effects may be a easier way of producing some of the larger changes. Plus it'd probably save me a bundle of time in rendering and computing power too.

The more i keep thinking about this project the more I like the idea of a underwate cave theme. I think this would give me alot of playing power with the design of the track enviroment. The thought of weaving in between stone pillars in a vast dark cave where they become visable only a few milliseconds before you pass them from the ambient lighting of the carrage or a quick twist in the track that sends the rider down a crack in the cave straight into a underwater section gives me a real passion to get on with this to see how it turns out.

For my robot animation i have been set iv started just modeling some parts out so i can get a feel as to how its all going to come together.

they're still very rough thou this is the jet pack and knee node iv designed. i still have more work to do on them thou its a start.

Im still not sure about the back pack whether its over the top for a cartoon style animation. but maybe the serious nature of it will work well in a out of context situation so ill make a choice whether to keep it of not later once iv assembled all the parts of my robot together.

For the Knee joint I thought a floating segment would work pretty well. I think this will help my characters cartoon apearance as i could give the charicter to exagerated but believeable movements and make it seem realistic. I can just see him doing a robot style brake dance now =).

its pretty hard to visualise how the walking movement will turn out once i've animated it with a floating knee joint, in the way that it would look right. I may have to do a solid leg design just in case but i feel its to earlie to tell.

This was a quick build exersise from images given by our lecturers. It was a fun problem solving project that took about 25 mins.

3D modeling of a truck

This is one of the first experiments i did with 3dsmax. i got a hold of some schematics of a truck (front, top and side) and built the truck from scratch.
im not sure wheather to attempt to texture it as with building this i feel i'v learnt alot through doing it but i short cutted a few things where i didn't know what to do so when i unwrap it i know its going to mess up. I think it looks ok just by itself as a first go but i think i could definatly do it again and do it better next time.

Unreal tournament editor 3 animation

For my level i put together a animation sequence leaving up to a door opening giving access to invunrability. i thought it would to have 2 animation sequences running off each other. one to start the sequence that hid the dragon ( that symbolized the fire trap if trapped inside beforethe doors closed) and the other of the mechanics that oppened the doors with multipule cog movment. all in all about 130 moving parts. here's some stills of the opening sequence.

Unreal tournament editor 3

With knowing i was going to start a new course that I'd never done before i knew i would be behind on a few things that people will have covered in the previous year. to get my self up to spead i started to learn how to build computer game levels on unreal tournament 3. Learning to use unreal tournament 3 introduced me into motion graphs and simple animation that prepared myself for 3dsmax so if your new to the area i recomend getting the collectors edition of unreal tournament and sitting through the 60 hours of tutorial that they have on there. not only does it teach you all of the tools but it give you a real head for how to put together a real level with mesurments in mind. It was a lenghty process but here are some of the images of the finished results.

Orrery

This is the first exersise that we did just to get us back into the swong of things getting us used to rigging up models so move together.
applying lathe and loft modifers to make the base and legs and copying the spheres and reducing the size of them making the modle was pretty simple. With being fairly new to animation