Re: Fun post-season animation
 

BuddyB309:

That eye test was great... his expression at the end is classic :P

Mazin:

Are you viewing the correct image? The more recent one has better lighting, bump mapping, and some diffuse mapping (not much though). while it could use some work, I've decided just to move on. It was just a few days' fun project, nothing else :)

I used Vray for the rendering (far superior to scanline and MR). It's an ancient stripped-down version (they used to produce 2 versions: a free basic one and an advanced commercial one). Not sure if they're still giving out demos or not. Still a great renderer that makes MR look relatively weak.

What I've been up to:


(click for wallpaper-sized image)

I've been playing through the second Metroid Prime for the last few days and have only just started to realize how amazing it is. This image (rendered in mental ray) doesn't really represent a specific in-game area, but I was just trying to capture that "metroid-esque" atmosphere. If you've played Prime 1 or 2 you understand :) I didn't quite get it, but it sure makes me wonder about the awesome talents of the Retro Studio people.

A quick little day project involved me trying to figure out how those little compressed-air engines (that the Air Hogs planes use, if you have seen one of those) work. A couple of friends and I were playing with an old one in my basement last night, they're really neat. I made a quick little animation using my model.

View the .gif

View the final animation (YouTube)

Yeah, opacity mapping is huge. Definately get good at this, it saved my life numerous times. For example, every tree and plant in our animation was created through opacity mapping. This allows me to make a tree using 1 face, versus the hundreds of faces that make up max's foliage (those trees really kill rendertimes). Using opacity mapping, I can make happy little trees in a fraction of the time using a fraction of the processing power.

Anyway... keep it up guys :)

Re: Fun post-season animation
 

wow you guys are amazing, did you take any classes or learn from any professional 3ds max animators? or is this just time and effort with online tutorials and just "playing" the max?

also, about opacity mapping, can you reccomend anywhere online that gives a description and a few tutorials about it? sounds like a time-saver

Re: Fun post-season animation
 

yeah, there's some great stuff here :) For me, learning max was an individual thing. I didn't start with 3ds max directly, but instead with free easier stuff; that way, I could learn the basics of 3d without being confused and disheartened by max's complex interface :) When I got into max, then, I could focus on the interface and more complex features rather than starting from scratch.

I was just looking for opacity mapping tutorials, but haven't found anything terribly useful. I'll try to explain:


This is an image found in 3ds max's reference files, not mine

On the left you can see 2 different planes; the foremost one being a standard diffuse map and the one behind it being the opacity map.

When that opacity map is dropped into the "opacity" slot found in the standard material, you can see the effect that has on the final output (seen on the right in that image). Basically, max evaluates the opacity map and uses it to determine the transparency of the final material.

Opacity maps are most commonly greyscale images; you can see that pure black makes that area of the material completely transparent, while white represents an opaque area. Any grey area in between creates a semi-transparent material.

For example, the trees in our animation were all created with the following as an opacity map:



All I had to do was stick that material on a 2d plane to get a perfect tree. I'm not the greatest at explaining things, so if you have any more questions just let us know.

Re: Fun post-season animation
 

Nope, I didn't see the new mech image. Looks nice.

BTW, where did you get the opacity/diffuse maps for the trees? I've taken to baking some of the built-in max trees to single-plane ones, but other than that I haven't used them much. I do remember an old plugin that would automatically make forests of planar trees complete with the lookats for a camera. There was a stripped-down version and a commercial version I believe.

Re: Fun post-season animation
 

I did a google image search for "tree silhouette" and got dozens of great images, though most require some photoshopping (or in my case, PaintShopPro-ing) before they can be used as opacity maps.

Google = best resource, ever.

Re: Fun post-season animation
 

I did do some of this video with 3ds max. I took me about 2 weeks to complete. Its a promo video for winnovation.

promo video

Re: Fun post-season animation
 

Nice vid. I like the little gear/wrench animation. Looked professionally done ;) We'll probably be doing something along those lines next year, though not quite as long (they will go on our school's video announcements). How are you distributing your promo?

on a completely different note, I've been improving my texturing/material skills. Check out my new death bot (bipedal mechs are lame now :)).



Check out how the highlight only shows up on the white paint remaining on its "head" - where paint has chipped off, it's dull. Nailed that ;) It's still a WIP - I plan on animating it and of course giving it automatic weapons (you can see the gun bays, the 2 closed panels on the lower-front portion of the bot).

Re: Fun post-season animation
 

[quote=abroerman]

on a completely different note, I've been improving my texturing/material skills. Check out my new death bot (bipedal mechs are lame now :)).

QUOTE]

I envy you. How do you get that good. What are your techniques and what do you look for when creating models.

I understand what any tutorials about modleing can teach me on the intrernet but I dont have the technique down to create a professional looking model. What are you doing thats different than what im doing? Are you useing spline modeling, box modeling, or vertex? How do you get good textures? How many hours are you spending into each model you make?

Re: Fun post-season animation
 

Thanks :) I'd say the most helpful thing is having a reference image. I drew this one up a few weeks ago (I get bored at school just like everyone else :)) You can see how much I changed it in the final version, but it's still nice to have some direction. Sitting down in max and arbitrarily modeling something is pretty difficult for me to do.

Once that's done, the modeling is pretty simple. It looks complex, but when you break it down, it's easy. The legs are all extruded splines and the "eyes" are lathed splines. The head covering started as a sphere, then using edit poly I cut out what I didn't want (using quickslice mostly). I could have spent more time cleaning up the mesh, but it works.


I also made heavy use of the "shell" modifier. You can see how thin and worthless the above mesh looks- I used Shell to give it depth.

For little details, such as the hydraulic lines and the little wire "collar" assembly the bot has, I used splines. You can tell max to take an otherwise infinitely-thin spline and give it a radial thickness. Later on, if I animate the legs, I can animate the spline's control vertices to give the hydraulic lines convincing movement. (if you have questions over any of this I can go over it in more detail).

Textures are easily the most important, and sometimes most difficult, part of the scene. I like to use Mayang's free texture library (aside from google of course). None of the textures tile seamlessly that I'm aware of, but the photos are great starting points, with all sorts of rusted-up steel, cracked paint, etc. Making your object look dirty and weathered is harder than leaving it spotless, but as I've learned, the results look much better.

You can see how light reflects more off of the painted areas vs. the rusted areas; this adds huge realism yet is extremely easy to do. This is achieved though glossiness mapping-any area on the glossiness map that appears white will have a highlight, while darker areas on the map will appear dull.

While there is a lot that went into that model, I'm sure that you're familiar with nearly all of the techniques that I used for it. It just takes practice and patience - take your time and concentrate on each individual element, one thing at a time. Unfortunately, that sort of mentality disappears during build season due to the rather demanding deadlines, but it's a good thing to strive for I guess.

One last piece of advice - look out!

Re: Fun post-season animation
 

I animated the quad 'bot a couple weeks ago but never posted it; just a simple walk cycle. Forgive poor .gif quality:

Re: Fun post-season animation
 

Good but I want to give a few pointers about it.

When animating a character I try to visualize how the character weight is going to be distributed. Your robot picks up two legs at a time one directly opposite of another leaving the other two to support the robot. If this robot did this in real life there would be nothing to stop the robot from falling to one side. (am I explaining this alright?)

Plus your robot's body is swaying side to side. This means that its throwing its weight to its side as it walks. In real life this would cause the robot to topple over since there is no foot there to stop the robots weight from going that way.

Its a good start and a little head bob when the feet lands would also make it a little more convincing. fiddle around with it and look at the way some animals use their four legs when that walk. (not trotting though they have to walk)

I have a animation of two little robots comming soon. There not that great of character modeling in the robots but I think I make it up with there animation. :D

Re: Fun post-season animation
 

Yeah, the physics aspect of the bot is pretty terrible, but haven't really cared to fix it. The real point of this was to practice rigging\texturing more than anything else.

I'm kind of abandoning this project (I lose steam pretty quickly if I don't care about something ;)) in favor of a paper model of Serenity, if anyone is familiar with the movie by that name or the show "firefly". I found one on the internet, but it is of pretty low quality, and lacks the detail I want. so I've set out in max to create one of my own. If you aren't familiar with papermodeling, it involves printing out templates onto card stock that you cut out, fold, glue, etc. The fact that the medium is a heavy paper means the mesh can't be all that detailed, you can see I'm keeping it pretty low-poly:



Right now I've only got the "head" and half of the "neck", it's going pretty slowly (with AP tests and all the make-up work from championships ;))
I'll hang the model in my room when I'm done, it will probably be about 2' long. It will be sweet ;)

Re: Fun post-season animation
 

well, i am gonna say that i envy your sk1llz. Your robot really rocks. I made a cheapo knockoff robot of my own (about 1/30 quality compared to yours) to play with in compositing. I now have a pic of him sitting on my desk, will post pic later.

I want to make a little vid of him crawling around on my desk, so can you recommend a tutorial that you used for rigging the legs? I tried a few things, but they were ghetto and didn't work how i wanted. thanks.

Re: Fun post-season animation
 

thanks... I'm surprised myself how it came out (model/render wise). Turns out this time I actually managed to trick max into doing something I wanted... you can probably relate.

Regarding your robots legs, it really depends on how it is set up. I don't know of any tutorials that explain what you're looking for, but I'll try to help as much as I can :cool:

Basically, the rigging process involved using the "select and link" tool to link the robot in the following (highly simplified) hierarchy:

[parent - Robot Center]
--[leg base]
----[rest of leg]

Movement is passed down the hierarchy, but not up. For example, rotating the leg bases of my bot rotated the entire leg, but not the 'Robot Center'.

Or maybe you completely understand hierarchies, sorry if that's the case. Let us see how your bot is set up, maybe we can help more. good luck with it:)

Re: Fun post-season animation
 

I started something yesterday inspired by abroerman's death bot. I love the legs yet I hate the body. I have talked to a few people and the largest suggestion is to reconstruct the head completely, yet I have no ideas of what to replace it with at this point. Any ideas?
PS I love the legs so much! (it has toothed treads on its legs because it looks cool)