How to advance in 3ds Max

I think in order for me to achieve better results in 3ds Max I must look at more tutorials and read some books. I have already bought two books offline about 3ds Max but haven’t really read into them that much. This break I am determined to read both books fully while practicing what is within the books in 3ds Max itself. Although I was pleased with my work a lot this term for this project, I feel like I should be a bit more advanced in my skills.
I feel that I should also buy a Mudbox book from the internet, I feel this programme is an excellent modelling alter, it seems very easy an accessible to drawers like myself. I already have a tablet and pen, so it would be very beneficial for me use this also.

Conclusion- Bots and Bananas- 500 word

In conclusion I am rather pleased with my final piece for this of ‘Bots and Bananas’ project. At first to begin this project I began to draw some initial ideas of robots and draw some environment plans. When I came to my final choice for my robot and my environment I began to create them in 3ds Max straight away. My robot took a few weeks to construct, but wasn’t too hard to make, because my final design was relatively strong, not much was needed to change. However, the design became a real struggle later when it came to rigging, well the legs that is. Due to the robots stumpy carves it was hard to put in HI IK solvers, every time I would try to move the legs, joints would move out of place, and this caused a lot of stress on me and prevented me furthering the project. But it gave me a valuable lesson to design more carefully next time and see if the body’s structure will be easy to animate. The environment wasn’t too bad to design either, it was just a matter of getting it the way I first designed it in my drawings. I took a lot out of it because I didn’t want to have to big a file size, because it would mean long renders, and a lot of time consuming near to the deadline, and I didn’t want to risk failing on my first attempt at animating. To me this project I didn’t want to put too much into it and stress myself out, it was all about adapting in this project to the idea of animating.

Animating itself was difficult at first, getting to grips with frames. Sometimes along the way if something wasn’t animated correctly legs would end up twitching in certain scenes or even coming out of their own sockets. Excluding all these negatives, there were a lot of advantages to the this overall project. One of them being camera angles. Using the ‘range’ option in render set up helped me a big deal when changing camera angles. It helped give a bigger picture to the whole plot. I think my choice of music and noises gave a great depth to the piece as well. The robots own noises e.g. his footsteps gave him a lot more character and made it seem a lot more relatable. When it came to editing this piece in Premier I think I could have polished up the movie more with some fade ins, I think they would of complemented the change in scenes. On the subject of scenes, the actual gag itself took a while to make obvious, I kept having to re-edit when he fell over the rock so it was obvious to the viewer. The only last problem have with this project was getting a good quality on the video, I wanted to make it a lot sharper, but couldn’t do so with the options in Premier, in order to do so I would have to go back to 3ds Max and render over again. But again excluding these negatives that I have learnt from, I enjoyed the end result to my piece and think it’s very fun and enjoyable to watch.

Anamatic from Cem Kilinchan on Vimeo.

Avoiding Bad Luck from Cem Kilinchan on Vimeo.

the final product.....

robot beginnings.....

Landscape

The pavement/sidewalks images on the side helped me create the design for this piece. I could have added more props to the piece but I didn’t want the surroundings to be too realistic, I want the surroundings to be quite cartoony and non-serious to help boost my characters believability as a childish robot

Storyboard

Final Design

As you can see I chose the middle design robot as the main basis for the final design. I also incorporated some parts from the other two robots above to make the final design that much more robotic.

Initial Ideas

Here are a couple designs of mine. I designed quite a few to give me a variation of what parts and pieces I could apply to my final designed robot. Along the design process I realised that the cute simple robots that I designed are not only the easiest to create but also fit the role of my story, as the character must look rather innocent and naive to pull the story off.

Influences

Most of my designs are influenced by Japanese robots; most of the structures within my designs are mirrored from them. To me they seem best because they’re rather basic in their design and not too jagged around the surfaces, they are usually roundish is most parts, which to me seems easier to animate.

Of Bots and Banana- 'Avoiding Bad Luck'- Robot Animation

Story outline- The outline of this story is about a robot who is trying to avoid bad luck, hence the name of the title ‘Avoiding Bad Luck’. During the start of the story the robot is walking down a road when he stumbles upon a load of broken pavements. The robot knowing that the broken pavement slabs are supposedly bad luck he decides to avoid them by jumping in-between them and landing on the good ones in a hopscotch manner. When he finally reaches the end he turns back to look back on his achievement. He then walks back in the other direction he was walking in before all cocky to only completely miss a banana on the pavement and slip and fall on his bottom. The story then ends with the banana on his head and him on his bottom looking towards the screen gutted.

Moving Image

Overall our Moving Image piece was of a great success. Our given script was ‘Dog’, I can’t say it was easy, because it wasn’t, conjuring a piece with the line ‘From outside the toilet we hear a difficult shit taking place’ was going to be hard from the start. Our take on the story was that the man had been hypnotised into becoming a dog. The whole piece itself is pretty much about him going through his daily routine acting like a dog, until you discover at the end (our added scene) that he was in fact hypnotised to be like. This is unveiled when his wife enters from a day at work shocked to see him in his state of acting like a dog, and a fallen ticket to a hypnotist showing.

Filming although time consuming (11 hours for one day and an hour the next day) was worth it in the end. I think it took us a while this time around compared to the One shot because we desired perfection, we had the option this time of repeating our scenes, unlike one shot we had to be done in one take. Being the camera man, this was very tiring and repetitive for me. Especially when the shots required me to use the camera without the tripod, because I had to be very still and sharp.

Our scenes in general turned our well, we were fortunate to have good weather during our park, café and street scenes and were lucky that there wasn’t that many people there to disturb out shots. We actually struggled the most with the indoor scenes when our character is at home. It was difficult to shoot due lighting. The lighting was probably the worse disadvantage through the whole process of filming because we had to get the lighting right in every scene. As it started to get darker outside meant that we had to modify the camera a lot to match the lighting, and move the lights around a bit to get it accurate to the previous scene we may have shot.

One of the great advantages we added to this piece was the POV. We gave the character/viewer the option of seeing the world through a dogs eyes in black and white. I think generally all the scenes worked very well, the actor we had playing the role of a dog was convincing and played the role well. All in all it was a long process, but considerably fun to make.

Online Environments

Overall I enjoyed coming up with the concept for Cems Impossible quiz. As you can see the concept of this game came about through the inspiration of the game series the Impossible quiz. The concept of the game is to have the most ridiculous questions followed along with the most ridiculous answers.

I wanted to keep the background basic to resemble the Impossible quiz itself, its very childish and plain in its design. Overall there's 12 twelve questions, I wanted to keep it short and simple.

There were quite a few disadvantages to this quiz. One of them was the videos, although I had used URLS that ended in flv, it was still struggling to show these videos when uploaded, which was rather frustrating because then the questions with the videos had no relevance. However, they still work within flash itself and as their swf files when not uploaded to the internet. Although it isn't really a disadvantage, I found that the actionscript was a real bother, a lot of time it stopped me from doing more creative questions that would be more interactive with the user, e.g. move shapes or text to achieve a point , but combing so many actions together sometimes doesn't work.

There were also a lot of advantages to the quiz. I felt the comedy side and the music complemented one another. Also my little animations made it feel more fun. Having a character accompany your questions give it a more of a feel that its a game and not chore. I also like the shining tween effect I added to the my writing, it continually shines, and looks more appealing to the user who is playing it.

Overall I enjoyed doing this Online Environments games quiz, but I don't believe its for me, Virtual Environments is still my desired pathway.




Interactive Quiz by ~cemshaolin on deviantART

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNXG80_b42o Better view

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