3D Planet

Today I planned to carry on with animating Tom the Monster but I didn't feel up to it and earlier on in the day I found a nice looking tutorial to make a 3D Planet on secondpicture.com. So I decided to have a go at that instead and here is the result...



It was a very clear tutorial and I enjoyed using and learning more about maps, especially displacement, composite, gradient, bump and opacity. It also let me use the SuperSampler for the first time!

What do you think?

Update: 01/09/09
Made this video, not pleased with it but it took 15hrs (!!!) to render so I might as well post it for now. Please watch it in HQ.


Music: John Martyn - Bless The Weather

Tom the Monster and his new world

To make sure I don't forget everything in 3ds Max (as I have been using Maya a little bit more this summer) I decided to design a new character.

I didn't want to create someone or something with a complexity that would give me a hard time animating (which I am thinking of doing in MotionBuilder, so he is pretty much a blob with legs and long arms.
His name is Tom the Monster (for short) and his full name is Tom Jeffredavichrisamickyle IV.
This is what he looks like at the moment...


So I started making him this morning but after a while (as usual) my mind wondered, I got distracted by the internet and started watching George Carlin videos on youtube! After this, and a quick bite to eat I decided I wanted to make a world for him, following an escalight.com tutorial and this is what it turned out to be...




Music: The Beatles - Drive My Car

Update: 29/08/09
Tom is almost alive!


Music: Jim Hall - All Across The City

Rubik's Cube Animation

Well that was a lot easier and less time consuming than I thought it was going to be thanks to Zigmar7. I used a very simple max script to animate this in a more realistic way so i'm happy about that because scripting scared me before now! The more I read up about 3D animation though, the more I realise its importance and needed.




Music: Bill Evans & George Russell Orchestra - Living Time, Event V

Rubik's Cube

I was waiting around for something to arrive earlier, so I decided to kill some time (about an hour and a half) by quickly modeling, texturing, lighting a scene for a Rubik's Cube.




Might have a go at animating it in the summer.


Music: Battles - Rainbow

Lip Sync - First Attempt

Well here is my first try at lip syncing with 3ds Max. It's not as easy as I thought it would be. I have probably spent a total of 3-4 hours working at this and I'm still not totally happy with the results... it's just so hard! So I wanted to post this at least to show where I am now and what I would have hopefully progressed to later on.

Last night I was reading an article about lip syncing in 3D World magazine and they made a pretty useful distinction between tracking software and morph editors... check out the article in issue 114 and the final animation here... you might recognise it! :)

This render took approximately 13 hours! I think this is the longest piece of animation I have rendered.




Music: John Mayall - Won't Have To Worry

Jack-o'-lantern: Quick Exercise

I wanted to create something new to allow me to find it easy to experiment with lighting and effects.

Modelling time: Half an hour
Total Rendering time: Half an hour to an hour
Software used: 3ds Max, Photoshop CS3







It was very easy to model because I used this tutorial.

Dead Arm no.2

Slightly improved the textures on the arm and wall, and added a few more movements for a 10 second animation.







Thoughts pleeeease!

Animating The Dead Arm

Using forward kinematics



Next week we're covering Inverse Kinematics

Please leave your thoughts.

Bouncing Ball

Dead Arm

Robot Arm...

This is the first time I've used the bump map in 3Ds Max and the first time I've experimented with lighting (as last year I was using Maya). Please leave your thoughts.




Music: Metallica - For Whom The Bells Toll

My Train

To give the train some scale...





Made in 3Ds Max and Photoshop CS3, over the course of two days.

I realise that they are not that great (looking at a few other mm students) so i will be gradually working on them and improving the realistic side. For now, they have the scale that's needed.

The Second Self - Part 1, 2 & 3

Animation: Maya 2008 Unlimited
Editing: Final Cut Pro
Music: A clip from something I wrote and recorded about 3 years ago, then re-wrote and re-recorded last year. It's called Minima.

I still have to make my person/avatar/alter-ego 3D thingy whatsit, but I'm pleased with the way it's heading so far I decided to upload and add music for the purpose of watching it progress...



Comments welcome!



Music: The Beatles - Blackbird

Robot Legs On The Run

My first attempt at making legs move in 3Ds Max. I was going to go for a more humanistic jive, but after playing around with various steps I thought the robot walk was looking most bad ass

A Tree in 3Ds Max

A quick 3D image I made of a tree in a very simple environment. Here is an animation...

The Future?

First I want to show my first attempt at animation in 3D Max it's my little aquatic friend called Squiddy, he's wearing a funky dunce hat...

I'm finding 3D Max an awkward piece of software to figure out at the moment, maybe because I don't have it on my computer to use in my own time and I have to find the time to go into Waverley and set everything up out of my own environment. But once I get my head round it, which I am determined to do the aim is to create my own avatar and have him doing something for about 3 minutes. Ideas for the avatar haven't sprung to mind yet. It's a very strange assignment for me. I have spent my life trying to find out who I am, now I have to create an alter ego and display it in a virtual world for everyone to see.

I really enjoyed my lecture on Tuesday with Deb, it was very interesting. The assignment given is to predict the future. Yep... but specifically the future use of Moveable Projected Displays using Projector Based Tracking
We also discussed the history of Multimedia, which should now be called Hypermedia, a name that for some reason i'm not too fond of. Maybe because hyper is a term used for the internet/website design and I have never got on with web design.
Its history looks something like this:
Image
Text
Photography
Telephone
Film
Sound
Computing
Multimedia
Hypertext
Hypermedia

We also looked at a new game called Crysis with some incredible graphics. Check out some of these videos...








I think my radio show is going well. It's a pity not many people are listening to it however i'm going to get the actual numbers tomorrow or Friday

I'm addicted to Twin Peaks at the moment. It's a fantastic TV Series by David Lynch; one of my favourite directors. The stories and music walk hand in hand with each other. If you haven't already you should watch this. It's got me drinking black coffee once a day, at least!


Watching: Twin Peaks - Episode 16