3D Max Unit 64-65 Evaluation

Above are two of hee final renders of my 3D Max project.

I am very pleased with how this project has turned out and at all of the skill sI have learned from doing it in ithe process. I have goen from never using 3D Max to learnign how to create simple shapes to animated space ships, basic environments and skinning the models.

Over the course of the project, mu shiop desing has changed from its original design plans of being a coffin shaped body with tomb stones and mausoleum attatched to it.The designs have since changed to being still a coffin shaped body, but now, instead of a mausoleum and tomb stones,, they have been replaced by "arms" that reach out of the back of the ship cageing the body of the ship.

So even though the design of the shi may have changed through the course of the project, I believe the overall product has met my intentions of creating a a space ship with a dark/gothic theme and the addition of a moon and planet with the animation was an added bonus to the product.

I started the project by researching defferent ships and creating mood boards with a selection of some of my favourite ships from different tv series but primarily from the sci-fi series Babylon 5.

Once I had researched the different ships and how they look, I chose the theme for my ship and started making sketches of different thigns that could be related ot my ship. In my case I drew thigns such as mausoleums, grave stones, skulls and fangs as an influence. This later influenced the main design sketches I drew of my ship.

I drew the plans of my ship in traditional architect style - front, back, side and overhead views and being in rough scale.

Once I ahd comeplted my designs I follwed them closelsy when I first started in 3D Max but the more I worked on the ship, the more it started to stray from tehe plans - I managed to create a coffin styled body for the ship and created something similar to a tombstone to represent the bridge of the ship. But eventually I decided not to do the mausoleum as upon doing it I found it made the ship look to blocky and simple. Instead I had the idea for the ship to ahve some sort of "arms" reaching out from the with the idea that they would act as weapons or propulsion for the ship.

After much trouble of figuring out how to get the arm to curve out of the body of the ship, I coppied the arms and attatched them to the body of the ship.

Once I had all the ship in one piece and looking lie a basic ship I started to unwrap the model so I could put the mesh into photoshop and create its skin that would cover the model. In most cases poeple would use light colours to make their ship stand out, but I thought that if it was real and it was some sort of military ship, trhe sensible thing to do wuld be to make it harder to see, at least harder to see from a window. So with that in mi nd I chose a darker colour pallete of blacks, dark reds and dark oranges mixed/coulded together to create its skin.

I then saved the new skin and applied it in 3D Max to the model to create my finished ship. However for some reason, it didn't skin quite properly and so there are some places on the ship that don't appear to be skinned properly.

However, witht eh ship itself finished I then went to work on animating the ship. I took a full day and several video tutorials to figure it out, but I eventually got the ship to follow a set path and i then to add something to make it look more interesting in th e background. My first idea was to add a spacestation but that quickly changed and soon became a planet and a moon. I eventually got t he moon to orbit around the palnet too so the ship flies about as the moon orbits the planet.

I also found images online of the moon and several different images of earth. I stuck an image of the moons surface onto the smaller of the planets which would become the moon in my 3D environment. I then went through several maps of earth and tried applying them to the larger planet. But that went wrong and I ended up with a rather large white crack going along the planet, until I found a night time image of the planet. That night time image fit the planet prefectly, and so i had a (nearly) completely skinned ship, a moon and a planet earth complete with animation and nebula background for when I rendered the animation/images.

Throughout this project I have learnt many new skills, boht from a research/design aspect of looking at how the ship would work and its functions, to designing skins within photoshop to be applied on my models and finally to the many and complex controls and options that are available in 3D Max and has left me wanting to learn much more about what I could do with that program.

If I had to do the project again, the only thing I would do different would be to try more of the many options and tools available in teh program and to see how they affect my model.

Unit: 67 Reflection

UNIT: 67 GAME TRAILER STORYBOARD

For unit 67 we were assigned the tast to produce a storyboard of our own design but we had to include a character from a cartoon/comic somewhere in our storyboard. We were first tasked with researching about how comics/storyboards were made and how they work. This was important to do so we knew how to lay out our storyboards and create our designs based around that. In this research I mainly looked at two main styles of storyboard/comic styles - the western storyboard stlye where it is read left to right and the Japanese style of storyboards/comics where it is read right to left. I found the Japanese style to be the most interesdting of the two as I am quite inot manga and anime. However by the time I finished the my actual product I ended up using the standard western style/layout.

After researching about storyboard layouts I then researched about the character I had chosen to include in my stoyboard - in this case I chose to do Harley Quinn from DC's Batman: The Animated Series. I chose to do that character because she is unique. Her character was created just for the animated series to be a female henchman for the Joker but fans of teh series liked her character so much she eventually ended up with her own animation series, own comic series and was officially included into the canon of the DC Universe.

I researched about her character, the artistic style that was used to creatye her as well as researching about the actual people who were responsible for chreating her character, the reasons why they created her and how they created her - such as who influenced her character etc.

Once I had researched layout styles and how storyboards are used and researched my chosen character I then created my scripts and drew several versions of Harley Quinn in various outfits and poses. Once my script was written and my test drawings were finsihed I chose my layout style and started work on my final product - the storyboard itself.

I started at first by drawing a rough version of the storyboard with basic images to show what was happening. I then i n my own time redid this storyboard and took my time doing the drawings so they were clear and showed whta I wanted but were basic enough that I could easily scan in the sketches into photoshop where I could then colour and edit thm into my final product.

I scanned in my drawings, though I had some technical problems and would only scan in parts of the drawing, but after messing around with it for a while I eventually got it to scan the full page so I could put it all into photoshop.

Once the drawings were in photoshop i proceeded to cut out the frames fromt eh rest of the page and put them onto a blank page in A3 size. I put all frames onto this new A3 screen and proceeded to put them into their order and started to colour then in - line art style.

However while I was doing this - moving the images and colouring them in, I was forgetting to add the colour to the layer that the frame was actually on so i made a mess of things if I decided I wanted to move one of the frames a bit. Even though I made a mess of it that way I think I fixed the storyboard so it didn't go into to much chaos.

During the colouring of the storyboard I used images that I had created myself to also be used in the storyboard. For example, in the scene where you are looking in through the window, on the tv you can see the 3D ship I designed in my 3D class, and during the scenes where harley is fading into view from the TV, the swirling purple background was an image i created in photoshop to be a unique backround for an presentation work I have to do to mark it as my own.

Below is my final version of the storyboard I created in photshop based on my own drawings and with the inclusion of Harley Quinn - my unique character for the storyboard.

Product Review

I feel that my end product matched my original intentions, although the layout is slighytly different due to me messing up on the colouring. However, I my product brief I said I was going to do it manga style where you read it backwards. When it came to me making the product I instead created it in the normal western stlye of storyboards. That was my only major change from my original intentions.

Above aer some of the storyboard/comic layout styles I researched to base my own storyboard on.

Overall I feel my product is appropriate for my target audience - which is every one of all ages, gender and race, however I feel t hat if I were to continue the series it would be aimed more at males in the teenage years and older.. I feel it reaches this goal as there is no graphic content that could cause offence, it has slight humour in it and has fairly well designed chracters in it.

Technical Aspects

In the technical aspects I used a scanner to scan in my A3 sketches and used the cut tool to slice out the frames of my storyboard and move htem across into the main screen. From here I used mainly the basic tools and useage of text to create and colour the storyboard. I feel the main amount of technical and artistic aspects came into play in the actyal colouring of the images - even if i was colouring htem in the wrong layers. I feel that the colouring was the best technical aspect during the creation of the storyboard due to the details I went into in the colouring - adding shading to the faces to make it seem more 3D and just look better, I used different opacity levels to achieve this instead of shading just using solid colours that would have looked out of place. I also used the opacity setting in some of the images of Harley to make it appear that she was fading into view in some of the frames each time her form becoming a more solid colour.

Therefore I feel that my artistic skills were the best part of hte project, even though my drawing skill aren't very good, I am still pleased with how the images turned out, especially the close up shot of the punk looking girl.

As stated previously the only problems encountered when making the storyboard, other then the technical issues with the scanner, were forgetting to change to the correct layer when I was colouring. This led to problems when I wanted to move the image later. I resolved this issue thoguh by designing the storyboard around it so it didn't look as bad as it could have been.

The main thing I have learnt from doing this unit is improving my drawing skill but more importantly - REMEMBER TO USE LAYERS CORRECTLY!

As just said above, I believe through this project, I have built up more skills in photoshop as well as slowly starting to improve my drawing skills which is something I definately want to improve throughout this course.

I believe I have met the deadline and had little problem with time management, except when I had technical problems such as corrupt usb's and my computer breaking.

Finally, overall I am happy with how my product turned out. Though I feel that it could have looked better if I hadn't donet he colouring in the wrong layers. Therefore if I had a chance to do it again, I would take much more care when I'm colouring to maske sure I'm doing it on the correct layers and to space out the storyboard so it doesn't look such a mess.