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have since changed to being still a coffin shaped body, but now, instead of a mausoleum and tomb stones,, they have been replaced by "arms" that reach out of the back of the ship cageing the body of the ship.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.