Another Hand Post

More hand edits. This time on my priest. I did some test rigging a while back, and one thing i noticed once i posed him was that his hands were massive. On top of that, they were a bit too realistic for his style, and totally weren't fat enough. I went to extremes with his new hands:

Last minute character model edits

Since i'm just about to start blocking out my animation in 3D, i wanted to make the few last edits to my characters before i get them in my master scene. I've always found modelling hands challenging due to their complexity. For my professor i had originally modelled a hand from top and side photographs of my own hand. What i ended up with however wasn't great, the fingers were too short, and very thin and tapered. They weren't really in the style of the rest of the character either. I decided to make some changes to make the fingers a bit more square and stylised, as well as to generally shape the hand better. Here's the results:

More Modelling 02

 Been doing more modelling work on my environment. Here are some basic renders, just to test the lighting

 

 

Adding details to the scene

One thing i noticed from all of my reference is that school classrooms or kindergartens are normally very cluttered. In order to get my scene looking right, i knew i had to add loads of little details to give it a cluttered feeling. Today i have been working on modelling those details - Art supplies, boxes, baskets, books, etc. Some shots are below. Please ignore the textures, as i have not put any in yet:

With this shot i did some basic lighting to make sure the render times weren't too large.

 

More Modelling

I've been really busy modelling, making quite a few different things. One thing i made was a children's coat rack to go in the classroom. Although there will only be one girl in the class during my animation i thought it would be nice to have at least some stuff in the coatrack, to give the room a lived in feel. Here's a breakdown of how i made the props to go inside the rack.

Of all the objects, the lunchbox was the simplest, basically just a slightly modified chamfered box:

 To make the glove i used a part of one of my characters to save time on remodelling:

 For the scarf i used 3DSMax's built in cloth simulation. It didn't yield the perfect results, so i just made a few edits by hand to it after. This was quicker than messing about with all the settings and trying to get the simulation perfect, and wouldnt cause a problem since the scarf doesn't need to move.

Projector Modelling

 Today i modelled a ceiling-mounted projector for the scene. Since it acts as a prop, and there is going to be a close up shot of it, i decided to put in quite a lot of detail. Luckily, i was able to re-use the vent that i made for the OHP several days ago, saving me some time on the modelling. The most challenging aspect of the modelling was the wires in the back:

Here is the method i used to create them:

The completed projector

I also modelled a Fire Extinguisher, although the modelling methods i used were unremarkable:

Continued Modelling Environment

I have continued modelling my environment, focusing today on the Fire Exit Door and windows. Since there is a number of shots that show them clearly, i have spent extra time putting detail into them.

 I have also done a quick experiment using a daylight system. I hope to get a nice lighting solution eventually. I plan on baking an ambient occlusion pass into the textures of the models, as this will save on render time. I am also considering rendering the characters seperately from the environment, but i will do more thorough tests closer to the time. For now, this was just to check that nothing i have made so far is driving the render time up - which it isn't; this frame only took 5 seconds to render, with both Global Illumination and Final Gather turned on.

Technical challenge 2 - phone cable

My next challenge came in the form of a phone wire. Again, this would be a difficult and time consuming object to try and model using simple methods such as box modelling. A little research online helped me to figure out another method for making this complicated shape.

Although this did yield a very nice result it clocked in at a massive 19,000 vertices - more than doubling the amount of verts in the scene, and on its own nearly as much as one of my characters! Since the phone is not important to the plot in any way, and is merely an object to add detail to the background the wire may be removed later on to save on render time. For now though, it can look nice in my environment.

Blog Repurpose and Technical challenges

Following the change of my idea for my animation, my blog is being repurposed to focus on my new story.

Since it is a requirement that i keep a blog or workbook of the technical challenges i face in my project, this is where i will do that.

So to begin - i'm modelling my environment. I'm trying to get it to look relatively realistic, so i know that adding the small subtle details will help me achieve this.

I'm quite confident modelling, so most geometric objects like tables and chairs don't really phase me. Rather than discussing all my modelling techniques, i'm going to list anything i did that saved me a lot of time, or helped avoid future problems.

I have an overhead project (OHP) that is used as a prop in one of the shots, so i wanted to make it quite detailed. Most OHP's have some kind of vent on the unit. To model a vent polygon by polygon would take a long time. Instead, i came up with a more efficient method: