Sketches and Planning

 This is a quick storyboard I've drawn up drafting out the events in my animation of my environment. Film grain will be continuous except for the opening pan shot and the ending shattering screen.

 The completed digital concept sketch for Roberts Park Bandstand. Front and Top elevations

 Uncompleted Digital Sketch

One point perspective of my planned environment. The statue will probably be destroyed in my environment.

3D Environment Progress Post

I'm currently making good progress with this model. The basic shapes are easy enough to model from standard primitives. Right now, I need to work on the detail of the Bandstand such as the pillar supports and railings. Texturing will most likely present a challenge because I am not very confident with mapping. Creating the textures themselves shouldn't present much of a problem as I am fairly confident with my photoshopping skills. My style of choice is inspired by the hit video game "the Walking Dead" which has quite an easy to replicate visual appeal.

The Bandstand is mostly completed, all that is left to do on this model is the railings. I'm going to be modeling separate models to be exported into this environment.

Now that the bandstand itself is mostly completed, I've begun to model little extra things such as this unfinished stereo. I plan to add a few more objects such as violins or guitars. The texture for this particular model is presenting quite the interesting challenge. I'm mostly grabbing bits of images and putting them onto the UVW map in photoshop. Some of the texture is being drawn by me personally. So far I'm not really sticking with the comic style and steering towards photo-realism which will be very hard to do correctly.

The stereo is finished!

Just a quick render. I've been continuing making small objects such as bins to be put into this environment. It shouldn't be to long before I'll start to create the rest of the main environment, the half-moon cafe and statue platform included. It should present quite an interesting challenge and I look forward to trying to model it... or so I say

This session, I have begun to model a mirror that shall be used in the final animation. This is the first stand in the model. The mirror shall be used to transition my environment into another team members most likely Rory as he is modeling the Half-Moon cafe... yes, he stole a part of my planned environment...

With the mirror completed, I can now try to focus on the rest of the model. I tried a displacement map on a plane for the ground but it made my poly count sky-rocket. A limitation with using this kind of software is you can't have a model to high poly or it will destroy the computer. 3DS Max has a habit of crashing when a model becomes ultra high in poly count... I've learnt this the hard way

I have now started on the surrounding environment for the bandstand. This render has no Skydome but I have now created one. Skydomes are simple to make once you know what to do. They are made from standard spheres and then cut in half, the remaining polygons are then flipped. A sky texture is then applied giving the affect of a sky!

Lighting and atmospherics have been completed and I am now animating my environment. The fog was created by editing the environment parameters to include fog. Two types of fog can be added in the environment editor, a volumetric fog and standard fog. The setting used in this environment render is a standard fog. Volumetric fog just looks a little fake to me and looks like it's just slapped on at the last minute. Here's some more epic panning shots:

Professional Example!

I would like my model to be inspired by the style used in this video. It's a 3D representation of a western comic-book style so it should be reletively easy to replicate. Luckyly my model won't require this much detail and I won't need human models!

My hopes for this project is to get something similar to what is shown in the video... but obviously at my current skill level, that isn't really going to happen.

House Model Practice

We have begun to learn to model interiors of buildings. We've started by replicating simple floor plans from the ground up. We were taught to use the Standard Primitive "Box" to make the walls but I found it much easier to make the walls out of AEC Extended "Wall". The door was a prebuilt one within 3Ds Max. I have yet to texture this model because I don't really know how to Map my models to Apply Textures.

3D Environment! First attempts

We were tasked with creating a photorealistic environment using a displacement map. First we created a JPEG file in photoshop as seen here. As you can see, Lighter areas are the parts that'll be higher up, it's sort of like a gradient map. To get this effect, we created a plane in 3Ds Max and added the modifier "Displace" which moulds the plane into the shape created by the JPEG in Photoshop.







Next up was starting to model a building. We were tasked with modeling Salts Mill/Shipley College. We modeled it from Planes and used Photos as temlplates. We started with a polygon count of 4 and built out from those 4 polygons. It was very challenging to get started but once I got going it was reletively easy until it came to individual parts of the building such as the windows and the arch on the roof!

Team Logo Development

The picture above is my original Concept Sheet for our Team Logo. Our Team Name is Cyberchondriacs, you might be wondering; "what is a Cyberchondriac?" if you're not, tough, I'm explaining it anyway. A Cyberchondriac is a variation of a Hypochondriac. They look up symptoms they thing they posses and get extremely paranoid with whatever comes up, thinking they have that specific disease. We chose it as our Team name for a number of reasons:

1. Our Flash artist (Rory) uses it as his DeviantART account name
2. It sums most of our team up nicely
3. It just sounds awesome

First order of business, we had to experiment with different Fonts for our Logo's. Seeing as our name implies computers and such, I decided  to search for some sci-fi inspired styles. I also experimented with a few gothic styles as well, just for a bit of diversity. Next, we had to think about colour schemes weather it be blues, reds, greens, yellows... whatever. I went for blues and maybe a little green. Blue my not sound to cyber-esque but I took that colour scheme from Tron which uses blues everywhere. After that, we considered types of shapes, I considered a sort of Trible pattern but turned out to be a flop.After Failing my trible idea, I looked at logos such as the Rockstar Games Logo and the Machinima Logo which are quite simple and easy to understand.

This design came out a whole lot better than my trible inspired logo. It could still use some tweeking though. For instance, the small print may be to hard to read once the logo is very small. A solution to this could be a larger font wraped around the logo itself.

Production Team

Team Name: Cybercondriacs

Team Leader: Ali Ahmed
Concept artists: Leanne and Lawrence
Photoshop Artist: Lawrence
Flash artist: Rory
3D Modeler: Tony

Blogs:

Tony: http://www.tonysgamedevelopmentblog.blogspot.co.uk
Rory: http://www.roryoliverg.blogspot.co.uk
Leanne: http://www.lalaleeleesblog.blogspot.co.uk
Ali: http://www.alismobilephonegames.blogspot.co.uk

Route focus: Green Route