Virtual Environments - Final Thoughts

So, what did I think of this module as a whole? While I wasn't too keen on the 3D head assignment, I did learn many interesting modelling techniques, and I learnt a new but complicated method of applying materials, but compared to other 3D based assignments, and although the finished product was good enough to get me a high mark, I still enjoyed working on the other assignments more.

The group project I had a bit more fun with - my team was great to work with, and the end result of that assignment personally impressed me more than the 3D head. Despite the final outcome of this group project being very good, I would still like the opportunity to do something like this again, but unfortunately (at least, as far as I'm aware), this could very well be the last time I work with 3D Modelling for University related assignments.

Although I had previously dreaded each upcoming assignment, I always ended up having fun with 3DS Max anyway, learning new skills which may greatly help me with whatever career path I eventually choose. It's a shame I probably won't be doing anymore 3D University work, but all I can say is that it's been a blast. Until next time...

Group Project Part 6 - Reflection

At time of writing, we don't present our work to the client until tommorow, but I may as well post my final thoughts regarding this group project now, since we have essentially finished all of our work.

As soon as I found out that there was to be a group project for this module, I initially felt very cynical towards this particular assignment, as in my first two years at University, in all the previous group assignments I have done, I've either had the majority of the workload dumped onto me, or I wasn't given enough work to do, or found that the rest of my group wasn't taking the work seriously enough - however, this time around neither of these situations occured, and this was perhaps one of if not the best group I have ever been a part of. For the first time in any group project I've been involved in, everybody really pulled their weight and the final result from all four of us was very pleasing, and really goes to show how much effort we all put in together.

I'll make comments about the things I have learnt later on in this entry, but first of all is a shout out to the other three members of the group:

Craig seemed to take on a front-man role right from the very start: of all the original three members of the group (myself, Craig and Ryan), he seemed to have the best communication skills. Not only did he provide very detailed modelling skills for his left side of the machine, but he also provided us with all the information that the rest of us needed, such as how the machine works, as well as the photos that were taken of the boiler pump which we all used as references for our modelling. As well as this, he also consistently provided the rest of us with very helpful constructive feedback.

Ryan appeared to have some fun working with fire in 3DS Max, and his right side of the machine, despite being started on fairly late into the project, also turned out to look very good, and like Craig, his representation of his part of the machine was very much like its real life counterpart. He also went out of his way to add extra detail such as the text at the top of the machine, and the way he connected the machine to a stove-like object was a nice touch. Sadly, while not his fault at all, and despite how good it initially looked, we couldn't even use the flame he made because of a technical error that I mentioned in a previous entry, which turned it blue for no apparent reason, so I had to recycle a flame I had made in an earlier project instead. I feel he did a great job with his part, and he even aided me with the camera positioning in the final video, however it was a shame to see his fire go to waste.

Adam, the late addition to our group, initially did not seem to be able to contribute much, but for understandable reasons. However, within the last few weeks he really started to pull his weight, taking time out of his incredibly busy schedule to provide us with with an excellent and suitable environment, a boiler room, for the machine. And for the final video to be used when presenting to the client, he also provided a very suitable voiceover. It was all thanks to his additional help that we went from being The Little Group That Could, to being able to produce some very impressive work in the end.

As for myself, I was initially handed the task of animating anything that required it, since both Craig and Ryan were very impressed with my skills from a previous assignment. I was more than happy to take up this role, being given the middle piece of the machine which so happened to be the only part that required animation. While my model wasn't completely accurate when compared to the middle part of the real machine, I feel that it still looked pretty good in the end, and it shows how far my modelling skills have developed over the past year and a half. For this project I also learned to use bump mapping for the first time, which really helped to give our models quite a realistic paint-like texture.


As far as this group went, we hardly ever came across any real problems: there were no argumanets over things going wrong, and we happily worked together towards our goal of completing this assignment. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed working as part of this team, and I'm very satisfied with both our final result, and the skills I've learnt from this module, including new modelling techniques, and teamwork skills - and this project, along with another recent one, has enabled me to develop a much more positive attitude towards team-based assignments.

Group Project Part 5 - Final Scene

Steven here, with our complete boiler pump finally placed into Adam's environment. Before I go into any detail, here's a screengrab of the final animation frame:



We spent our most recent meeting putting the boiler pump together, and then placed it into the environment. We also placed a camera into the scene, which moves around to give the viewer a better view of the envoronment, and most importantly the boiler pump as a whole.

Because I've been using the most recent version of 3DS Max, and since my middle part of the boiler pump (and presumably the materials too) will not open in earlier versions of the program, I was tasked with rendering the final video.

Before doing so, a number of changes had to be made, not only to shorten the total render time as much as possible, but also because of other technical issues. The aforementioned changes are as follows, with screengrabs.

Firstly, Adam's water tank was removed from the scene:



This was a difficult decision for me to make, since I imagine that along with the environment, Adam spent a fair bit of time getting the tank to look just right, and it fit in with the scene very well. However, once the completed boiler pump was placed into the scene, we initially had difficulty getting it to fit next to where this boiler was placed. It was shrunk, and even moved to the other side of the room, but I later noticed that it got in the way of the camera, so it ultimately had to be hidden. I personally feel that, had we thought more about it, we probably could have found a way for the water tank to connect to and work with the boiler pump.

Secondly, I had to replace Ryan's fire with one of my own.



The flame does look very good, but a problem that Ryan discovered early on was that, when a light source is included in the scene with this fire, it for some reasons colours some of it blue. While blue is the inverted colour of yellow, we had been scratching our heads as to why the flame was even changing to that colour, or rather how or why the light was changing it. With no apparent answer or a way to solve this, my only option (with it being 2am at the time... I just wanted to get the render started and go to bed!) was to replace the flame with one that I made and used for an earlier assignment:



So after bringing in this flame from a 3D Modelling and Animation assignment from last year, I placed it into Ryan's model, resized it as neccesary, and this is how it looks:



It is a bit of a shame that I had to resort to this, because my flame is actually dimmer than Ryan's, and the reflection effect that the previous flame had has now been lost.

Finally, a bump map that Adam applied to the concrete floor had to be removed.



Bump maps take a fair bit of time to render, so with the floor basically being a giant bump map, that would have been one of the contributing factors to a very, very long rendering time. So I simply had to make one small adjustment to the material to get rid of the bump map...



And this is what it now looks like. You can still see that there appears to be some bumps in the floor, so while it now doesn't have a very realistic texture, it still doesn't look too bad, and again reduces rendering time.

So while applying these changes, as well as making minor adjustments to the lighting and shading, I managed to get the total rendering time from 25 hours, up to around 36, and then finally down to a more reasonable 19 hours. I still didn't think my laptop could handle all of that, so I had to do it in four parts, three of which I slept through. The final render, in video form and with all four parts included, is here:



In our next, and most likely final meeting before we present it to the museum staff, we will be making some more changes like possibly adding a voiceover.

Group Project Part 4 - Animation

After adding materials and bump mapping to our models, I have now animated the middle piece. There are a couple of minor issues with the render since I had attempted to use Curve Editor to loop the animation, and when it comes to the end it pauses for a brief moment before repeating.

Anyway, here's what we have:

Group Project Part 3 - Pieces Coming Together

Steven here, with my middle piece of the boiler pump. I've done a bit more to it, adding more parts as my guesswork alone is teaching me how the machine works, giving me a much clearer idea of how it should be coming together.



This is what it looked like last night, before I started adding more pieces, applying meshsmooth to one or two parts and changing the colours from something you'd see in Toytown to match the appearance of the actual machine:



It's looking much better now, but there are still a few more details I need to add before I start animating the swivels and pistons. Aside from what's lacking at this moment in time, I'm very pleased with how it looks so far.

Craig seems to have finished his left part of the machine, and I think he's done a pretty good job. He's also recoloured it to match the paint job that the boiler pump has, and this is the result:



I have to say that I'm quite impressed with the model as a whole, especially the amount of detail that he's put in.

Now, it's time to bring these two parts together to create two thirds of the boiler pump! So with mine and Craig's modelling powers combined, we have...



...discovered that our models are completely out of scale with each other. We have both been using centimetres as our measuring unit in 3DS Max, but my part is stupidly oversized, whereas Craig has been working with the correct scale of the real life boiler pump. So, it's now time to shrink my piece down to the right size and bring the two together...



Although there are a few minor niggles like overlapping pieces and some colours not quite matching, it's starting to come together quite nicely. Keep a look out for my next entry as I apply finishing touches to my middle piece, and start adding some realistic materials to our models.

Group Project Part 2 - Progress So Far

For this group project, my own task involves modelling and animating this particular section of Arthur Mumford's pump, circled in the photo below:

This part features swivels which are seemingly attached to clamps that move a pair of pistons back and forth. And by "seemingly", I mean that I can't clearly tell whether or not they are actually attached just by looking at the photos (I was never able to visit the museum myself, so a lot of guess work has to be done by me). Presumably, the swivels on the sides actually push the clamps attached to the pistons back and forth without actually being attached to them:



Look where the arrow is pointing. The swivel doesn't appear to actually be attached to the clamp, and the part where the arrow points to appears to have had a load of paint scratched off over time. So at the moment, this is the only lead I've got as to how this part works.

Here's what I've modelled so far:



I started out by modelling the main body of this section (the part in gold), which I did by making a box, adjusting the size and number of faces as I needed, and extruding the faces in order to match the proportions of the actual machine. From there I added more shapes for the various parts of the machine, with a bit more work going into the swivels and the clamp holding the pistons.

I will use modifiers to smooth it all out when I feel the time is right, but I want to complete the modelling process fist. There is still one little bit that I'm currently stuck on...



These two joints. And I have no idea how they work or how they move, so it seems that there's plenty of guess work for me to do.

Group Project Part 1 - First Meeting

Just days before handing in that dreaded 3D head, my group made up of only three people at the time had our first "official" meeting. We basically looked through the photos that were taken by one of my group members at the museum, and we decided on a machine known only as "Arthur Mumford's Favourite Boiler Feed Pump". No official name, model number or anything like that, all we know that it was apparently Mr Mumford's favourite.



Since I couldn't go to the museum myself, I wasn't able to get too much of a good look at the machine, so it's just as well that Craig took plenty of photos from different angles for me to use as reference images for my part of the machine.

Craig's task as far as modelling goes is to make the left part of the machine, and he will also be gathering any information he can get regarding this machine. He also seems to have something of a leadership role within the group. Ryan will be modelling the right side, and he hopes to be able to work with elements such as fire and water. And finally, since these two have given me good feedback for my animations from last year, I have been given the task of modelling the piece in the middle, the only part which actually needs animating.

I'll go into a bit more detail in my next entry, which will basically be a copy of what I've posted in the group blog.

Week 5c - My Thoughts

So what did I think of this assignment overall? For my first time handling "organic" 3D modelling, it wasn't too bad, but it certainly wasn't easy. After the simpler techniques I learnt last year, something as complex as a somewhat realistic version of my own head was quite a huge leap to take, especially considering the fact that I had only five weeks to complete it (technically, you could say it was actually only four weeks, since we only found out about the assignment at the end of the first week back).

I'm quite pleased with the result, but as I mentioned in my previous blog entry, it's not perfect, and if I had just a little bit more time to finish it off, the end result would definetely have been of better quality. Of all the various parts of the head that were modelled, I'd say that the ears were definetely the most difficult part. They look OK anyway, but because I did so many different things ti the inside of the ear, it is in actuality a bit of a mess. As far as tutorials go, I was only able to make it as far as applying the material to the 3D model, so I wasn't able to do more to it like applying bump maps, or even give my 3D self some hair.

Speaking of the tutorials, I found them slightly difficult to follow: Mr Maslowski had a habit of skipping ahead on parts that I may have needed help with, although to be fair this allowed me to do my own thing and see if I could do it myself - which wasn't always a good thing. He also skipped the eyelids (and as a result, my 3D model has none) and the eyeballs (which I made myself anyway) and I don't think he showed us the neck creation very clearly, if at all (I still managed to pull if off myself, so it doesn't matter too much).

If I was given another chance to try this again, I think I would turn it down straightaway probably be able to do it with a bit more ease, and could probably do the earlier parts of the modelling process without the tutorial's help.

Here's a 360 dregree view of my 3D head:

Week 5b - Finishing Touches

In my last entry, I covered the development of perhaps the most complicated task - at least, as far as modelling goes - for this whole project: the ear. I've finished attaching it to the ear (and once again, the symmetry modifier saves me the trouble of modelling the other one, yay!), and here's how the head looks thus far:



Another thing I pointed out in my last entry was how difficult it was to attach the ears to the head, purely because of the difficulty I had getting the camera in place. So what I had to do was drag the ear outwards so that I could get a better look at where the vertices would all be attached.

Once that was done, I welded the ear to the head, and then carefully selected all of the ear's vertices to be pushed back into place. For some reason, this caused some of the ear's polygons to go inside the head, and I can't go in and save them without ruining the appearance of the head which I already feel looks OK anyway. As Jo taught us last year during 3D Modelling and Animation: If you can't see it, it doesn't matter. So I left the polygons alone.

Now, the only thing left to be done is to make my 3D alter ego look more human and less like a Namek... and this will be done by adding a material! According to the tutorial, the first step is to temporarily turn off all modifiers, go into editable poly and apply a modifier called Unwrap UVW. I then had to select the Face option underneath that modifier, and use Paint Selection Region to go over everything except for the ear, which has to be done seperately.



After rotating the camera to make sure that everything is selected, the next step was to scroll down under Map Parameters and select the Cylindrical button. After adjusting the position of the cylinder thing, I then had to apply a Checkerbox material to the head:



It doesn't look quite right, partially because Mr Maslowski made the addition of his checkerboard pattern look easy. Where he got the whole thing, I only got 4 squares, so I had to increase the amount myself. Also notice how, for some reason, there are hundreds more on the ear.

Now he's instructed me to click on Edit underneath Parameters, which brings up this window:



Now I'm slightly confused, because in his video, we can clearly see that his ear is also there. I for some reason can't see mine - hold on, what's that green line going across the top right corner? I'm going to zoom out so we can find out what it is...



AH! There it is, only it's been made gigantic for no reason. Now I need to scale the stupid thing back down...



There, that's better. But I'm going to leave it aside for a moment, as instructed, because it's currently not important (on a side note, this has fixed the problem I had before where the ear had hundreds more checkers on it than the head).

From here, I now need to start adjusting things which I'm not going to go into much more detail about because the tutorial already does that.

A few hours later, after much frustration, confusion and hair pulling over trying to follow the tutorial, I have at last come to this point, where I now have a UV layout:



After some adjustments, this UV map has been rendered and saved as an image that will be used in Photoshop.



In Photoshop I've been copying bits of my photos and pasting them above the gridlines in the above snapshot. Because the edges of these cutouts are blatantly obvious, with my skin being darker in one place than another thanks to that pesky thing we call shading, I've had to use both the smudge and dodge tools in an attempt to clean it up, while ironically making even more of a mess of it:



I have to admit that it could be much worse than that, and as I'm quickly running out of time, I have no choice but to overlook this and move on (and I only discovered via the tutorial, way too late, that I could have used the clone tool instead, which would have been even better. Thanks for nothing!).

For some bizarre reason, once I imported the file into 3DS Max, while part of the forehead looks absolutely fine, the rest... well, just look at this screengrab. I'm speechless as to how stupid computer programs can be sometimes:



I'd love to know what the heck happened here. As you can see, all but a bit of the forehead came out completely screwed up, with completely random TV static pixels and a trippy liquid-like effect on part of the forehead, despite the fact that it looked nothing like this in Photoshop, and the fact that this was the format I was instructed to import it in.

I couldn't give up here, especially not after coming this far. So I had to go for a Plan B, that is, to import it as a different file format instead. Rather than a Photoshop PSD like before, I now imported it as a PNG file, and that instantly fixed my problem:



And I have to say that it's not looking bad at all. Now it's time to start making those final adjustments...



And at long last, it is finished. But sadly, it's not perfect, and now that I've basically run out of time, there's really not much more I can do to it. I'm disappointed that I had to resort to the smudge and dodge tools for some parts of the face and hair, but it seems to have worked fairly well anyway.

One strange fault I came across was an area up the nostrils which for some reason turned out how it did in the below screengrab, with no apparent way for me to fix it:



Sadly, I don't have enough time to fix this problem, since I can't locate where exactly it's getting the colour from, so I have no choice but to leave it alone.

In my next entry - and my final for this project - I'll post my thoughts, as well as a video showing a 360 rotation of the head to give a better idea as to how the whole thing looks.

Week 5a - The Dreaded Ears

Now it's time to work on the final part of the head before I add any textures to it: the ears. This is potentially going to be very complex, perhaps even more so than the face, but since this has to be finished and handed in by Friday, it's time to dive in.

I started by adding topology lines and quads on the profile photo, just like I did with my face not too long ago:



I have a feeling that I may have done something wrong, but I didn't have enough time to worry about this as I shortly moved onto the modelling process:



Once again, this was modelled in a very similar way to the face: the quads were drawn as gridlines on 3DS Max, and joined together by the vertices. Much like when modelling the face before, I needed to simplify the quads in some places, while adding more in others, however the general shape of the ear's detail can still be seen.

After positioning the vertices to define the overall shape of the ear, it now looks like this:



It's not exactly perfect, and since I wasn't feeling too well last night, I decided to leave it for the time being and carry on with it today while I can concentrate better. The ear seems as though it's difficult to model, which is because I have only been moving the vertices around, which isn't working properly. Instead, I need to extrude some parts inwards to form the ear canal, much like I did with the nose earlier on (bear in mind that I'm not currently following the tutorial, although I did skip through some of it to see how he was doing it).

In order to help me in modelling the ear, I actually went into Photoshop and turned off the Topology and Quad layers, so that I could see the photo more clearly. After adjusting more vertices and extruding some faces, it now looks more like this...



...a horrible, blocky mess. However, it does look more like an ear - and more importantly, my own ear - than it did before. It looks much better once Turbosmoothed:



This is the closest to a perfect match with my real ear that I've been able to get, but I'm pleased with it anyway. The ear as a whole still isn't finished yet, but apparently the next stage of the tutorial is to attach it to the back of the head.

In order to do so, some of the faces on the side of the head had to be deleted to make way for the ear:



But there's still no detail behind the ear: it needs some thickness of its own. So now what I'm being instructed is to press Alt+Q to go into a 3DS Max function called Isolation mode. From here, all of the edges of the outside of ear were selected by selecting one and then clicking on the loop button.

After doing that, I pressed shift while dragging the edges along the X Axis to create copies of those edges:



As shown by the above screengrab, this has now given the ear some depth and is defining the outer edge. From here I had to continue adding faces to the back of the ear in order to create the back, and make it easier to connect it to the side of the head:



Now I can exit Isolation mode, and start attaching the ear to the head.



At the moment, I'm finding this to be the most frustrating task so far, purely because it is difficult to see where everything needs to go, even when I move the camera in place. Tune in to my next entry to hopefully see the finished head!

Week 4d - Head and neck

Well, as far as blogging goes this has been quite a busy week. But at the same time, my 3D head is coming along nicely, and I just finished both the back of the head, and at the same time the neck.



Compared to other students' work that I have seen, there isn't really much of a neck, which is mainly because on my reference photos, my t-shirt is covering up the majority of my neck and shoulder area, so there wasn't really much for me to model.

As far as the sides of the head and the neck go, I did that by myself without following the tutorial, partly because the guy who made it skips ahead without bothering to go through that process, but also because I wanted to try and do this part my own way. I'm pleased with the result, but one part I had trouble with was the side of the neck. While matching it with my reference photo, it for some reason became a bit sharp and pointy:



I think this is more to do with the surrounding vertices, but perhaps when this is Turbosmoothed it will look better. Speaking of which, it's time to see how it looks so far, but first I need to attach the two objects together, using the Attach button under Editable Poly.

Now that the two objects are attached, let's Turbosmooth it to see how it looks!



Hmm... oh dear. That's not how we wanted it to look. On an upside, clicking on Symmetry again automatically creates a copy of the back of the head without me needing to adjust any settings to put it in the right place, but now there's a line going around the side of the head and around to the back, clearly defining the two seperate objects.

There is of course, a cause and solution to this problem: looking back at when I was starting to model the face, while the two objects are attached and treated by 3DS Max as a single object, they haven't been welded together yet. So what has to be done now is to undo Turbosmooth, select all the vertices that should be connected, and click on Weld to finally connect them together. Having done that, we'll Turbosmooth it again and...



Much better. Before I get started on the ears, one more thing I need to adjust is my head shape. Let's face it, nobody's head is really as perfectly round and smooth as that, which I noticed after seeing my own profile view for the first time. Using soft selection while moving the vertices around, I started repositiong them so that they would match the shape of my head. Here's how it currently looks:



Before I add any materials to finish my head off, one more important feature that needs to be modeled is the ear...

Week 4c - Eyes and the back of the head

After finishing the nostrils and lips earlier this week, the next stage in the tutorial was to start working on the back of the head. I then opened the next tutorial video up, only to notice that the guy's already done his eyeballs... wait, what? You're not going to show me how you made them? That's not fair!

So I had to go out of my way to make them myself, without the help of this tutorial. What I did first of all was create a sphere for one eyeball, and then begin working on a material that would make my eyes look somewhat realistic. I had no idea how I would actually do this, so a bit of tutorial hunting on the Internet led me to this useful guide on how to make a realistic eye texture in Photoshop, which allowed me to make this material:


I made the eye brown in the middle and dark green everywhere else to match my own eye colour. The pattern on the eye does look a bit weird when you first look at it, but once I applied this material to the sphere, it actually looked quite good. Bear in mind that the picture above is zoomed into the middle of a large 1000x1000 pixel sized bitmap, because anything smaller I tried did not cover the whole sphere.

After adjusting the position of the eyeball texture onto the sphere, and reshaping the eyesocket area on my 3D face, it now looks something like this:



This is what the whole thing looks like so far, with Turbosmooth on. It was vital that I undid the process straight after taking this screengrab, so that I can carry on with my work.

The eyes look OK for now, but I think the colour might be a bit too bright (if you look at my photos in earlier entries, you'll notice that my eyes are quite dark in colour). If I'm not happy with it by the time I'm finished with the head, I can always make minor adjustments later on.

Back to the tutorial: I made a sphere and repositioned it as needed, which will form the back of my head. I then had to squash it at the sides in order for it to match the shape of my head. Here's a screengrab showing what it looked like at this stage, with the Reference Plates hidden:



Noticably, there are parts of the sphere's geometry that are not needed, like the bits covering the eyes, the bits coming through to the forehead, behind the face, and the bit behind what will soon become the ears. So the next thing I needed to do was covert the object into an editable poly (according to the tutorial, by use of the Edit Poly modifier, rather than just converting it into an Editable Poly by right clicking), and then use the Paint Selection Region tool to select these unwanted areas, ready to delete:



After deleting the selected areas, it somehow also got rid of the same areas over at the other side of the object, which is very useful and saves a lot of time... but the next stage involved deleting the other side of the sphere anyway.

Next, I needed to match up some of the sphere's vertices with those on my 3D forehead. For the last one or two, I needed to use Soft Selection in order for it to affect the quads behind them:



The only problem I had with using the Soft Selection tool was that not only did it affect the ones behind it like it was supposed to, but it also affected the positioning of the vertices that I had already positioned to match the face.

I then had to start cloning the faces around the back, by selecting the edges and holding down shift, to start matching up with my neck:



Note that the guy who made the tutorial drew more topology lines and quads for this bit, but I personally feel as though I don't have time to be messing around with these for this part, and just wanted to get on with it (after all, I have to draw even more of them for the ear later on). Another important thing that needs to be done for this process is that the snaps toggle must be turned off, otherwise when dragging the faces down, you get something like this:



I'm going to take a break from this for tonight, so perhaps you'll see the finished process in my next entry.