The last couple weeks in game design we started working with rigging and animation. The first couple of units we worked with just animation and relearning a bit of the basics. Personally, I believe that animation is one of the most fun things you can do while 3D modeling. The first couple of activities were just matching different definitions to the different words. The first actual assignment that I started working on is where I have to animate a ball bouncing across a room and interacting with six different objects in a room. I learned how to animate realistic bounces with the curve editor and how to make correct spin on it as well. In my room I put a table, a chair, and bench looking thing, a clockish thing, a painting, and a lamp thing. I think that I made it look halfway decent at least, and I made good use of each object in the scene so that the ball bounced off of everything at least once and had kind of realistic bounces. Since I am now done with this assignment, I can move onto the basics of rigging which is supposed to be the absolute hardest unit of the year. I only have two weeks to complete a whole ton of assignments and projects so I need to work nonstop from here on out.
I researched tips to help you rig better in 3DS Max and it basically talked about how you need to ask yourself what the purpose of the character is and what the character is going to do. You must also be precise with your work and organize your nodes properly as well. Things I learned:
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All of last week we had to rush through the lighting unit in only five days. Since I was out on Wednesday I only had four days to do everything plus a quiz and didn't get through about three assignments. Lighting itself is actually pretty simple to learn because there are only six different types of lights that we are working with at the moment. The six different types of lighting we are doing is free spotlight, target spotlight, free direct, target direct, skylight, and omni lighting. Basically my week started with me getting about eight assignments that we have to do in five days and the first assignment took me the entire day to do so I was pretty stressed out, but the next day I got two more assignments done so I was happy. The first assignment that I had to do was I had to find six different photos that went with each of the lighting types and explain how they represented that type of lighting and how they improved the scene. The next two assignments that I had to do was create a desk lamp where I created a table and then make the lamp base and the lamp shade as well. Then we put a light inside the lamp to mimic a lamp light, then we also have to add two more lights to light the rest of the scene. For the light inside of the lamp I used a free spotlight, then to light the rest of the scene I used two omni lights, one to cast a shadow and another to kind of light the back of the lamp. The next assignment was where I had to create a mini stage and put two things onto the stage then create different spotlights for each other of the items to make the shadows look cool and different. What I decided to do was make one of the shadows a soft red color and the other one a soft blue color so that there was a lot of contrast between the two. All in all, lighting hasn't been too difficult but the small time limit has made it extremely difficult to get everything in on time and I am definitely going to have to go for tutoring to get the rest of the assignments done.
A while ago Mr. B told us about the rest of the year and what we have coming up for the fourth quarter. We are very behind so we have to fit lighting, cameras, and rigging into a single quarter with time left at the end for EOC review as well. We are going to be doing all of lighting in a single week which sounds super tough and I'm not really looking forward to it if I am being honest.
Last year we did a little bit on lighting but didn't go super in depth. The little that I have used it though, it seems unnecessarily tough to do and seems like a big hassle for no a lot of reward. After that is cameras and I remember doing an assignment with cameras last year where we made a spaceship and a city scene then we had our camera follow our spaceship around the city while it flew around. It's a very tedious process from what I remember, but I hope there's some shortcut that I didn't know about back then. I think we have about a week or two for cameras which makes sense because it's not too huge of a topic, but rigging, on the other hand, is a different story. There's been lots of talk about rigging since the first quarter from Mr. B, Christian, and the other older kids in the class about how hard and long it is to do, so I don't really know what to expect, but I'm hoping the outcome is worth all the hassle and how long the unit is. I think we plan on doing rigging for about 6 weeks but I'm not really sure about the schedule. I hope that Mr. B goes a little easy on us in the last quarter of the year because I really don't want to be as stressed out I was this quarter with game design, it really sucked. I hope he lets us get creative with the stuff we animate and we can make it our own and actually have fun in this class. Today is the second to last day of the quarter and I just finished up the last assignment I needed to do this quarter and it feels good to finally be done with UVW mapping. It got really tough and annoying to me to be honest. The next assignment I had to do after the box assignment from last month was an assignment that had me follow a tutorial to put a UVW map to create a gas can. After that I had to make my own soda can and wrap it, but I decided that would take too much time and just skipped it. The next assignment I actually did was an assignment where I followed about 15 tutorials to put UVW maps into Photoshop and put different materials onto them to make the look like a barrel, a window, a wall, and the ground. Altogether it looks really good, but it took a really really long time. It taught me a lot about how UVW maps work and really changes how I look at game design and making assets for video games. It's a lot harder than I give it credit for and takes a lot of attention to detail. After the barrel project, the next assignment was to take our robot that we made a long long time ago, and to unwrap it and put different materials on it to make it look cool. My idea was to make a texture and put it on the the entire leg and copy that to put on the other leg, then put a lot more effort into the actual head of the robot. The robot I made, I think, looks pretty cool and was pretty fun to make as well. It was kinda of tough to get the back of the head because there was a long strip of the head that wasn't on the UVW map and it was pretty aggravating but I just decided to peel it in the UVW editor and put a red strip down it. The next part of the project was to take a picture around the school and Photoshop your robot into it and make it do a cool pose or something. I know it looks goofy, but I really like it and I think it looks pretty cool. Getting the chicken in front of the leg was a real hassle but I think I got it to look pretty cool and I think UVW mapping is pretty cool in general but a real hassle.
Where do I even begin with this game. As a kid (which wasn't that long ago) I played through Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario 64 and once I started playing Odyssey it seemed like it immediately belonged in the same group as those games. This game's ideas are just so fun, imaginative, and expansive that on your first run through, you are likely not going to experience even half of what this game offers.
The main objective of Odyssey is to chase down Peach, like in any other Mario game, but this game has you travelling through different kingdoms that Bowser visits along the way. In each kingdom, you must obtain a certain amount of "Power Moons" that are hidden across the kingdoms and bring them back to your ship to power it up and advance in the game. To complete the game with the minimum moons, you will need 124 moons to get to the Moon and defeat Bowser. You can obtain 539 before you finish the game and the other 327 are unlocked after you beat the game. I have been playing this game for 60+ hours and still need around 200 more moons to get them all. The best part about this game is that getting all the moons isn't some lame chore that you need to do, it's just pure fun to explore and find all these hidden secrets around the map that you had no clue were there the first time you visited. The other part of this game i want to mention is the movement and functions of Cappy. There are so many ways to get around even though the only things you can do are jump, dive, roll, and throw your cap. These four movement options can create combinations of movement like the a triple jump into cap throw to dive onto the cap to give yourself another jump then throw your cap again and dive to it again. There are endless combinations of things you can do and it makes just moving around each kingdom fun in in of itself. Of course you can also "possess" different things with Cappy like a fish, a chain chomp, a dinosaur, etc. Each of the things you can possess has different abilities and you need these abilities to possess in the game and get certain power moons along the way. Most of them aren't even required to beat the game though and thanks to some fun speed running tricks people have found, the minimum captures the game requires to beat it on the 1.0 version is 15 captures, including some that the game forces you to get in the beginning and end of the game. Overall, Super Mario Odyssey is my favorite Mario game of my lifetime by far and rightfully deserves all the praise it gets from review companies like IGN. Recently we began learning about UVW mapping which is where you can apply a bitmap onto an object, but you can unwrap the texture as well and edit it however you please and wrap it back onto the object. The first assignment we got with this was where we had to start out by following a tutorial in texturing a box that was something like you would find in a video game. Basically we made six different materials (one for each side of the box) and put those six materials onto a multi-sub object material and put that onto the box. You put the bitmaps for each side onto the corresponding side of the box and it starts to look like a box. Some of the faces might not be facing the right way so you have to go to the material editor and change some of the values for the U, V, or W. In the end it looked like this: This part of the assignment wasn't very hard because it was just following a tutorial, but the next part was the tricky one. We had to find a box from Mr. B and take pictures of it on each of the six sides. You would then put each of the pictures into Photoshop and crop them so that only the box was showing. After that, all I had to do was do what the tutorial taught me to do and put it onto the box and make it look like the real thing. After all was said and done it looked like this:
Where do I even begin with this masterpiece. This game is sooooooo huge. The game has been out for not even two months and I easily have over 200 hours sunk into it. I beat the story mode on my third day of playing and then 100% it a couple days afterward and then beat it again on "New Game +" just to see what would happen (sadly nothing happened) and it was a blast. I beat classic mode with all 74 characters (which was a pain in the butt) and that felt like a major accomplishment, and now I'm hosting a tournament with some friends in a couple of days.
This game is the fifth installment of the Smash Brothers series and includes every single character from the first game through the fourth, plus some newcomers. This game is very inviting to newcomers in the series since some of the characters are very easy to play and very very good (like K. Rool). There are also characters that take incredible skill to play at a high level and if a new player tries to play them, then they probably won't do too well (Inkling). Smash Ultimate was in the top ten selling games of 2018 when it came out in DECEMBER of that year, It sold five million copies across all regions and is selling more and more as the hype isn't even over. The game is planning on releasing six more characters in the future, two being Piranha Plant from Mario and Joker from Persona 5 , with four more being revealed later in the future. Smash Ultimate, it seems like, isn't gonna become irrelevant anytime soon and, I think, will become one of the greatest games of all time. As a kid who played Smash Melee and Brawl, this easily has been more fun for me than those two games were for sure. This game is easily a 9/10 and almost a 10/10 if the online services were better and I hope Nintendo takes some time to revamp their online services, because they SUCK. So far in the class we have been working on our project where we have to use our old neighborhood scene, put in our fountain scene and our flag into it, then add two of our robots into it and do some stuff with them. One of the robots is going to have to knock down a wall and another will have to shoot another robot and blow it up. So my first idea was to have two robots fighting and have one of the robots knock another into the wall and then that robot will blow up the other with a missile so I got to work on it. Initially setting up the scene was very easy and all I had to do then was animate the robots and I thought it was going to be easy, but it turns out animating with key-frames and moving body parts is very very tedious.
Key-frames tend to cause problems a lot so it's just annoying to have to deal with everything over and over again. I was halfway done with an animation on one of the robots and then I grouped two things on the robot together and it screwed up the entire animation and I had to restart it. Things like that just pile up and it gets annoying, but I am finally almost finished and it feels very nice. The animation doesn't look too terrible and it looks pretty cool to have the robots fighting and just destroying the environment around them. I think I did a pretty good job making it look kind of realistic with gravity affecting things in the scene, but it's definitely not perfect. The simulations that I used in the animation were bomb, massfx, cloth, and a couple others. Combining everything together just makes the animation look realistic and super cool because you really just did that you know. I hope in the future we get to do more things like this (but I also hope it's easier). The only simulation we have started to work with so far in 3ds max is the cloth modifier, which is pretty straight forward. All it does is make planes into a cloth-like object which you can make interact with things like boxes and cylinders, For the project we had to make two flags with a country's flag on them. After we made those we put them onto a table with a tablecloth on it with our chess set we had previously made on the table as well. The hardest thing about the project was getting the cloth modifier to work correctly with the wind and gravity we had to put on it as well. Before I learned about simulations, I wasn't entirely sure how you made certain objects for games and how they looked so realistic, but now I'm excited to learn how other stuff is made to look more natural and feel like it's part of real life, because the flags look super realistic. I looked up more simulations in 3DS Max and I looked into MassFX and I learned about the simulated dynamic, kinematic, and static energy. Basically dynamic is when the simulation completely controls it and there is gravity and other forces in the simulation. Kinematic can be animated with standard methods or not. They can affect dynamic objects but not be affected by them. And static objects cannot be animated like walls, etc.
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2017/ENU/3DSMax/files/GUID-3A3E8929-A7A4-4BA8-80F2-8B32AAA7BC7B-htm.html Summary:
Ever since I was a little kid I have wanted to go to London, so when I heard we had a chance to make the London Bridge, a car, or a nested dodecahedron, it was a no-brainer to make the London Bridge. It only took me about a day or two and it wasn't that hard since I was just following a tutorial, but it was still fun none the less. I started with one of the towers and created some cylinders to put on the outside. The top of the first tower is just made of two boxes and one of them is just made to look like its sharp on the top. Then you put cones on the tips of the cylinders. I put a cross on top of the cones. After that you go to the bottom of the tower and make another very big cylinder and drag it out to make it fit the entire bottom. After that I created half a cylinder and extrude it out to make the holes in the towers that the cars go through. Then you boolean it and subtract it to make the actual hole. After that you duplicate the tower and move it 850 centimeters to the side. The rest is the more simple part you just created three planes as the bridge, one for the road and two for the walls. The last part is creating the supports on the sides. I used a spline for all of the lines and made the parameters thicker and rounder to make it look like wire. I then duplicated it for all four sides. and attached everything together. Overall I think this assignment was pretty fun and it helped me get a lot better with parametric modeling and I hope we do more things like this in the future.
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AuthorMy name is Jonathan Eller, and I am 15 years old and I go to Durham School of the Arts as a 10th grader. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools. Archives
May 2019
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