Untitled Animation

So lately I've been working on this animation for the Northern Design Competition. The story is, put simply,  about the end of the Earth. Its a simple story, but I think it works quite well, what with all the global warming and natural disasters going on nowadays. The animation is set on Earth, at a launch site. and in space, which features all the planets, the Sun and even the asteroid belt ;) The launch site has been used from an animation I made earlier called Leaving Earth, but has been adapted to fit with the size of the new space shuttle.

Here are some renders, some of which are tests others are from the animation itself.

(Space Shuttle on the launch pad)

(Blasting off)

(Blasting off - camera attached to shuttle)

(Boosters detach, falling back to Earth)

(Earth and Moon silhouetted by the Sun)

(Saturn with Sun in background)

(Some of the planets orbiting the sun)

Ill be uploading the video soon so check back to see the final piece. Its looking good so far so im just hoping that it looks good when its all edited together. 

Steampunk Island

Since this project is coming to a close, I thought it best to upload some of the final screenshots of all the elements that make up our Steampunk Island, and write a little about the building process of them, and the ups and downs I had through the duration.

First up is the Market Place:

(Here we have the Fruit and Clothing Stand. The fruit stand is just for decoration, but the costumes displayed on the Clothing stand can be bought for a small fee of nothing,how generous am I?)

(As with the clothing stand, both the top hats, and goggles are available for purchase. In the background you can see the stairway to the Sky Bar, as well as the warehouse on the left, and a pit shaft in between the two)

(We even have Market stalls that are for rent. In the background you can see the "park" seating area, with a very 'steampunk' looking character lazing about)

Now onto the Navy Base:

(The navy base, with its high solid walls, which also features a floating, rotating cannon turret for defense of the islands)

(Here you can see the turret island, which contains 4 cannons, and the inside of the navy base.)

Islands:

(The islands themselves were created by me in Maya, then 'sculptied', and inserted into Second Life) 

Outfits:

(Here we have the Pilot character on his trusty flying machine)

(Here we have the Merchant at his Top Hat Stand)

(Heres the Adventurer having a drink in the Sky Bar)

Heres a shot of the whole island.

Steampunk Island

Just an update on the construction of our island, we managed to fix the problem of the islands being too small. This was due to Second Life's limitations wherein the maximum size of an object is 10x10x10. This was fixed with a pack of Megaprims which allows a maximum size of 50x50x50. This being said, we've ran into another problem. Even though we have an island of a decent size, the scaling in Second Life isn't very accurate.

The picture above shows this problem. The dock on which I'm stood is 2 meters wide in Second Life, but if thats the case, then how tall is my avatar? The problem with this, is that it appears that due to the large size of the avatar, everything on the island seems smaller than it actually is. I've tried editing my appearance to make my avatar smaller but it doesn't make me small enough. A solution I thought of  was to make an outfit which makes your avatar small enough for the island to look proportional. Hopefully this will work, but in the mean time, I better get back to building.

Critical Review - Just Cause 2

With the success of the Modern Warfare series of games, which are First-Person Shooters, a lot of sandbox games such as GTA and Just Cause don't get the recognition they deserve. A sandbox game usually consists of a very large playing area, and a general story that doesn't have to be followed. So essentially you can just run around doing what you want when you want. This is one of the more appealing aspects of Just Cause 2.

There are two sides to this game. First side is the shooting, which unlike an FPS its third person. This makes the gun fights less realistic and less accurate. You could be having a gun fight with ten enemies shooting at you, and your life will last quite a while, so realism has gone right out the window with this game. Thats not too much of a problem though because sandbox games don't have to be realistic.

The second side to this game is that size of the world and the amount you can do in it. The vehicles in the game range from different types of cars, bikes, planes and even helicopters. This diversity in vehicles allows for a varied game experience. Some people would rather go around the whole island on top of a car, whereas some prefer to fly from A to B, and then parachute (or even free fall) out. A major addition to this game that the first didn't have is the grappling hook. This doesn't just allow you to get to places quickly, but you can dual hook objects. This means that if you need to destroy a statue, you just attach it to your car then drive away to pull it down. Now of course you can use it for less moral uses, such as dragging a person around behind your car, or attaching two people together so they fly towards each other. Grim stuff, but very fun indeed.

On the whole, the story is very easy going, missions aren't too difficult but very fun. But most of all the extensive content and possibilities within the world of Just Cause 2 seem endless. Definitely worth a purchase.

RSS - Good or Bad?

I’ve been using RSS feeds long before we got this assignment and they’ve brought nothing but ease and joy into my life. To be honest I don’t actually see anything bad about RSS feeds.

In this day and age which is full of technology and information, it can sometimes be hard finding what you’re looking for online. The amount of content available on the Internet is so vast and ever growing, which is good and bad. Good in the sense that its an unlimited source of information and bad in the sense that its also full of pointless and more times than often, wrong information. The thing that’s good about RSS feeds is that it cuts out the time you spend searching for something, by delivering it straight to you. Some people may say that you still get all the pointless stuff as well, but with RSS you get control of what you receive. You can choose what sources you subscribe to, so if you prefer hearing about games from gamespot.com rather than ign.com then you simply subscribe to the gamespot.com feed and you get all the information about upcoming games from that site and no other. Another good thing is that you can subscribe to a vast number of things, ranging from your friends blog, to news on the war in Iraq.

     

RSS feeds have helped my practice because it has allowed me to search through posts about Maya techniques, upcoming games, the latest gadgets, the list goes on…and its all in perfect bite size chunks. This means I can flick through all my feeds on gadgets, and just select the ones that interest me and “star” them so that I can go back to them and read through them thoroughly. It also means I can keep track of all the latest things going on that interest me without having to search multiple websites and having a million tabs open on my browser. Instead I just go to my google reader and everything is organised for me.

So overall in my opinion RSS is good, if not great, and it has helped me a lot and I can imagine ill be using them for many years to come.

Leaving Earth

I've finally finished my rocket animation, well I say i've finished it but to be honest I don't see this one going away that easily. I've learnt so much about Maya and so many new skills just from making this, so I'm probably just going to keep improving it and adding to it. That being said, I've edited it together in a short 1-minute animation which I've called "Leaving Earth".

Check it out here:

Theres a few things I still need to change. First of all is the first scene where the rocket takes off, I used a Physical Sun and Sky in mental ray. The problem I had with this was setting the ground using a texture, which kept flashing big squares, behind the mountain, every now and then. I think the reason for this is that it's stretched the texture i used to cover the floor making it very pixelated. To fix this I think I might just need to set the texture so that it tiles across the floor rather than stretching it. The next problem was with the space scenes. I used Paint Effects to get the stars and galaxies, which i painted on the inside of a NURBS sphere for a full 360 degree star field. The problem with this is that the Paint Effects don't show up when rendering in Mental Ray, which I was using to get the shiny effect on the rocket. So this meant that i had to render those scenes without mental ray, causing the rocket to lose its shininess. A solution i thought of was maybe rendering the rocket and planets out with a green or blue background using mental ray, and rendering the stars out on their own without mental ray. I could then use Adobe After Effects to put the two shots together, removing the green/blue screen.

Other than these few problems I had, i'm still quite happy with the overall look of the animation. I feel it has a slight 60s/70s animation look to it which goes well with the music which is widely recognised from   2001: A Space Odyssey.

I'll definitely keep going back to this one because its a personal project i've enjoyed working on and its taught me a lot about animation and using Maya. Hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Cheers

Blast Off News

After a lot more work on the rocket animation i've rendered out a short animation of the rocket blasting off. I've included the smoke/fumes, and I've used a motion path for the rocket to follow. Here's what it looks like so far.

I was quite impressed with the outcome of this render but there were a few things I wanted to change. Firstly was the colour of the smoke, rather than having it fade to black I decided it would look nicer fading to white, especially at the beginning before it takes off, when the smoke is collecting around the base of the rocket. Another noticeable error is roughly halfway through the animation the rocket rotates in a split second. I believe this was due to a keyframe i may have forgotten to delete.

As i write this blog, I'm currently rendering the updated version of this, which includes the white smoke, and the rocket doesn't randomly rotate. I have edited the graph to give the rocket a slower launch and accelerate at a high rate to give a realistic look. When the render is finally complete I will post it here to show the progress being made.

Once i'm satisfied with the take-off, I have a few things that I want to tweak. One of these aspects is the surrounding landscape, maybe a few buildings in the background, or some water nearby. I'm currently sketching some ideas, but once i've decided on the right look, then i can get started with the story of my animation.

Keep checking back for updates. Comments and feedback are more than welcome.