Monday 31 January 2011

Research Board

Today i attempted to create a research board asked for by Richard, the tutor, to be able to do this i had to decided on which James Bond movie i wanted to animate and create a 30 seconds trailer for.

Now while this task may seem simple, its actually rather difficult, this is because you need to either watch the films one by one to see what sort of things you could put into the trailer, or watch another trailer for the films and pick bits out of it you would like to animate and you think that would interest viewers and keep them interested. As i have already seen the majority of the Bond film's i decided to simply remind myself of them by watching the trailers, after doing this i picked a few of the films i would like to animate, and from there i choose ones i thought would have enough parts for me to be able to animate for 30 seconds without having to put in odds bits and pieces to make the trailer longer.

After this i was stuck with two films still, so i started to create a research board for each, providing i have done the research boards correctly, which as i have never made one before i believe to be very unlikely, each of these research boards contains stills from the film which i believe contain information that is key to the relevant film. The kind of information within the stills shows that the film's key points as well showing the kind of things that would get the viewers interested, an example of this could be within the Casino Royale research board, one still has someone holding two cards, both Aces, and as this film's story at parts revolves around a poker game i believed this still was important.

I will be uploading the actual research boards tomorrow as im not sure if they are correct and want to make sure i have done them right, or partially right before uploading them, though if they are wrong then i might upload them anyway just to remind myself of my first attempt at a research board.

Tuesday 25 January 2011

My first White House

In our first 3D Modelling and Animation Tutorial we learnt the basics to using 3D Max, as a final task we were told to create the White House using what we had learnt, i believe i did quite a good job for a first time using 3D Max and below are some screen shots of the stages i went through to create the final attempt (also below):




 This is the first stage of the process, i simply created two rectangles using the Box tool, after turning the rectangles white, then using the scale button i edited the rectangles to the size and height i desired. Once this had been done i simply used the move button and changed the x,y and z coordinates to the positions i wanted and placed the smaller box on top of the bigger box to create the roof and main building.



In this stage i created the windows,  this was done by simply creating a small box and inserting it into the main building, i made the window boxes grey as to stand out from the main building colours. After i made the window i created the window above it and created the lay out how i wanted it to be, with all the spacing etc. after i was happy with the two windows i simply cloned the set of windows another seven times to create the rest of the windows going along the building.
 


This stage was simply done by using the cylinder tool to create the colums that would hold the triangle roof, i created these colums first so that i knew where i wanted my roof to be. Once i had created the first colum i simply cloned it to create the front four colums, after these were spaced out to how i desired i simply cloned the four colums and moved them to the back.


Within this stage i created the triangle roof, believe it or not this was created using a cylinder, i was able to change the cylinder to a triangle by changing the amount of sides that would be created when i drew out the cylinder. Then using the x,y and z coordinates again i moved the roof on top of the colums. Once i had done this my White House was complete. I think for a first attempt i did quite well and i really enjoyed it.

The Brief

Today we were given the brief for our 3D Modelling and Animation assignments, to create these blogs every week, as well as to create moodboards, research boards and storyboards. This is to be done up to week six, the blogs will then be printed out and handed in along with all the different storyboards etc. that we have created.

After week six we then need  to start to create a 30 seconds long James Bond trailer for a movie of our choice, happy days, so far i think this is actually one of the most interesting assingments we have been given as it allows us to learn and to have fun creating something of our own. Apart from the idea of having to design all of the storyboards for every step of the animation i am really quite looking forward to this assignment and i hope it turns out to be quite interesting.

Same time next week.