The first assignment I got was to work together with someone and model, bone, skin, and animate any arthropod creature of our own choice. After some discussion between ourselves, we ended up choosing Black Widow for our project, and it went better than expected to work alongside someone else.

I can say that I am happy with how it turned out, although the texture could need some extra work to get it right. The reflection needs to be more blurred out, but I couldn’t find the exact parameters to get it just the way I want it. And the reflection in the image now shows off the aspects of the spider better than the other test renders we have done.

I fumbled around for a while with the animation, but I never got the hang of creating a natural walk for all the eight legs on the spider, which annoyed me quite a lot. So we ended up delivering still images of the spider instead of an animation – although I would have preferred an animation, I don’t want to deliver an animation of poor quality.

Sackboy

This week we’re working on our own version of Sackboy, the well-known character from the game Little Big Planet. I have “completed the modeling”, that meaning I will probably make more adjustments along the way to give it the appearance I want.

I chose to make a flash version of Sackboy, can’t really give an explanation of why I chose this appearance – it was the first thing that popped into my head.

I have given an attempt at the texture but I will work more on this since I did not really spend that much time on them, but it shows the general idea of how I envision the final model.

I have done a lot of tuning and adjusting to the animation to get it to the point where I can see myself satisfied with the work I have done. It is almost at that point now, it just needs minor adjustments.

Looking at the animation I have created, I can not help but wish that I had chosen a different idea for the project. It is very technical and straight forward, suiting a news intro – but to be honest it did not pose much of a challenge.

I believe part of the thought behind the assignment was to give me a challenge, something that I would learn from. As mention there were not many issues with the creation of this animation, there were some minor areas that needed more thought than I had at first thought – but these were fixable with some thought.

Testing different ideas

After I had nearly completed the assignment I decided to look at other areas of 3D which I wanted to learn more about. The one that interest me the most is particles, all the things you can do with the system is impressive!

I made a few different scenes with the use of particles, the one I liked the most was a scene where the particles flew around – and combined into a sword at the end before blowing away with the wind again.

I have looked at several good plugins that can be used to create magnificent particle effects – such as MassFX and FumeFX but they are too expensive for me to purchase at this time, maybe later. I would also have liked to look at Krakatoa (volumetric particle rendering).

After looking at several different videos of vignettes and identity animations – I have come to the conclusion that I want to create a vignette. I have looked at a lot of different videos to get inspiration to what I am going to create.

I got my inspiration from videos like:

At first I learned about the basics of animation, which at the time, seemed quite tidious and not very interesting. But after working some more with animation and learning more about the subject, I can see how these basics prinsiples are important when animating.

I started with the bouncing ball exercise, which at first glance might look very simple and something to just breeze through – but that is not the case. The basic principles learned in this exercise are relevant to everything you animate.

When studying references and playing around with the ball I realized how the simplest things can build upon the realism of the animation, and if I remove one of these simple things – the whole thing looks fake. An example of this is the stretch & squeeze. This happens to all  objects, although it might not be as visible on everything – however this does not apply to hard objects like a frying pan etc.

Another good example of basic principles is movement, does the object ease in and out of a movement? Or does it move in a linear fashion? For instance a ball bouncing on the floor, it hits the floor in a linear fashion, it doesn’t slow down, but when it is at its highest, it slow down before reaching the top and eases into the falling curve.

You have probably noticed that the framework running on this site is WordPress, and the theme I am using at the time of writing this entry – is bought from http://themeforest.net. I am very satisfied with the theme, it is well made, I tip my hat to you pexeto.

There are however some areas of the theme I wish was done better, such as the portfolio section, its good, yes. But I want some more functionality to the presentation of items, so I thought I might as well create my own theme – giving me a lot better control over everything on the site.

Designing the new theme

When I was working on the new site, I first used my regular placeholders to show where the images would be – gray/black boxes with the dimensions in it, something like these: http://placehold.it/. These work great, but they are not very inspirational when you are working on the design.

That is why for my current project I have started using http://placekitten.com/. It is very similar to my old way of going about placeholders – but it brings more “life” and inspiration to the design under the developing stage.

Using placekitten very easy, and you can choose any dimension you would like and get a picture of a cat, either in black and white or in colors.

Color

To get a picture of a cat you simply include the following path in the img tag in html:
http://placekitten.com/width/height. For example, http://placekitten.com/400/250. This will give you a color image of a cat with a width of 400 px and a height of 250 px.

Grayscale

If you would rather like to have a black & white picture in your theme, some themes certainly look better using grayscale, and this is just as easy.

http://placekitten.com/g/width/height. For example, http://placekitten.com/g/400/250. This works just the same as the method of getting color picture, but you get a black & white picture in return.

Overall I am satisfied with the finished project, but I don’t think it looks realistic. I have worked on this project for so a long time and now I only see the flaws in the image. As most of the materials are Arch & Design those materials looks quite good, but I am not sure if they look realistic.

Mood scene

I like the lighting in this scene, it brings “life” to the image, instead of the daylight scene where everything looks a bit dull. There are of course some areas that do not look as good as I would have liked. The wood with the picture has some weird reflections on it, but since I delivered it as a split image I was able to hide this.

If I divided the image the other way around, it would have been dull, as most of the lights in the scene are in the other side of the room – as well as the painting on the wall which looks better in this scene than the other.

I am also like the ceiling light that comes out from over the lower ceiling. It gives a great mood to the scene – at least that is my opinion.

Daylight scene

The soft shadow on the roof was grainy and had noise in it, so it all looked very unrealistic, but this is something I was able to solve near the end using Global Illumination and Final Gather – and adjusting the slider “Soft Shadow Precision.”

Elements in the scene

I would have liked to include more props in the scene, but when I placed books, plants and other props on the shelves and around the room, it always looked out of place. This might be because I have been looking at this scene for so long.

The sofa
I see now that I could have done a lot better when modeling the sofa. Instead of making separate pieces for the different parts it is all modeled into one big object. This is not realistic, as in the real world the different parts would have been put together and you would see “seams”. I also would have liked to make the corner pillow without the shortcut.

The Fireplace
In the final image there is no fire in the fireplace, I tried to create fire but it turned out cartoonish. Therefore I ended up leaving this out, but it would have brought a lot to the mood lighting.

Moldings
There are no moldings in the reference image which is why I did not include them in the scene. I believe having this would improve upon the image, but I wanted to stay true to the reference. This has made me realize how much smaller details improve upon an image as a whole.

Materials
The material that I am most satisfied has to be the red walls material, how the light reflects off the flower patterns in the scene. This is something I wanted to get right from the start of the project, as you may remember I mentioned this in the preparation.

Note
Thanks to everyone who gave me a helping hand during this assignment, I appreciate it a lot.

Instead of using one computer to render the whole scene, I have used Backburner to network 10 computers together and split up the image so that every computer gets 10% of the image to render. Using this method saves me a lot of time, and I am able to do while the render is working.

Tweaking

This whole day has gone to adjusting the settings in both global illumination and final gather to get rid of the noise in the render, especially on the soft shadows. I have finally been able to get most of the grain away by adjusting the “Soft Shadows Precision” along with some adjustments to the final gather settings.

I am still not completely finished with the image, but it is coming along nicely. There was however some setbacks.

While working on the mood setting for the scene I noticed there had to be more lights in the scene – and I can’t add those in the mood scene alone, they also have to be in the daylight scene. So I ended up going back to the daylight scene and add those lights, so that the two images would have the correct reflections and be exactly the same, the only difference in the two scenes are the lighting.

The reflections in the image looks different now that I have combined global illumination and final gather, I do not know why this is happening exactly, but I will find a way to fix the reflections so that they are correct again.

While working on the mood setting I noticed that there had to be at least one more light in the scene that I had not planned for. This was not that big of a problem, as I just instanced my lamp so that I had one more behind the camera to bring some extra light to the scene.

Getting the lights to light up the scene how I envisioned it was a bit harder. At first all the lights did not fade out as I wanted them to, but after a lot of tweaking with the near and far attenuation I got the lights approximately how I wanted them.

When I compare the two scenes, daylight and mood light, I am much happier with the mood scene than the daylight scene. It gives much more life to the scene than the regular daylight. This is probably due to some of the settings in the exposure control, and I tried adjusting these settings as well without luck.

Outside Environment

At first I tried to model some objects to be placed outside the windows in the scene, but I never got a result that felt I could include in the final project. After playing around with several different ideas, I contacted a former coworker of mine, Sindre Fiskerstrand. He was able to provide me with some amazing photographs of outside environments.

Instead of modeling the outside environment I ended up with a plane outside the windows with one of the photographs I got from Sindre. This looked far better than the previous attempts at creating the environment – which gives the whole image a better feel of placement. A big thanks to Sindre for providing me with the photograph!

The architectural visualization project is coming along, but I have not been following the schedule point to point. I like modeling, it is fun – but I felt like doing something else for a few days. With this in mind I started working on some of the materials, as well as the lights.

There is still a lot of work to be done, but after adding light and some materials you can see how the room is taking shape – and looks a lot more “impressing” than without. Below you can see a render (without composition) of the room I am working on.

The materials still require some adjustments, but you get the general idea of how the room will be as a finished product. There are a few objects that I have not modeled yet – some of them are not even boxed out as I am not sure what props I want to use in the room to give it a feeling that someone actually lives there.

If you look out the windows in the image, you can see that there are no objects, no ground – nothing. This is something I will get around to working on later, maybe a picket fence? I forgot about this part until recently when I created the lights in the scene – when all you could see outside was darkness.

Creating objects

While creating some objects I forgot about the position of the camera – for example the sofa. At first I made two back-pillows for the corner, this did not seem right, looked odd to be honest – couldn’t get the positioning and size correct.

I spent some time working on this without thinking about how the camera in the scene would capture the corner-pillow, but when I finally found out that the camera did not actually see much of this – I decided to take an easier approach.

I know, it is not the best solution – but I think due to the camera positioning this is something that can slide without too much notice. The sofa does not look like the most comfortable sofa I’ve ever seen. If I have the time later I might create a new sofa that looks better and more comfortable to sit in.

I am quite satisfied with the look of the pillows I have created for the sofa – the brown ones on top. A classmate showed me a way of using the cloth modifier to create realistic-looking pillows without much work – nice trick, thanks for the help.