Final Building - No. 6

The final building type that is going to be modelled, which is slightly different from some of the other buildings that I have made, is going to be the circular fuel tankers in the harbor.

This reference image shows that there are a few of the fuel tankers in a farm area near the edge of the harbor. These objects will be good for when the explosion scenes happen and the smoke and fire occurs during the animation - as we can assume that these went up in smoke very quickly.

A ladder and some piping around the edges has been added to make it look more realistic. A metal texture for the piping and the ladder will be simple to apply as they are all seperate objects, but for the main tank, Unwrap UVW will need to be used again so that all the materials look effective. Also, as a door is being added in at the top of the tank, different materials will need to be applied to this part too.

I have mapped this building first mainly so that I could get some more practise with the Unwrap UVW technique. This building was very simple to flatten and map out then apply the materials in Photoshop, which might not be the case with the more complicated buildings. The most complicated thing that needed to be done was for the top and bottom circular sections: there were no appropriate aluminium textures that matched up with the rest of the building to apply without having a watermark, so the first task was to remove it using the clone brush on a very small setting.

After this, there was a lot of rotation and referring to the mapping in 3DS Max to ensure that the right parts were being selected, but there wasn't a major need to change materials as the piping and ladder had already been sorted in the program using UVW Mapping. The final texture was then applied to a black background and the outline layer was removed.

The final building then looks as follows. This will be cloned, rotated etc. when I work with the landscaper and put the buildings into the landscape to form the basis for the scenery.

Building 5

The next building that has been made is the Pacific Air Forces historic headquarters building, which was bombed in Pearl Harbor. It might look slightly different now compared to then, so I am going to texture it according to the common materials used from that time period, however as we know it was bombed, it will be a good one to get destroyed during the animation.

 

The same techniques have been applied when creating this building as when creating the other buildings. Textures will be applied using the maps below and by using the architectural texture pre-sets for the roof and the pillars.

Building 4

I am creating another building similar to building 1 but with some minor differences, so that it looks a bit more like this photo.

I will now work on the textures for this building, which should be similar to the first building made, apart from a different part of unwrapping as there have been more detailed windows added to the lower part of the building.

The textured maps for the building's sections that use UVW Unwrap are as follows:

Building 3 Update

To ensure that the quality of this building is as high as possible, I have now been working on adding planes to the interior, so that textures can be added to them which allows more flexibility when adding cameras to the scene, as we won't need to worry about any glitchy looking areas during rendering.

To start with, the inside window compartments have had more windows added to them internally. To do this, planes have been aligned with the outside walls to ensure that the sizes match up. Then, the windows have been added, so that the interior part looks the same as the interior windows.

Next, the back wall and the ceiling area have been given planes to put a simple texture on. I have keep the same slanted roof and plan to make the interior roofing look like a wooden panel.

To complete the final part of the design stage with only the texturing left to be done, the runway and rest of the area where the planes will be parked has been finished. Depending on the size of the landscape and how this fits in with the rest of the scenery, the flight path will be extended if needed.

Building 3

The next building that I am working on is the Naval Air Station, which will be the place for the models of the planes to be in the animation.

 

The main feature that I have firstly been working on is making the object hollow and adding the amount of polygons needed to make the small glass pannelled windows.3DS Max doesn't seem to like buildings being hollow, so I may have to add some more features later on to make polygons on both the inside and outside to ensure that it renders correctly. But, so far, this is what I have achieved:

 

I really like the effect that extruding and insetting all of the polygons has given the end parts of the buildings, so once the correct textures are applied, this should look rather effective. However, using the UVW Unwrapping could prove to be a huge problem in itself, so I will see how that can be resolved when reaching that part (I aim to have started texturing all of the buildings next week). I will also combat the issue of the inside looking too dark and hollow by possibly cloning each part and rotating by 180 degrees so that the inside can be textured properly as well.

Building 2 Update

Another feature of the Naval Supply Depot Building is that it has a flag on top of the building. To create this, a flat box was added onto the cylinder, then modified to be a cloth. The object properties of the cylinder also needed to be adjusted so that it is now a collision object and can be linked to the flag.

When stimulating the action of the flag, as there was no force making it flow, it simply just flopped down like a flag would be if there was no wind. So the next course of action was to apply wind to the flag.

Next, in the modifier panel, the wind force needed to be added to the object and put into simulation, instead of just simply being present in the scene. This way, the flag not only has the appearance of a flag, but is also constantly blowing in the wind like a flag would be. In the animation, the speed and turbulence of the wind can be adjusted considering the amount of planes, bombs etc. that would be affecting the wind. In this instance, the wind object had to be lowered, moved closer to the flag and to point upwards slightly to give the appearance of a standard flag blowing in the wind.

Building 2 Progress

The second building that has been modelled today is the Naval Supply Depot, a reinforced concrete storehouse. My sketch is based off pictures that I have researched and has helped aid my modelling.

This building is slightly more complicated than the last one - there was a lot more windows to extrude and inset. When applying UVW Unwrapping to the object to arrange the map for Photoshop later, there was a slight problem:

Even with the map open in 3DS Max to reference where each polygon was, it would still prove too difficult to apply textures. To combat this, normal mapping and a lot of careful selecting of polygons was used, with the 'ignoring backfacing' option selected.

The mapping is now much easier to follow, so this method will be used when more complicated buildings are made again and need unwrapping applied to get decent texturing.

Building 1 Progress

The first building that I have began modelling is the Naval Supply Dept. Warehouse:

My sketch and model is looking slightly different to the photograph but the general building shape and the textures are very similar. The techniques learnt in class (extrude, connect, ring and inset) have been very useful when it comes to making the building detailed. To create the slightly different shapes and sizes for the windows, these techniques have been applied.

As the building has been constructed using mainly boxes and very simple shapes, the detail of the building will come out in the texturing. Unlike last year (as I didn't know how to use the tools explained in the first lesson to create good windows), there has been no need to create separate cylinders, boxes etc. for the window frames, so applying the texture to one object is slightly more difficult. However, I now know as well how to use UVW Mapping to make this easier.

As the extruding, insetting etc. has created many polygons, the unwrapped UVW looks quite complicated. But as I know what parts of the building are which part of the map, using Photoshop it shouldn't be too difficult, it just might be a bit of a fiddly process. As the building isn't going to be seen in extreme detail, the inner frames of the windows shouldn't need much work in terms of texturing. The main parts that I want to ensure are perfect in terms of textures is the window itself, the front view of the frames and the building's brickwork.


Map 1 (which can be applied to the top part of both of the main sections of the building, as they are symmetrical):

Map 2 (for the lower section of the building):

While I am editing this in Photoshop, the UVW will be open in 3DS Max so that it can be constantly reffered to to ensure that every texture is accurately placed in the right section of the map. More maps will be used for other parts of the building if necessary.

More Fire

Now that I've remembered how to create the basics for fire, I decided to go a bit further to add on to my experience from last year. The next part was surprisingly simple - creating the glow effect for the fire to make it look more realistic.

Using the video post editor, a lens effect glow is added to the fire.

This results in the fire glowing - much more realistic than having just a flame that looks like it has no heat or light. The settings needed to be adjusted to tone the brightness down a bit and the colour needed to be changed to give the above effect. It was also applied to every pixel so that it all glowed, but the edges could have also just glowed or an outline of light could have been applied.
To start off with, the fire had an extremely bright glow which was a pale yellow colour, which resulted in the sort of glow you would see emitting from a candle. So, unintentionally, I have learnt how to create an effective looking candle as well as a fire.

This is the render of the fire, placed on a black background to show what it would look like at night with a faint glow around the edges.

Sketches

I have started drawing up some ideas for some of the buildings that were in Pearl Harbor at the time that the attack happened, to get my ideas in order and to have some reference points for modelling. These are only some of the buildings that are in the area that I am going to include, but once I get back into the swing of modelling I will hopefully not need some drawings to help me visualise things. I've also got some reference images of the area at the time that should help with the placing of the buildings once the landscape part of the scenery is finished and the time comes to put it all together.
The buildings in this image include the Naval Supply Dept. Warehouse, the Naval Air Station and the Reinforced Concrete Storehouse for the Naval Supply Depot. Another building that is going to be included is the Pacific Air Forces Historic Headquarters, which looks very similar to the top building. This was one of the buildings that got bombed but managed to get rebuilt and survive, so the damage done to this will not be quite as extensive as the damage will be to some of the other buildings.

Particle System - Super Spray

Today we learnt about using the Super Spray Particle System to create smoke and fire. I have a good existing knowledge of how to use this tool already as it was used a lot in my animation last year. However, there is always room for improvement and today was good revision for when I need to use it again.

I started off by creating smoke. The particles needed to be facing so that whatever angle the smoke was being looked at from, they would always look the same. One thing that I learnt while creating the smoke was to cut down the particle quantity. By inputting the amount of particles manually (e.g. 200) the rendering time will be cut down dramatically. Render time was a major problem last year - it took a good couple of weeks for files to render, especially the scenes that contained particle systems.

Another part of the tutorial that links to the super spray is creating wind. I didn't need to create this last year as my smoke just attached to my object and the object's movement controlled the movement of the smoke, but having wind joined to the smoke will be an effective tool to use. It was a bit fiddly trying to get the smoke and the wind the right speed/turbulence as what changes on one effects the output of the other but eventually I got to grips with it.

Next, the texturing was dealt with. The opacity needed its own Gradient texture and there was also the pre-set smoke texture applied. Face mapping needed to be used as well so that each polygon had its own texture: this prevented the smoke from looking like it was made up of loads of square particles, which is something I didn't quite get to grips with when creating the smoke last year. As one of the new parts of animating that I have to work on is explosions, there will obviously be some element of smoke and fire with it too. However, I am going to try and keep these to a minimum, as even rendering this small part of smoke took about 30 seconds, so a whole scene full of fire and smoke would take forever. To finish off the smoke, I added a feature that allows the end of it to fade out, making it look more realistic.

Next, I gave the fire a go despite having a bit of a memory block on how to do this. Similar techniques were used, with the main difference being that the fire needed some more variation on the top part (it needed to seem thinner toward the top and the particles needed to appear as though they were 'flickering' at different times to each other). The result of this I think looks a bit too circular and not right, so I will watch the tutorial on youtube and try to extend the technique further and use the end result in the animation.

UVW Mapping

I am still getting to grips with the tutorial that we did on Wednesday on UVW Mapping. I am following the youtube tutorial to try and work through it slowly to make a simple dice/box cut out like we watched in lesson.

I'm not sure whether I'm having problems because I'm trying to use the version of 3D Max on my laptop (which my laptop doesn't always agree with) and visually it is much easier to work with on the big screened macs. However I am getting there and learning the basics finally. I will do some more practises on objects, including my little house, before this part of advanced texturing gets used in my modelling work.

Storyboard

Here is my contribution to the storyboard. I have done the opening scene, the closing scene, one of the flashbacks in black and white, the harbour before the attack, the destruction of the place and the final viewing of all the destruction caused.

Not all of these scenes are the ones that I am solely going to create - some are what the whole group are going to do together. I am going to finish off some more detailed sketches of my own scenes shortly and will upload them (always find it easier to draw something and have it visually in front of me prior to modelling it).

Personal Development

In this module, I am going to demonstrate my use of new skills. The main new skill that I am going to show is to create effective looking explosions in my animation. Last year, I created effective looking fire and some smoke, but this year I am going to improve how my smoke looked as well as adding explosions as well.
This will be an essential part to the animation because during the attack there was a lot of explosions and almost every photograph from the day has a vast amount of smoke in it.
I am beginning to watch tutorials as well as looking up and practising techniques from the 3DS Max Bible that should aid me when the time comes to actually animate this part of the animation. My blog will be updated with my progress in these techniques as I learn new skills.

Textures

Today in the tutorial, we have been learning how to add textures but make them look better than last year. As sometimes the textures look distorted and low quality, this will be an important factor (especially as I am creating a lot of the buildings) so keeping the textures looking detailed will add to the overall detail of the buildings and the scene as a whole.

The first thing that I did was adjust the preferences: Customise > Preferences > Viewports > Configure Driver > Mtach Bitmap Size As Closely As Possible.

Now, to make a simple building, I have made a plane and adjusted the segments so that there is only one length and one width segment. This makes applying the texture simpler and cuts down on the polygons.

Now to create polygon sections that align with the windows and the rest of the building, I have used the quickslice tool. This is another tool that I have only tried briefly before, but as I still find it tricky to use I've avoided it. But this year I will make the effort to use it as it is easier and I need to eventually get to grips with it. The first sections that have been divided using this tool are the brickwork in the texture. This was then extruded so that it stuck out from the windows.

Next, the framing part of the windows needed to be selected using the quickslice. These parts were then extruded as well, but not as far out as the main brickwork of the building. It can now be seen that the building looks much more detailed and realistic, just through having a few parts of the building extruding slightly.

To finish off, the plane that I have been working on has been cloned and rotated to fit around the edges and create a realistic looking office block like building. The planes have been rotated whilst having the angle snap toggle turned on so that the angles are precise. Another two planes have been used for the base and the roof with the colours changed to fit in with the rest of the building.

This tutorial has been particularly useful for me, as it is showing a more efficient method to create complex looking buildings simply and with minimal polygons. New tools have been learnt as well as new settings, which can be applied to other parts of the project, not just buildings.