Bomb

Now that the first one of my scenes has been completed (scene 5 - simple camera work showing the scenery prior to the attack) and the recordings have been edited, I have begun work on my part of the flashback scenes - a building getting bombed. As this is one of the dramatic black and white scenes, it is going to be short to achieve maximum effect with all of the events being put together in short bursts.

To create this effect, instead of using a Particle Array and a Gizmo, a bomb is being used. It has been placed in the middle of the building, binded to space warp with the building and the falloff has been turned on to give it a good range of effectiveness. No gravity has been added as the building sinks when it is on, but spin and all of the other settings have been adjusted to make it look as natural an explosion as possible.

A sphere gizmo has then been added to the bomb and inserted where abouts the fireball would be when the building explodes. The settings have been adjusted to include an explosion and so that the fireball is of an appropriate size for the explosion.

Motion blur has also been applied to the building so that when the parts of the building fly off in the explosion, during the render motion blur will be seen. The amount of motion blur may need to be tried and tested so that not every single piece has it, but it should look very effective. However, this will add a fair amount to the render time, so that needs to be taken into consideration too.

The render with the motion blur applied can be seen above. The time it took to render this one frame was very lengthy, so I am going to consider decreasing the amount of motion blur to avoid crashes. However, as the scene is so short, it isn't a major issue like it would be for the other scenes, but this will still be taken into consideration  for the final render.

Without the motion blur, the scene looks like this. The black smoke is good for the explosion effect, but the fire needs to be adjusted as it isn't showing up during the renders properly, just a black fireball is appearing where the orange fireball should be, which hasn't happened before when I have practised this technique previously.

For this scene and others, they will be rendered as TGA files in case of any crashes. The quality will still be there, but stopping/starting will be much easier and piecing all pf the parts together at the end will be a simple task too. The settings above will just have to be remembered so that the file remains uncompressed and so that the background doesn't disappear.

Another problem to be solved has popped up during the practise render, one which I have never seen before, so this shall be queried next week, but it seems to be a problem with using the metal ray renderer with this particular scene.

Editing the Sound

Using Soundbooth, I have been editing the sound recordings that have been made to be our documentary style voiceover. We have used a male in our group to be the voice and the recordings have been edited to get rid of 'err's and other sounds not needed. The amount of noise has also been adjusted to clean up the audio. This has been done now while the landscape etc. of the island is being fixed and it is needed so that we all know roughly how long the speech part is for us to modify our animating around.

Completed Scenery

It's all finally done! I am very impressed with how it all turned out - the water and lighting mainly finish it off very well with all the features. There have been some further texturing problems with some of the buildings when copying the scenery file over (it kept mixing up the textures from different buildings and tried to sequence them) but hopefully this is all fixed now. I feel that the planes could have been better as I think the texturing and the shape of them could look slightly more professional, but still, the scenery looks excellent.

Finalising The Scenery

Following on from last week, we have been working together to place the buildings in the completed landscape and scenery area. The water has been added to the harbour area and looks extremely effective.

Buildings have been cloned and adjusted slightly when needed, as well as the same happening to the boats. The ships have also been positioned according to our research, which shows on a map the alignment of the ships on the day of the attack.

As all we were waiting for now was for Dan to finish texturing the planes, we helped with the Daylight System to save time and as we had nothing else to do, it made sense. We used the correct date, time and location on the daylight system and repositioned the place that the sun rose (got to have some artistic licence) so that the area had enough lighting that things could be seen in detail, but so that it all still looked effective. The glistening of the sunlight on the water looks particularly effective.

The shadow softness was then adjusted so that the shadows were softer, and the intensity of the sun was also played around with till we got the settings that we felt looked right. Using this system with the sky and sun also saved the problem of trying to make clouds and a sky for the background in Photoshop. However, the rendering for all this is going to take a long time when we animate, so we have to ensure that we all leave sufficient time for the rendering. I personally aim to have the majority of my animating finished by the back end of next week, rendering along the way as I go and saving the renders as individual images due the amount of crashes that will most likely happen.

Explosions

Another explosion tutorial that will be useful is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRyFJ9kK1ko which shows how to plant bombs inside objects to make them explode. It uses similar tools to the other tutorial (which both use the Gizmo to create the smoke and fireball effect) but it produces a slightly different result.

Starting To Animate

Now that all of my modelling is finished, I have been working with Lydia to help get all the buildings arranged on Ford Island and Pearl Harbor.

SCREENSHOT TO FOLLOW

We have also discovered that adding trees to the scenery is extremely simple due to the AEC Extended Foilage objects, which has the palm trees we need, so this will save us all some work and give some extra detail to our scenery to make it look more realistic.

For the animating aspect, I have begun researching techniques for my focused area for animation, which is explosions. A useful tutorial that has been a good starting point is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDGUaw0XrDg
 

I will be making buildings explode as well as having bombs dropped, so having the skills to make objects themselves blow up into little pieces as well as just having general explosions is a good thing to begin practising with
Explosions use a particle system just like fire and smoke does, but they use thePArray rather than the Super Spray. The PArray then got linked to the object and used mesh particles as object fragments.

The next settings to be adjusted were to make the fireball part of the explosion. Using the Helpers tab under the Create tab, the Atmospheric Apparatus has a Sphere Gizmo, which is what allows the ball of flame to appear. There are different shaped Gizmos to play about with as well, which I will try out later on and see which ones look best for the animation. After this, a fire effect was applied from the Atmosphere & Effects tab. The settings for this can be adjusted, including the colours, size etc. as well as smoke and explosions being added. The size of the explosion itself can shrink and grow like any standard object using the Autokey when animating. To get the sphere to disappear, it was simply hidden, but the Gizmo stayed behind.
To show that the explosion is also a light source, an omni light has been placed inside the explosion, which is why the shadows on the pieces of the broken sphere appear on the outer parts of the pieces.
This tool seems fairly simple to use so I should be able to get to grips with this challenge fairly quickly, so learning my new skill for the animation part of this module should be successful.

Completed Buildings

All of my modelling is now completed. UVW Unwrapping is definitely getting mastered with all these buildings needing at least two maps each!

Fuel Tankers

Naval Supply Warehouse

Naval Supply Depot

Naval Air Station

Navy Yard Warehouse

Pacific Air Forces Headquarters

Now that all of the modelling and buildings are complete, I can work with the person in charge of landscaping and place the buildings in the scene so that the scenery will be almost complete. The only thing needed then will be the models of the boats and planes. For the modelling, I have kept to the group timeline that we agreed upon within the first couple of weeks and I now have some extra time which for allow for troubleshooting during the animating or rendering.

Building 3 Completion

 

 

The texturing of the Naval Air Station on Ford Island is finally finished.The mapping was a bit of a pain but mainly due to there being lots of fiddly bits to work with in Photoshop. I am particularly pleased with how the windows turned out, as that is what made the mapping so complicated. I have also made a point of not making the texturing on the glass parts of the windows consistent - different shades of the same texture have been included to add some imperfections in the windows, as in real life they would not look exactly the same.

The mapping can be seen above. The top one is for the glass windows and the panelling and the lower map is for the main section of the building, including the roofing, walls etc.

Reactor

Today we had a recap on the reactor tool. This will be useful for me as I am in charge of explosions, so if any bombs are going to be dropped and cause collisions with buildings then this tool will be a good starting point for this, although more research will need to be done in the next week when the models are finished.

Firstly, playing about with the mass, elasticity, friction etc. properties and just getting re-familiar with the reactor area was done. I quickly remembered the settings and how to use the reactor after the demonstration. Pressing 'p' to play the animation and 'r' to reset it showed how the animation turned out.

Next (remembering that the objects should be as close as they can be without touching, as reactor doesn't like that!) a ramp and ball were added to collide with objects. Once again the properties needed to be added, as well as the collision tolerance being lowered as far down as it could go so that the boxes don't bounce about everywhere.

The final part involved no ramp, but the autokey and basic animation with the ball. The important thing to remember here was to change the start frame with the timing from 0 to a number that is after the animation begins. From this lesson, I am going to start reading up/watching youtube videos to do with creating effective looking explosions and destroying buildings, as I have a feeling that this part might be tricky to do.

We also learnt how to create water, which was a lot easier than I expected. Using the reactor again, there was a special section for water. A plane was then added as well as a sphere, then the settings were adjusted so that ripples etc. appeared. Although I am not in charge of creating the water for our scene it is still a handy skill to have.

More Texturing - UVW

The unwrap for the second building was a bit more complicated than the other buildings that have been modelled so far. The mapping itself was more complicated, but also the textures needed to be adjusted and re-sized, as well as some UVW Mapping being applied after.

The amount of layers for this map was very great, so re-naming and merging them down when possible was necessary to avoid confusion and keep things organised and structured.

The building itself was made of reinforced concrete, so the textures reflected that. However the top parts appeared slightly different, so using the material editor and one of the architectural textures, stone was chosen and adjusted to the desired texture.

To avoid having to use UVW Unwrap on the blocks on top of the building (and also so that a 3DS texture could be used) UVW Mapping has been applied and then scaled down appropriately to avoid any distortion or pixelation of the texture.