testing

i then went on to test out some explosions as i had never done any before on maya and was not particulary amazing with particles on maya(no pun intended) so i did a tutorial that emma found for me on exploding a sphere which worked easily enough. i them tried it on a cube and below was the resault which i was reasonably satisfied with.



i then moved onto trying it on the buildings in my scene, the particles of flames show up as only circle clouds until you maya software render them.



so in the video they show up as that but this photo below shows the current look of the explosion rendered at that stage. I later went into detail further with the particles making ramps to alllow for different colours and ramps for transparentcy but all this and the fact to many particles where coliding meant that the whole scene was slowed down and a major clean up was in order which M.L and george helped me out with but on the whole the explosion was a success concidering i have never made one before. i will put some more photos up later of the explosion and the laters which M.L rendered it in to show the smoke and flames.

Back to the works

When i returned back to the gas works to make the explosion and model the town using M.Ls buildings as the template houses, i had no problem making up the streets and plonking out houses of different sizes, though i feel i spent a little to much time modelling and scaling the houses as most probably wouldn't have been in the final shot but needed to be there for environment purposes. The real challenge would come when i had to make the gas works explodable which turned out to be a lot harder than i thought, concidering the amount of buildings i had in the gas works. below is what the town looked like with M.Ls buildings before i tore the gas works appart.

Bomb, bomb, bomb ba bomb

Next in order was the ol bomb for the explosion and bomb drop shot of the plane releasing the bomb and the bomb then blowing up the gas works. I just modelled the bomb from your standard plane bomb shape that is so often dypicted in cartoons and illistrations a like. i put a little bit of hand writen writing on the side which was common in those days to write messages to your enermys on bombs or shells ect. the message was good night tommy writen in german which you most likely wont be able to see but i wanted to put that suttle touch to this simple thing for a laugh so there you have it our awesome german bomb, see below.

Drive by, fly bye

I was then asked to model the environment and animate the fly by shot were the planes go under the aa guns, i started with the landscape where i got to use a few different tools which took a little getting used to for me to make a valley that looked believable and wide enough for the planes to get through, but i got the rough shape in the end and sorted the planes out and animated to movement of the aa guns and the planes, as M.L had the textures for the trees and was better with lighting than me due to my incapability in that area (note i need to work on lighting and texturing) i let him put the same trees from his scene into mine and get the lighting looking good and texturing the sandbags and as M.L had the re-rig claude(our character) he put him in position also on the aa gun . i just modelled the aa guns and landscape and some sandbags around the guns and changed claudes apearance so he looked like a soldier just by tweeking M.Ls model and also animated the fly by so you could see the guns as they face each other and the repeating action of them also.

mechanics

while i was in the process of modelling the gas works, we decided to keep the style of the houses throughout the same and we decided to go with the style of matt.l's (M.L) houses, so i stopped the gas works for a while and modelled a car for M.Ls scene as we were working on getting all the aniamtion and modelling done scene by scene at this point. M.Ls scene that the car was needed for was with the bus being shot by the plane, so i mad a car to go in M.Ls scene which was quite fun to make despite a series of silly problems with edge loops and duplicating the 2 sides of the model. I chose to make the car the same way i modelled my fish in the ident project as its easy to correct things for both sides as a car should be symetrical from the middle so this made things easier. i put on a few details that probably wernt necessary but i still think i could have done a lot better, but as M.L said because the car will be so far away you wont notice it, but i wanted to give it a bit of character just with colour and shape but i think this will be one of the models i would quite like to make into something visual to use close up in a future scene possibly so when i get back to my computer i think i would like to improve on this model and also that of my AA gun model.





As i said the detail could have more work done to it but as yu can see from the bottom one you cant see much detail at all of what i have done as the car is so far away as the distance the camera is in this bottom shot is the distance the car will roughly be from the camera.

modelling ;)

back to modelling after the animatic and i went straight into roughing out the rest of st ives around where the gas works which was not to much difficulty and added some rough colours in to give a feel for the scene before i started texturing.

2d_personal_character

Even though i never got round to doing a 2d turnaround i did a few ideas for my personal character in rough, but i havent had the time to do it in colour as of yet, so my character is pritty self explanitory im a fishboy that surfs which is prity much what i am lol spend all my time by the sea or in it and have been called fishboy back at school many a times and on holiday when ive been surfing so i thought the idea was quite fitting. though the character is taken from a real factual species of fish called a mexican walking fish so that kinda let me play with the idea which i enjoyed.

pre pro

i did a few pre production shots of my own for the fly bys when we were first conceptualising to help out with forming our storyboard, see below.

Animatic.....

This was our animatic for which i had made the anti aircraft gun(aa gun) and the gas works, as we were having a little group organisation of who is doing what and what camera shots for the animatic, which resulted in matt.l doing more work than me for it, i would have been more than happy to do more but i didnt know what kind of shots we were looking for. But the animatic i guess was just a case of roughing out the work so i have no problem with matt.l doing that just made me feel like i wasnt putting any effort in dispite there only being a little work to do as its a short animation, so it all worked out in the end.

initial ideas_maya

this draft of fore street was just a rough idea of how to do the street shots on maya just popping up some planes and a polygon for the church tower, just to keep the initial concepts simple and as low poly as possible even though we didnt use this shot.

Then for the animatic i started work on rough model of the anti aircraft gun and the gas works just to help with the block through. i tried to get the aa gun as acurate as possible but we later found that rigging the character to it with so many polygons was difficult so i took away some of the handles and general polygons that you couldnt see. I enjoyed making the aa gun though and if i had some more time would like to give it some nice textures but as the shot is short and close up you wouldnt have time to see them. For the gas works i just blocked it out for the animatic with polygons for all the buildings as you wouldnt be getting hugely close up.