flash catle animation first draft

hey again heres the animation i was working on not the finished one yet though still a few bits to do on it like i said in the big post about it.

(if the animation does not play please follow the link)

(link:)  http://youtu.be/FWebAm7p-Ec (my channel:) http://www.youtube.com/user/SirMortum?feature=mhee )

anyway i'll hopefully upload the final draft for this soon but i may get caught up in the assignment or others but anyway see you on the next post.

The future of the animation and how I feel about it

hey again just posting how I felt about my animation and what I’d do with it in the future well first of all how I feel about it:

I really liked the animation I did although there is always something that could be improved on first of all I wasn’t that happy with how the fluid fire went I wanted the lamp to fall then west on fire or set on fire in the act of falling or hitting the ground wasn’t pleased with how it started before it hit the ground. Another thing I wasn’t happy with was my models rigging I spent so much time on making this model and all the thing does is stand there looking pretty even though it was rigged although not greatly because of the limit I had on time and the fact when I thought of doing it I forgot how to paint the influence of the joints having in no small part impinged on moving it.
But as I said overall I was very happy with how my animation turned out maybe lengthen it at bit and it would have been better but it was not bad.

and on to what will I be doing with the animation in the future well because I want to add this to a portfolio I’m at least going to re-render it in a higher quality render but I think I will go and change a few thing with-in the animation such as finishing the character rigging to a better standard and texturing the model differently I would also like to change when the fire starts and will most likely do that quite soon along with this I may totally redo the final part of the animation and make it a bit longer and have the model crush the lamp then it go on fire like I originally wanted to do.

Anyway that pretty much covers what I felt about the animation and what I’m likely to be doing in the future to improve on it so again if you have any questions please mail me or comment on the post and see you again on the next post.

background of the animation

Hey again just showing some of the stuff that was in my assignment animation but may not have been seen. I’ll put up a few screenshot of different bits of the stage as well as a view of it where you can see it all and write a bit about each screenshot saying where it is and things like that so first.

Here is an over view of the scene you can see everything at one from here. You can see how big I made the scene so that I didn't catch the cyberspace in the animation. You can also just about see the second wall on one side where I textured sky so that if you saw through the camera you would see sky not cyberspace.

Here is the computer base unit you see briefly at the start of the animation with it’s cd drives out.

Here we have the back of the monitor and the cables going through the table and down into the computer base unit.

Here is the window that was closed for the duration of the animation because it never really entered into the shot I was going to have another camera show it as a third shot for the introduction but decided not to because of time I had and the time it took at the start of the animation.

In this screenshot it shows the model I created on the stand that I put him on as a massive clay model he would have moved but to crush the lamp when it fell but I decided to take that out because the lamp was a pretty ok model and I didn't feel right crushing him and setting him on fire J.

And here is the fire effect that my lamp falls into at the end of the animation although he was meant to be set on fire I found that too difficult for the time I had left and just tried to get it so the camera didn’t show it till the lamp was on or near the floor so it looked like he had set on fire. This is actual a fluid particle fire I have done normal particle fire but I decided to use this because I think that it give a much nicer effect than the normal one.

Anyway I hope these screenshot give a bit more of an insight into how much work went into the creation of the animation for my assignment if you have any questions or want to see any other bits of the animation that I’ve not already shown then please mail me or comment and I’ll answer the question or get another few screenshots up.

Hey again just putting up the movement designs/plans for animation and concept art for animation.

Here are the basic designs for the animation from the first movement of the lamp to when it falls into the fire a few things have obviously changed over the course of the creation of the animation.

there we go the concept art/plan for the animation if you have any questions please mail me or comment on the post and i'll see you again on the next post

concept art

Hey just putting up my basic concept drawing for the animation assignment first I’ll show you the drawing I had to make my character I got these drawing online to help build the model since I wanted to do a jack of blades model from the “fable the lost chapters” game I went looking for the 4 view for his and got them after I cut them out and made them around about the same size I used them as a reference for my model here they are:

There we go there is some small difference in size between the front and back views and the 2 side views as I found out when I came almost to the end of the build of the character.

Here are some concepts art for my animation this is just the basic artwork for it

anyway hope you like the art work i will put up so of the concept art for the animation later on

Hey again this is the promised log/tutorial on how to rig the witch's hat I made so that it can be moved so that it looks like it’s moving because of the wind so first I'll open up my witch's hat I've already made 

then I’ll press space and go to the side view and open that up to the full display then I’ll change the main menu bar to animation so that I can get to the joints menu and go to skeleton and joint toll like it did in the cable log/tutorial and make some joints from the bottom of the cone to the top around about 4 or 5.

Then I will slect both the cone and the joints that I just made (remember to make sure they are in the middle of the cone) and the go to the skin menu on the main menu bar and to bind skin and down to rigid bind I do this because I want the hat not to move around when I move the joints

Like so the bottom of the cone hasn't moved just the top around the joint I moved smooth bind that I have a tendency to use would have moved the entire cone not just the bits near the joint I moved.

So there we had the cone moving now for the base of the hat for this I'm going to try make a few joint a around 8 points around the hat I'm not totally sure how I'm going to do this and how well it will work :)

So first of all go again into the top view if you're not already there (you can do it from other view but this is the way I did it and its a lot easier) and go to the joint tool and create almost a a full ring around the cone on the cylinders side then on the last one go to the tool-bar just under the main menu bar and click on snap to point this button if you can't find it

Then click on the first joint you made and you should get a circle of joints like this

After that you should start making lines of joints like this

You can do this by going to the joint tool and clicking on an existing joint then make the new joints they will be connected I’d do this around the full hat around about every 2 spans

There's mine hope yours is something like that you can do more than 2 joints to the outer side of the circle but I've only done 2 for this one.

Then I went and got all the joints I just made and smooth binded them to the circle you can manipulate the hat to do some things the only problem is it could have used more joints between the outer and inner circle and a main joint point because the circle of joints moves the full hat rather than just bits of it you could paint the influence and get rid of this later.

Here's the finished product though 

Anyway hope you liked them log/tutorial hopefully I'll have time to fine tune this and put the final hat up on the blog so that's the end see you more on the next post see you there.

Hey again here's another tutorial/log on what I’ve done

This time we are going to be making a witches hat I had forgotten how to do this so it may be a bit of a weird way of making the hat. But first I went and got a cone and I deleted the bottom I just selected it and deleted it.

Then I went and made a nurbs cylinder and deleted the sides and the top so that all I had was the bottom circle I then put that under the cone that I had set in the middle on the grid by using the attribute editor like I did in my earlier tutorial/log.

Then I pressed the space bar and went to the top view and right clicked on the new circle I made from the cylinder then clicked on the control Vertex and grabbed the middle and took out all of the Vertex one at a time so I had this

Then I counted up the vertex points and went back to the cone and into the attribute editor and went to MakeNurbCone1 and into cone history and down to sections and changed it to 20 since there where 20 vertex points in the middle of the cylinder/circle, I’ve got to say this took me a bit to do I was stuck for a few mins around this point adding up how and what I’d do J.

Anyway back to the log/tutorial then I went back to the circle/cylinder and moved the points in the top view that we where on to the coordinating points on the cone around the base like this

Remember to bring all the points back I almost missed this the first time I went through it as you can see in the screen-shot above the screen-shot below shows it with all the points in more or less the right place.

And there we have it a witch’s hat all you have to do now is combind the cone and the remains of the cylinder.

I hope you liked the log/tutorial I will have another up soon about me rigging the hat so that it can move a bit as though from a gust of wind see you on the next log

Hey again this is how I created the cable that I had in my animation assignment I’ll go through how I made it and made it so that I could get it to move if my character walked into it even though in the animation I didn’t have to first here's my start for a cable just a Nurbs cylinder.

So first of all I have to make it a bit thinner so I’ll use the scale tool to do this then I’ll set it down on the grid.

Ok here it is scaled down an easy way to make sure the Nurb is exactly turned horizontal on the grid is to the up -90 in the rotation attribute in the attribute editor (p.s. you can open this by going to display and down to the UI elements and turning on the attribute editor) you can also make sure it’s just sitting on the grid by putting 0 in all the boxes for the translation attribute in the attribute editor.

After that I went to the attribute editor again and went to the MakeNurbCylinder1 at the top of the attribute editor and went onto the cylinder history section and changed the spans section from the original of 10 to 30.

After this I then changed the main menu bar menu located in the left top corner.

I set this to animation then pressed space and picked the top view and opened that up to the full display so that I could see easily then zoomed in the that I could see the spans then I went to skeleton and down to joint tool and clicked on that so that I could start then I went and put one joint into the middle of each span.

Then I went back into the prospective view and selected both the joints (all of them) and the Nurb cylinder then I went to skin and clicked went down to bind skin and to smooth bind and clicked on it.

And there we have the final version the cable can now be moved with the joints easily and makes the bend look natural because of the amount of joints and spans if you have too few joints to spans the cable can be quite wooded for the bend.

maya models

OK heres another model i made you probably saw this in my assignment animation this is my keyboard and mouse the keyboard i spent ages on it was really hard to do i actually went and counted the buttons on the keyboard then tryed to put them in unfortunately i was using a laptop keyboard as a reference so it's not that amazingly layout unfortunately anyway heres the image of them

so theres the front and side view i think it's pretty good you like it i cut the keyboard in half thats why the under side is open i did this because it didn't sit right when i put it on a table in Maya it looked really weird thankfully by cutting it in half it helped and look pretty good on a table.

anyway yet again if you have any questions plz e-mail me or comment on the blog see you on the next post :)

jack of blades

just writeing about the model i made over a few weeks it's a full character model i never showed many of the images of me makeing this model but thankfully i saved them and here are a few originally i found online the 4 veiws for jack of blades from the origional fable game and i decided to have a go at makeing him so i cut them out and started heres one of the early ones with just the head, hood and the body unfinished i made most of these by adding a nurbs sphere with around about 20 subdivides on all axis and moved the vertex in to position for the pictures that i had added in a camera views so that i could make sure they fitted nicely

as you can see below i did this quite a bit and managed to get quite far only having a few problems on whitch was pointed out later by the tutor was that the center point was in view and not hidden and would make it hard to rig later on and not move as well as it could.

for the arms though i didn't use a sphere i just used a tube it worked quite well if i say so myself  this is me nearing the end almost got everything i would have at the end

this one is pretty much the final copy although i did make a few more changes before it went in the clip for the assignment like remaking the tummy.The hardest bit in this was the hands that i finally admitted defeat at finishing before the deadline.

anyway that how i made my model i eventually rigged it but just with a basic rig as i think i posted earlier although i this one he is colored in with jack of blades colors though :) i took these out of the animation because he was to look like clay for it, so thats the jack of blades model i will be continuing on this project and hopefully getting it into zbrush to make it better i will also continue to post update about it on the blog thanks for reading and hope you enjoyed the images of the model if you have any questions plz drop me an e-mail or a comment


thanks for reading Azrael (Sam Sharp)

Here is my assignment animation finally rendered even though I've had to do so around about 5 times now because Maya settings seem to change every time i load up the program thankfully though this made it possible for the the fluid fire effect in my animation to work eventually

I'm quite pleased with the result apart from the fire effect starting before it was meant to very pleased i managed to et it up to around 55 seconds as well.

this is my model of a computer in the screen-shot is the monitor and base unit as well as a wire that i have rigged so that the connected up to each other i was really happy with the model apart from a few little bits about it first is something i just noticed that because of how i did the monitor you can see the gray "screen" from the back of the monitor but apart from that i was quite happy although i may continue to develop this further and actually open up my computer at home and model the circuit boards so that it looks like a computer inside and out.

looking at what i did for this model i'm quite happy with the amount of time it took me to build this model apart from the cable at the back originally i had quite a few of problems with this but after adding in more subdivisions into the bar that would become the cable for the computer and making sure i didn't have to many joints for the cables skeleton it came out ok. overall i though i did very well on this model and am quite pleased with it.

Heres the first draft on my Jack of blades model I've been working on for a bit he still needs to be fine tuned so i have to go over him again taking out different bits of the model and connecting it up as well as texturing him but thats for later

i have run into some problems with the rigging it's a ok rig but maya has enviably made some mistakes
so i will have to go back through and paint the effect of the joints onto the model unfortunate i've forgotten how to paint the influence of the skeleton joints

but i have found a website that has a tutorial on this so i will watch the video and then fix the rig
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TACB6bX8SN0
I should have the model properly rigged very soon.

flash

if not working see SirMortum on youtube for video

flash

here is my flash storyboard

flash castle animation working on

Hey Just wanted to show some basic animation in flash that I’ve been working on, I’m building a castle and battle scene to see if I can do it so far I’ve built the castle and a man at arms the doors open the man comes out all simple motion tweening animation so far

In this screen-shot I’ve now got 3 men at arms and they are all outside having a look around with each other.

In the next screenshot I’ve built another model this one of a wizard the 2 groups will attack each other in the scene after this one I’ll hopefully manage to use a shape tween soon.

Here is the battle scene it is only small because I’ve run into some problems trying to get the man at arms weapons in maces rather than swords but here it is.

You can see the shape tween here with the magic turning into a lightning bolt.

I’ll export what I have on this animation and when I’m finished and got round the problem or given up and gone in a different direction upload the finished cope of the work. again if you have any questions mail me i'll be happy to answer them and see you on my next post.