(attempted) Meeting of 26th Oct

Well sorry to be blunt, but I didn't think much of that meeting. It sucked frankly. My major concern is the way that we've divided out the work. For example we have Nelson himself. Ali will make him, and could spend as much time on the model as he likes. Perhaps he could wait until the last week to complete it. Then that would leave me with 1 week to create the clothes onto the body (cant be done without the body). Pass it on to the people animating it, and the people texturing it. We we all depend on the people before us. Its a mess, and too risky.

I realise in any kind of animation dev team like this, that's how its supposed to work, but we aren't professionals, barely know each others skills/styles, and we have a very close deadline. I would prefer it if we could divide the modeling out to everyone, then split the animation between everyone too. Or just have our own thing to work on all sides, like modelling, animating and texturing a character, or a cannon or something.

Other thing that bugged me, was in the meeting, about 5-6 people were shouting at once, only about 2 of them listening to anyone. I just gave up, put on some headphones. It seemed the usual lot took charge without asking anyone else, and tried to sort things out, but that didn't work too well. Sam, if you read this, you should of stuck about, we needed you as a project manager, but I cant blame you for leaving. Leah, I just read over the notes, thanks for keeping track of all that, I couldn't figure out what was going on. Ali, I text you asking whats going on with Nelson... no reply. I'm not doing Nelsons clothes, if you need some help though, just ask me.

So to sum up, I don't have a clue whats going on. If you want to be a team, and communicate like adults, then we can sort something out. The modellers are well off, but if your an animator, just think whats going to happen if you don't get your models until too late. The longer the modeller spends on it, the better mark he/she gets, the worse yours is. We need to restructure this or we're going to end up unintentionally screwing each other over. I needed to vent that, sorry, it's not directed at you all!

I better get some more sleep before coming in next time :P

Modeling my face IV

I only worked on the eyes today. I was trying to get more detail around them, like eyelids, creases and so on.
Crease is a great tool to use on edges. You just select the edges push the button, and it puts a crease there! Nice and simple :)

The problem I just realised I've had, is that the area/shape around the eye changed without me noticing. I'd advise you, when using the relax tool, to keep an eye on the area around where you're working, because it can affect too much sometimes. Now I've got to tweak the nose, cheek and brow back to how it was :(

The face stuff is starting to get on my nerves, so after this I just want to get on with fixing it onto a head, and getting all that over and done with.

Oh, and something I would really suggest, is once youve got the general face shape, to put your front photo on as a texture. That way, instead of trying to look through it, and at different angles, you can actually move things slightly, to get them in the right place. It really helped me, because you can see if the nose is slightly too high, or if your creases are at the wrong angle etc. Anyway, if you want to do that, use UVW Map modifier on your face, and use the 'plane' type, and just move the gizmo around, and adjust the height/width to get it right. If your photo (like mine) is uneven, you can use the material editor to crop half, and mirror it in the settings above.

Cannonballs

I made a cannonball! lol... that was hard :P

Hehe, they're just spheres, but it was good to have a glance at some of the textures avaliable and what can be done with them. Suprisingly, the Metal_Rust texture is awful, and Metal_PlateOX is much better in terms of rusty metal. I had to modify it a little, so that it was black and shiny, and didn't look like grey concrete. To do that, I just made the diffuse map, a "Mix" type, which means you can mix two textures into one. So I just took the rust looking one, and mixed it with black.

The wooden floor is Wood_Old and it seems to work nicely. I think we'll end up using that on the ship, quite a bit.

Modeling and firing some of the other types of ammo should be a bit more interesting though, the grape shot looks really odd, and the one that splits in two with a chain as well.

Cannon

I decided to give the face a break today, it gets a little tedious after a while. So instead I built a cannon! I figured we can get on with building some basic props like this before knowing the exact storyboard, and I'd already collected some reference photos anyway.

I tried two methods of making the barrel; lathe and loft. I ended up sticking with lathe because it was so much easier to tweak and add detail, than dealing with separate shapes, then curve editing.

It's going to be fun to use with Max's physics system, because the barrel should be able to actually fire a ball from it. Can't wait to animate it, and have some flash & smoke, make it roll backwards when it fires :)

I want to upload the .max file to share, but realized if we are going to be working as a team, we need some online space, like FTP or a wiki, where we can share all our files, and work collaboratively. Actually I've got a few ideas, and want to let you know about a few other cool tools I've found while working in a development team lately, so I'll get some stuff together and post about it later.

Oh... Click the top image to see full size.

Modeling my face III

As you can see I've done some more work on the lips, which I'm happy with now. The texture should add most of the detail to them, because its the colour that defines where the lips begin and end, not so much the shape of them. They were sticking out too much before, a bit fish-like I think.

I also cleaned up the forehead a little. That was a pain, because the relax tool wouldnt work on the central area, because it ignored the central line of vertices, So I just had to do some vertex tweaking.

The eye area is next on my list. I added an eyeball, but just as a visual aid. I took the default eyeball material from Max, and just chucked it in GIMP to change the colour from brown, then mapped it on a sphere.

Oh, thanks to Lara for the tip on using the Symmetry tool. It works great, much better than mirror, because you can change one side and affect both, and Max still regards it as one shape. It even has a checkbox to automatically weld the two sides together! No more meshsmooth issues from having two objects...

Modeling my face II

I've spent possibly too much time on facial sculpting (I'm a perfectionist, I cant help it), so I'm fairly happy with the basic shape now. I'll probably be making more tweaks every now and then anyway. But I've got around to sorting the nose out, its still a bit wide, and needs some more work, but it'll have to do for now, because I want to get on with the lips and eyes. I had a quick attempt at the lips, but the mesh smooth really mucks things up, even when using vertex weighting.

I'm a bit annoyed, that I spent a long time resculpting the chin, almost perfected it, then realising that I had done it on a version I didnt want to keep, now its back to pointy land. Oh well, save it for another day.

Has anyone got any tips on doing the lips? I'm sure the texture will be most of it, as the colour really defines the shape somehow.

I found a few good tools that I'd highly recommend using:

• "Relax" tool can be found on the vertex subgroup of the object, and it basically takes the selected vertices, and evens them out a little, like an average. Use the custom settings for it though, and you can do wonders getting rid of annoying bumps and dips in the face, without the aid of smoothers.
• "Retriangulate" is a polygon tool, which will redraw your quads, with the inside edge being optimised. What does this mean? Well I've taken an example below, to show you how the same quad can look very different. What you must remember when working in 3Ds Max (and possibly all 3D software, is that every face(polygon) is a set of triangles, so quads are simply two triangles. Retriangulate will try to choose the best looking option, so selecting ALL polygons and using this will improve your model greatly. If you dont trust the computer to do this, or it just comes out a bit messed up, use "Edit Triangulation" to draw the centre line manually. It saved me going crazy a few times.
  
• I'm sure you all know of soft-selection by now, I'd still recommend using it for softer areas (duh!) such as cheeks and chin. The 'bubble' factor is worth using, so you get the right curves.

Modeling my face I

I've now moved out all the vertices, so that they are laid out in the 3 axis. I spent quite a long time tweaking it to get it as accurate to my face as possible. There needs to be more work done on the nose, eyes and lips obviously, but I'm happy with the rest of the facial structure. I think the defining parts of my face are the cheeks and brow region, they can make a face look very different if altered.
I did this in Uni before, but didn't save because I wasn't too pleased with it. I tried using my photo as a texture map for the face, but it was just for fun really, because I'll be making more changes, and I believe mapping should only begin after the modeling stage is complete.

I used a NURBS type mesh smooth, with 2 iterations to soften the edges, as you can see in the top two wireframe photos the amount of edges are increased. It's also useful because it means I now have more edges to play with, so I can actually define the detailed areas.

A few tips I'd recommend to everyone, that I found while doing this:

• Keep a mesh smooth filter on all the time, but don't adjust the vertices/cage of that, just flip back to the original blocky edges when you want to make adjustments, and see how it looks with the smooth on.
• Use NURBS smoothing, instead of quad or classic. They both produce unwanted details and blockyness.
• Use the Mirror tool (next to 'align' on the toolbar) and choose 'Reference' as the type of clone. It means you can keep working on just the half you want, and all changes will be updated to both sides! Remember to delete the reference after.
• Play with the opacity! You can see through your model onto the reference plates.
• As well as the reference plates, I found using UVW Map, Plane type on the model, with your photo as the texture, can help you see if some parts are slightly off. Also comes in handy when working in Perspective as opposed to the left and front only views.
• When its complete, take off the smooth first, use Mirror again to create a clone, attach the halves, and weld vertices. Then reapply the smoother of your choice.

I'm eager to continue, but I think I'll watch a few more of the tutorials first, and maybe wait until Friday. That's all for now!

Modeling from reference plates

I just finished the next step of modeling, using photos of my face as reference plates in 3Ds Max. I drew quads using the line tool, over the topography that I already mapped out on Photoshop. I converted those to Poly, then attatched them all into the same object, selected every vertex, then used weld, so that it formed one large flat surface, with the edges following the right features of my face. As i've done this before, I imagine the next step is to start dragging these vertex back using the left view, so that they are spread out on all 3 axis. Then create a mirror, or reference version, and stitch them together to make the entire face! After that, I'm not really sure where or how to start attatching this onto a head or body.

Well, I'm done for the night, see you all tomorrow.

Late night rambling

Well I'm still in Chelmsford as I've been doing some work up here on a website/business I'm starting. Launching any hour now, and our developer is still coding, so its total bedlam! I haven't had a chance to do much for this project as my laptop doesn't have 3DsMax or Photoshop installed yet, and I don't even have a camera with me to take a photo of myself!

Fortunately I've done a similar thing before, sculpting a head from a photo, although there are still many new things to me too, like laying out the vertices from facial features like cheek bones and wrinkles. What an excellent idea! Well done and thanks for the great set of tutorials Eric Maslowski!

So I'm hoping to get home in a day or two, and get on with making a 3D version of my head. I've never texture mapped a head/face either. Strangely enough I've always been satisfied with UVW map for texturing, and have never used UVW Unwrap! I remember plenty of times as a kid, going through the files from computer games finding these funny photos of stretched out character faces, and just laughing at them!


Now I know they are the texture maps, but still wonder how they know how to stretch them out, and how they are even generated from photos.