Scene 1 - Golfer Hitting Ball

The first scene of my part of the animation was to have the Golfer standing on the golf green and putting his ball towards the golf hole. I started off by creating the scene for the animation. This meant placing the green in the correct position, adding the golf club and golf ball to the scene. I also added extra grass in the background along with the Golf Stand for the crowd. I then added the model of the man that had been created.

Scene photo

The next step was to place the man, golf club and golf ball in the positions that I desired. I then started manipulating the bones and therefore the skin to move the man into a position that a golfer would hold to take the shot. I then moved the golf club to sit neatly in the two hands of the golfer ready to then swing.

I then used the "Select and Link" tool to attach the golf club to the golfers hand. I had used this technique last year but was still not totally satisfied with how it worked completely so this was quite tough t set up. This meant that when I moved my hand, it would move the golf club in relative motions. I now needed to bend the neck over so that the golfer was looking at the ball like a professional would do.

I spent some time manipulating the individual fingers so that they wrapped around the club to make it look more realistic of him holding the club.

Linked fingers

I was now ready to start animating the golfer. I turned on AutoKey so that 3dsMax created keyframes for me. This meant that I could place the putter in the position at the end of the back swing. I moved the shoulders and arms of the golfer so that they were in correct position for the golf swing.

I used this same method for the next two keyframes where the club made contact with the ball and the reaction after the connection was made. I manipulated the bones of the golfer to make it look realistic for each part of the swing and took the timing of the swing into consideration.

I had to edit the position of the shoulders during the swing because a golfer rotates their shoulders. This was quite difficult because it would affect the hands and arms. I went through the key parts of the animation to ensure that it looked realistic.

The final part of the animation was to animate the head. As the golfer completed his forward swing, I wanted the golfer to lift his head and follow the ball as it went towards the hole. This was quite simple because it was just a simple rotation of the head that I had already moved into position.

Backswing

Contact

Reaction

Individual Models

Golf Ball

The golf ball is obviously one of the most crucial parts of my animation seeing as it is going to be used in every scene in my part of the animation. It would also be used in the transition between Tom’s and my animations. I was adamant that I was going to spend a long time ensuring that the golf ball looked realistic and effective for my animations. Originally, I struggled to think of the best way to create the desired look o the golf ball so I used the Internet to find a tutorial of how to do it.

I was very surprised to see how simple this model was going to be to create. I started off by creating a “Geosphere”. I had never used one of these models so was eager to see the outcome from it. To this Geosphere, I selected all of the edges and used the “Chamfer” tool. To this I added a turbosmooth modifier to smooth out the edges. The chamfer tool allowed me to created the hexagon affect that is on the edge of the golf ball. To my surprise, this method worked perfectly first time and the result that I produced stunned me, in a good way.

Geosphere

Chamfered

TurboSmoothed

Golf Club

The animation that I wanted to create requires the golfer to hit the golf ball towards the hole. This meant that he was going to have to be holding a golf club. I created this as a separate model and then would add it into the scenes when it was required.

I started off with a Cylinder that would be the grip of the club. I increased the cap segments to 1 so that would be able to extrude the inner parts of the cylinder down. I did this a couple of times to create the metal shaft of the club. Once I had done this I then moved on to actually creating the head of the club.

Golf club shaft and grip + example

To create the head I started with a box model and made it into a cuboid, the shape that the head of a golf club is. I added some segmentation to this box to allow me to manipulate the shape of the head and the vertices within it. This made it easy for me to delete the back part of the club to create the sloped part at the back of the club.

I then added took the model of the club head and the shaft and placed them next to each other and attached them together to create 1 object. To this model I applied a Turbosmooth modifier to smooth the edges of the golf club to make it look more realistic.

To make the golf club look realistic I was going to need to add some colour to it. I knew that different sections of the club would need to be different colours without any very large parts being one colour. To achieve this affect I used the Material ID Settings. This allows you to select a group of Polygon’s and add a material to them therefore making it easier to apply a range of materials to one model.

I created a metallic material to be used on the shaft of the golf club. This was from a silver base colour and edited the specular levels and glossiness of the material. I darkened the specular level a bit and also applied this material to the front face of the club. I did this because the part where the golf club actually hits the ball is usually a silver colour and in many cases made from a different type of metal. I finished off by adding a dark colour to the head of the golf club and a red colour to the grip.

Golf Hole

I needed to create the golf hole for the ball to fall into after the golfer had hit it to the edge before having it fall in. To do this, I used the same method that I used to separate the green from the fringe. The ProBoolena tool allows me to select a shape and cut this out of a different object so I used this method by creating a cylinder and cutting it out of the golf green. I could decide the depth of the hole by changing the height of the cylinder that I created.

Golf Flag

Another model that I needed to create was the golf Flag. This would sit inside the Golf hole that I had just made and would be the target for the golfers and where they are aiming their ball to go. I started the model by created a cylinder and split it into a few sections. I created a separate plane that would be used as the cloth material for the flag.

I did some research into possible alternatives to the method that I had thought of using and found that there were some very effective ways of creating a cloth material. There were 2 that I used. Using a reactor modifier and also using a cloth modifier. Unfortunately I struggled with both of these methods and with my lack of experience in the program, I decided it would be more effective for me to continue with my method and then come back to it if I had time.

I converted the Plane that I had created to an Editable Poly. I was now becoming very familiar with this method and was starting to find it easier to work with than when I originally started using the program. I then rotated the plane so that it was the correct way up for my flag. I manipulated the flag so that it looked like the flag was waving in the wind whilst also giving it a more realistic look.

I moved the plane towards the flagpole and attached the plane to the cylinder to create one object. This now gave me the Flagpole with a cloth like material coming out of top of the pole creating the actual flag part. I added a yellow colour to the object as most flags are either yellow or orange to make them stand out. This is to make it easier for the golfer’s to see their targets. I also added an image on top of the yellow colour to the cloth part of the flag. This was an image of the Essex crest to re-iterate the idea that we are advertising Essex.

Golf Stand

At all of the big major events in professional golf, there is always some big seating areas for crowds to sit in and watch the sport. These are usually around the green as it is where a lot of the most important shots are made and very frequently the point where a golfer is hitting the winning shot. I decided I would create a stand that could sit on the grass in the background that would allow audience members to watch the sport. Once created, I would add some models to the seats in the stand to create some viewers of the golf. These characters would be able to have their own animations to react to what is going on in the current scenes.

I started off by creating the main part of the stand. To do this I created a box with a number of segments so that I could manipulate each section individually after turning the box into an editable poly. I then extruded out a second layer of the box to create the different layers in the stand. I repeated this until I got a stacked set of boxes, like the seats in a cinema.

The next step was to create the seats for the crowd members to sit on. As the stand would be outside, the makers would be more fussed about durability rather than comfort. This would mean the seats were not made out of decent material that costs a lot of money. I decided that I would create some metal seats for them to sit on. To do this I created a box with 3 length segments. This was going to be for the crowd members to sit on. I then selected the middle length section and extruded this down to create the stand for the seat. I then duplicated the Seats and placed them in rows on each level of the stand.

The next step was to create the safety barriers and Flags. The flags were created in the same method as the golf flag to sit in the golf hole but just on a larger scale. The material on the flags were also different because they were National Flags to represent the range of national golfers playing. The middle flag (Australian Flag) would also be used in the transition to the next scene.

I finished off the golf stand by creating some safety rails. These were very simple to create and are 3 Vertical and 1 Horizontal cylinders with a silver material added to them to look like metal. I placed these at the end of each row on both sides and along the back of the stand as a form of safety for the crowd.

Golfer

We decided as a group that we would use 1 model of a person and re-use this person throughout our animation sequence. This would give the affect of the same person undertaking the different roles/tasks/activities and giving the audience a view of what Essex has to offer. Dan was the man who offered to create this man and the rest of the group members imported and merged the man into our models.

In my scenes I re-used the man as another golfer and the members of the crowd watching the golfers playing. I changed the material colours that each of the men had to show that they were different people.

The Basic Model of our Man (created by Dan)

The golf stand with crowd members and flags

Golf Green

A golf green has 3 different levels of grass and I wanted to show the difference in each of them. My first task was going to be to create the grass. The method I used for this was using a Hair and Fur modifier on the ground. The issue I was going to have was that I wanted to make it clear the 3 different parts of the grass scene. The way I decided to do this was that I would split up each part of the grass into sections and then add a separate Hair and Fur Modifier to each. This would give me a lot more freedom when it came to editing the grass colours, lengths and amounts.

I started the model with a simple plain that had a high amount of length and width segments. I converted the Plane into an Editable Poly to allow me to manipulate the vertices to different shapes. I then moved around some of the vertices to create the first layer of grass, which was the rough. This would be the outer most section of the green. I then highlighted all of the Polygons that I wanted t be used for the rough and detached them from the main poly.

Even though I had detached the object, I left it in its place so that it looked like it was still connected to the rest of the green.

I then had a though about how a golf green looks in real life. The different sections and types of grass are usually determined by the length of the grass and there is always a big difference between the very short grass on the green and the quite short grass on the fringe. It gives the impression that the green dips down from the fringe as if it were a separate piece of land. To show this effect and emphasize the change, I decided that I would try to cut out the green shape and then lower this therefore creating a lipped edge to the fringe. I was thinking of ways to do this and one way that was suggested was the idea of using the “ProBoolean Tool”.

After doing research on this tool, I realised that this would be a good tool to use to complete this part so decided to use this method. I have now found out from doing a lot more research that the “ProBoolean Tool” usually creates a lot of unwanted topology. This would be an issue in most cases however the tool worked very well for me in this situation. I feel this is probably because I am using it on only a small part.

I then repeated the method of detaching the rough to get a separation between the green and the fringe. This now gave me 3 separate sets of Polygons to represent the 3 stages of grass on a golf green (Rough/Fringe/Green). The next step was going to be adding the Hair and Fur Modifiers to create the grass.

This was probably one of the most important parts of my animation because there was going to be grass in every scene therefore making it important to get it looking realistic. I had used the Hair and Fur Modifier’s in previous years but never to make grass. This meant that I knew how the basics of the modifier worked but was unsure at the beginning how I would be able to create different types of realistic grass. I added a base colour to each set of Polygons that would be similar to the colour of the grass to give me an idea of what colour I was aiming for in each section.

I decided to work on the rough first. This is where the grass is longest and usually a darker colour than the other parts of the green. I added the Hair and Fur Modifier to the set of the Polygons that I had detached ready for this process. I played around with the colour settings for both the root and tip until I had selected a colour that I felt was going to work well in the scene. The next step was going to just be a lot of trial and error whilst playing around with different amounts of grass, length and thickness of each strand.

Render of Rough

I played around with the different lengths of the rough to get the perfect length and one that I was happy with. I then moved on to the other parts of the green, which were the fringe and the actual green itself. I was able to use the same method to get to my final design by playing about with the colours till I found one that I liked. The green itself was going to be quite a bright green because on a golf course the green is cut a different way and lightened so that it is distinctive. Once I had the colours for the fringe and green, I then just played about with the different variables to get the desired effect.

Render of Fringe

Green Render
Grass Scene Rendered

I had never worked with the Hair and Fur Modifier to this extent or to achieve a grass effect. I was very happy with how it came out because I believe it all looks very realistic. I think the colour and the length of the grass for the rough and green help to make the difference between the sections of the grass easier to see and therefore more realistic.

One issue that I found while using this choice of Modifier was that to get a realistic look of grass, it required me to add a very high amount of hairs (strands of grass). If the amount was too low, it made it impossible to get a smooth look of realistic grass because it became very patchy. The other issue that was with the modifier was the high amount of time it took to render the scenes where it was being used. The perfect situation would be to add a very high amount of hairs to the scene because it would make it very realistic. Unfortunately due to the resources available and time restraints, this would have caused my render times to increase dramatically almost to an impossible amount. I feel that the amounts I used were suitable and the outcome was very good.

Storyboard + Scene Description

I have uploaded my storyboards of my programme. These are initial ideas for the project and my part of the animation. I am the first to admit that my skills do not lie in drawing therefore I have to admit the drawings are very low detail. I have also supplied the actual paper files in the submission so that it is easier to read the text.

Golf Animation

After deciding to change our idea for our animation, we now needed to decide what small animations we were going to create. We held a group meeting to come up with what we were going to focus on.

We all thought about some possible events and activities we were interested in animating. We knew we weren't going to be able to do all of the animations so we decided to pick the one that we really fancied working on. We also needed to consider what transitions we were going to create to allow the animation flow between scenes.

I decided that I was going to created a golfing animation to promote the range of golf courses across Essex. There is a wide range of golf courses across Essex so I felt it would be better to just promote them all and try and gain some interest in the local sport.

New Project Idea

This is a post from our group blog that outlines our new idea for our project. The blog post was made by Tom and you can view this plus the rest of the group posts on our group blog (http://3dvisitessex.blogspot.com/)

[ Tom ] - Group Meeting Animation Discussion

Friday 22/10/10 - 10:30-12

Today we had another group meeting. As it had been a week or so since our last meeting, we went over our idea again and decided to stick with the transition between 4+ areas of Essex idea.

As of today, the 4 main attractions of Essex that we want to animate are the: air show, beer festival, golf course and lawn mower race.

We also decided on what type of visual style of animation we would be doing. We want to do a realistic style mixed with a little bit of a cartoony style. Like in the Pixar films where the humans have a distinct cartoon style, yet seemingly blend in with the realistic background style.

The intention is to each take 1 of the 4 areas of Essex and do a 15-20 second animation of them. We would then create an inroduction and ending to the animation together and stick them all together. We were a little concerned that the animation would not be long enough, so we deicded that if we have the time we would include a fifth of sixth area of Essex in the animation, if need be.

Finally, perhaps the most significant part if the meeting, we came up with the idea of incorporating Flash into the animation. In other words, instead of creating a continous 2 minute animation, we would make an interactive Flash animation. So for example, we could use the map of Essex that Dan created and then place our 4 landmarks on it. The user would then be able to click on a landmark and watch the short animation while having the option to read up on some facts. This way, the user would have more control over what areas of Essex they wish to learn more about instead of having to sit though an entire animation.

If time allows us, we will submit both the 2 minute animation and the interactive Flash animation.

Change of Project Direction

After speaking to Jo and seeing other groups presenting their initial ideas, we realised that the idea we thought about doing was going to be very similar to everyone elses.

With this in mind, we decided to change the idea for our animation. We went back to an original idea that we had thought about, which would be a series of short animations that all linked into each other with a transition. We had originally considered this idea but then went forward with the Essex map idea.

As we wanted to be different we decided to go back to this idea and develop it to make it better and more detailed.

[ Mike ] - Group Meeting To Discuss Final Idea And Presentation

Today a group meeting was held to a) decide on our final idea and b) discuss and produce some presentation ideas for the lecture on Friday. All of us were still not too happy about the idea of making our project about Colchester Castle so we put our heads together and thought about what we all wanted to model. We considered a few different ideas but it seemed that there was no 1 place/thing that we wanted to focus all our ideas on.

This led us to our idea because we were unable to think of 1 idea to do, we decided to do multiple ideas in 1 and look at a few different activities in Essex. This could be a lot of work because we will have to look at a lot of different places whereas most groups will only be focussing on 1.

Our plan is to do a walk-around of Essex and a range of activities that it includes. We have looked at images of Essex as a whole and picked out a few places that form a kind of circle and would all be appealing to people to visit whilst in Essex. We aim to complete all the places we have suggested however with time restrictions this may need to be cut down.

This will include looking at:

Chelmsford Beer Festival

Colchester Castle

Hatfield Forest

Clacton

Southend Air Show

We also want to include some activities that can be done in Essex such as:

Walking

Cycling

Windsurfing

Jetskiing

Horse Riding

Golfing

We are going to present our idea on Friday to Jo and the rest of the groups. Any feedback that we gain will be used to improve our project.

[ Mike ] - Week 2 - Discussing Ideas With Jo Bowman

Today we had our 2nd lecture of the year for Virtual Environments. After having the presentation from Elli on Wednesday, we had met up as a group for a brief review of what we picked up from the talk. This allowed us to discuss a few possible ideas, which we then put forward to our lecturer Jo Bowman. Our only concern was whether we would lose out by focussing on a broader subject rather than focussing in on 1 building or 1 activity. Jo re-iterated that the project was quite broad and that we were able to interpret the brief how we liked as long as the end product was what was desired of the project.

We had come to the conclusion that our best idea was going to be Colchester Castle. We thought about doing a "Castle through the ages" theme where we look at the history timeline of the building and its inhabitants. We all felt that this was a good idea but at the same time voiced concerns over a) the possible lack of excitement and enjoyment of the final video and b) the fact that a lot of people may chose to do a castle as its quite an obvious project.

We put this idea forward to Jo and she liked the idea of it but as a group we decided we would continue to think of ideas and have a final decision by the next lecture.

Jo informed us that the next part of the project would be to make a small presentation to her and the rest of the groups in the next lecture about our ideas for the project. We decided to meet up on Tuesday 5th October to discuss this presentation.

[ Mike ] - Meeting With Elli Constantatou

Today we had a presentation from Elli Constantatou who as the PR Manager of Tourism at Essex County Council would be taking a very keen interest in this project and in the end would be the person who decides what groups will have their work published on her website. She went over the project and the kind of videos that were expected of the groups. We were given a sheet of paper that gave us some information about different events that went on in Essex that most of us were unaware about. She also gave us some facts and figures about Essex that surprised us as a group.

This got us thinking about the different kind of things in Essex that we could focus on. We came up with a few ideas but were unsure, which one would be best at enticing people to visit Essex. We were told by Elli that we could use the brief to get the main idea for the project but could interpret it to whatever extent we wanted. We were contemplating whether to look at a particular event in Essex, a town/city, an activity or a landmark.

The first ideas we came up were:

Event - Chelmsford V Festival

Place - Maldon Promenade

Landmark - Colchester Castle

We had come up with these 3 ideas after hearing what Elli had to say about the project. Our plan was to go away and meet up a week later and have a final idea sorted after discussing it with Jo Bowman on Friday in our lecture.

[ Mike ] - Week 1 - Visit Essex Project

In our first lecture, we had the projects that we were going to undertake during the year explained to us. Alongside the individual project of modelling our own heads in 3d, we would also be carrying out a group project in small groups of 3 or 4. We were allowed to select our own groups and this was the first job. This blog is for the group consisting of:

Michael Walton

Daniel Alderman

Tom Early

Simon Mills

All members have the ability to update this blog and will do throughout the project whilst also updating our own blogs with our personal work.

We were told that the project was going to about promoting Tourism in Essex. We would need to create a small video about something in Essex that could be placed on the Internet to attract and give information about places of interest in Essex. Ms Elli Constantatou, who is the Marketing and PR Manager at Essex County Council, is going to be coming in on Wednesday 29th September to give us some more information about the project and what she will be looking for as it will be her that decides whether our work is posted on her website (www.visitessex.com).

First Impressions of Project

After completing the first part of this module, which was to create my own head as a 3D model, I was now ready to move onto the second project we had to complete for the module. This was going to be working in small development groups and creating a small 3D video animation to promote Essex.

We were going to have a visit from Elli Constantou who is the PR Manager of Tourism at Essex County Council. She would give us more information about the project and the tasks that we needed to create for the module. This presentation would give us a key insight about what the "Visit Essex" group was all about as it was received from somebody who is working towards the improvement of this project.

I am looking forward to working in a small group on this project as I feel each member will be able to bring their own specialized skills to the group to collaborate into a successful project. I feel that my strong leadership skills will allow me to lead the group to create a high quality final video.