My channel

I've decided that it's time to introduce the fictional TV channel that my three idents will be produced for. I present to you... SRTV!




I felt it would be easier to make up my own channel rather than use an existing one, as it allows me more freedom to do what I like. I even made up a company profile for the channel:

Founded by owner and CEO Steven Reeves in February 2009, SRTV currently has no other staff, or for that matter any scheduled programming other than three idents starring the company's mascot, Ste, with all three idents being produced by the owner himself.

It's currently not known what kind of channel this will be. Unfortunantely, due to the current financial crisis that the world is in, it is estimated that SRTV will cease operations by May or June 2009, ironically shortly after the apparent deadline for all three idents.

Character model - final version

I just finished modelling Ste, adding more detail to the head, as well as giving him a body, arms and legs.



The ears, like the eyes, were made using flat spheres and placed on either side of the head. The body is a box which has had meshsmooth applied to it, and the arms are each made up of two cylinders - one for the sleeve and the other for the arm - and a sphere for the hand because I'm lazy.

The legs were also made from a box, with two parts underneath extruded before applying the meshsmooth modifier. The feet are made from a sphere which had one half deleted.

Here's another render, showing the detail I've added to the head:

The earlobe and hair are both materials made using Photoshop. For the earlobe, I simply typed in a letter 'S', flipped it upside down and modified it slightly, deleting parts where neccesary. I then flipped it around for the other ear.

Finally, a very small yet annoying problem I found with the sleeves: they look fine within 3DS Max itself, and yet when rendered, the insides of the sleeves just disappear for no reason. Here are some screencaps for comparison:



I have no idea why it does it, but it is quite a nuisance, especially since I cannot find any way around it.

Character modelling - head

My TV idents will mainly feature a character, acting as my made up channel's mascot, having mini adventures or whatever I plan on doing with him.

So far, all I've done is his head:



I've named this character "Ste", taking just the first three letters of my name, as I normally would after getting a high score on a videogame.

Before I started on this, I looked everywhere for a character modelling tutorial of some sort, and also one on how to make his hat. After giving up that search, I decided the best thing would be to learn how to do it myself.

Basically, for the head, all I've done so far is used a sphere, applying materials to colour the top half red for his hat and the bottom half his skin colour. Then, I converted the sphere into an editable mesh, and selected an area of red at the front to extrude as the peak of his cap.

For the eyes, I've taken inspiration from Japanese Anime and Manga, particularly a character style known as "chibi", or alternatively "super-deformed", and have given him a pair of big, black, cute eyes and a blank facial expression. Originally, I planned to use bitmap materials for the eyes, as I initially felt that making the eyes in 3D would be difficult – ironically, modelling the eyes turned out to be far easier, and they look much better than I anticipated.

I have also done a test animation of sorts, but all I've made him do is blink:



Basically, I made him blink by adding two boxes which appear when the eyes disappear: I simply right clicked on the objects, chose object properties and adjusted the visibility for each key frame of the animation.

I'm pleased with how this is turning out so far, hopefully by the end of this week I'll have done a bit more to him.

Week 3

During this week's lecture, we learnt how to change the appearance of a shape by morphing it, and taking the form of another shape.

The video we watched was a bit too fast for me to keep up with, so after watching, I had to play around with 3DS Max on my own to see what I could get. I'll probably end up not needing to use this for any of my idents, but I'll explain how this works anyway:



I started off by making a box (the purple one, as shown above) with two height segments, and then cloning it twice. With the first copy (green box), I converted it into an editable poly , and then using the edge selection and scale tools, changed the shape of the top segment. I did the same with the second copy (silver), except I changed the shape of the bottom segment.

Next, I selected the purple box, and then Morph from the modifier list. I added the green and silver boxes as seperate channels, changed the number (which represents morph percentage) for each channel to 100, and the purple box could now take the shape of both of the other boxes, as shown in this video:



So that is how the morph effect works. As I said earlier, I may end up not using this function of 3DS Max, but that will depend on what I want to do with my idents.

On a side note, if anyone reading this knows me well enough you'll probably know why I picked those particular colours for the boxes. :p

Tutorial 2

Today we learnt how to assign an object to a path as a way of animating it. The way to do this is to insert a spleen, like a line or a circle, and then click on the object you want to assign to the path. Go to the animation menu and click on the Path Constraint button.

This can also be done with cameras, so that you can have the camera follow a path. The screenshot below shows a camera that has been assigned to a spleen.



When animated, the camera will follow the spleen, and move around the inanimate objects I have placed around it. Here is the animation:



Admittedly the camera's movement is very twitchy, and this is because of the way the spleen was drawn. When I come around to using this function in future, my spleen drawing skills will need improving...