Ident 3

This is, so far, the most complete one out of all three of my idents. Using the Space Shuttle featured in my previous entry, as well as a tutorial that helped me to make Planet Earth, as well as a star field in the background, this is what I have at the moment:




Poor Ste.

I will provide a link to the Planet Earth tutorial later, but now I will go through how I made the star field. Instead of using Render to render the video, I used the Video Post function: in that window, I clicked on a button labelled “Add Scene Event”, which allows you to choose the viewpoint or camera from which the video will render, and also allows you to apply settings such as a motion blur. Next, I clicked on a button labelled “Add Image Filter Event”, which then brought up this window:



I selected “Starfield” from the drop down box, and then on the setup button which allowed me to edit settings such as the star brightness, size and count. Next, the “Add Image Output Event” button was clicked, allowing me to select a save file and location. Finally, a button that looks like a running man, “Execute Sequence” was clicked, which then began the video render. This ident took the longest out of the three to render, and yet it also has the smallest file size...

While I’m at it, I may as well go through how I made the space shuttle explode. Basically, it's a funtion within 3DS Max that's called a Bomb Space Warp. To make an object explode, you simply look for the Bomb in the space warps menu under the create panel, drag it into the scene and link it to the object to make the object explode.



In the above screengrab, I've labeled where I've placed the bomb. It doesn't need to be placed directly into the object to blow it up.

It sounds easy, but you can't just put it straight in without changing the settings: to get the explosion to look just how you want it to, you need to adjust the settings, for example the detonation time, otherwise the object will blow up straightaway, like in this video for example:



As for the fiery blast in the ident itself, that's actually a sphere with a specially made material. I attempted to follow a tutorial which demonstrated how to make a nuclear explosion, however, only the making of the material proved to be useful in the end.

Now I need to go and get my other assignments done as well, but in my next entry, I will post videos of the final versions of the idents, complete with sound!

Space Shuttle

In my third ident, Ste will be exploring the Final Frontier... in this:


This space shuttle was fairly simple to make, as all I really did was recycle my plane from last semester, making the neccesary changes to make it look less like an airplane and more like a NASA Space Shuttle... or at least, something closely resembling one.

Immedietedly after making it, I made a couple of simple animations of the shuttle in flight. Here's the first one, where it flies down and pulls back up:



And in this second animation, it's going to "Do a Barrel Roll!"