Week 7-Creating ident 2 part 3

For my second ident I had to do some more modelling before any animation could be done as not all the elements I needed had been created. So to begin I created the balloons for the scene. First I started with a sphere which I made into an editable poly to use the soft selection tool. With the soft selection tool I selected the vertex at the top in the middle of the sphere and with the move tool moved the vertexes upwards to create an egg shape.

This did create an up side down balloon, but I felt this was easier to work with as I could see what I was doing.

Next I decided to try to make the end of the balloon where the tie would be. Firstly I tried to create this by extruding selected vertexes of the balloon; however this would not work due to the shape of the polygons.

Instead I created a cone and positioned it under the balloon shape. Afterwards I changed the dimension to radius one as 1.145, radius two as 2.45 and the height of 3.642 as this made it proportional to the sphere.

I then made it into an editable poly and chose the soft selection tool. After I selected the middle of the base of the cone so I could move it upwards and convert it into a hollow cone. I made sure that the fall off value represented the bottom radius so that only the base was affected.

Then I used the soft selection tool to make the bottom of the cone less symmetrical as an attempt to add realism. To do this I lowered the fall off to 2 so a smaller area was affected. I left uneven spaces between the moved areas as I felt this would represent the shrivelled end of a balloon well.

I then went on to create the string. For this I used a spline to draw out a rough shape and altered the vertex points to make the shape exactly how I wanted them. Finally I made the spline renderable.

When I was happy with the balloon as a whole I grouped the objects used to create it and cloned two copies. Then I made slight changes to the vertexes of the clones so the strings were not all the same.

Afterwards I went on to create the materials. For all of the balloons I used a translucent shader as I would be able to make it quite realistic and let light go through. I applied a different colour to each of the balloons and chose red, purple and yellow as I felt this would work together. Initially I tried to use the same settings for all the shaders, however this did not work as the colours were of different brightness.

For the red balloon I set the specular to 100, glossiness to 40, diffuse level to 90, self illumination to 30 and opacity to 90.

On the purple balloon I used a specular of 100, gloss level of 40, diffuse level of 85, opacity level of 95 and self illumination level of 10.

Lastly I set the specular level to 150, glossiness to 40, diffuse level to 95 self illumination to 25 and opacity to 85.

Finally I arranged the balloons in an order which I felt worked best.

Next I exported the balloons from this file and imported them into the scene. However, the string was not visible once imported. Due to this I went back to the original file to correct this.

I then drew out a spline circle with a radius of 1. I converted it to an editable poly, clicked on the polygon icon and selected the circle. I then opened the extrude along spline window and selected the line of the string. To get a smooth shape I increased the number of segments to be included. I then repeated this process for the other two strings.

Finally I created the materials string. I used a blinn shader for this and set the diffuse colour to blue as this worked well before. I set the specular level to 0 and gloss level to 10.

Next I went on to create the animation for this part of the ident. To do this I first imported the balloons into the scene before moving them so it looked like they were tied to the bench and then used the scale tool to make them in proportion. Afterwards I imported the bear which I also scaled to a realistic size and placed him on the bench. When doing this I made sure that he was just above the bench and not intersecting.

I felt the best thing to do next would be to rescale the timeline before any animation is started. I set the timeline to 60 frames.

Afterwards I went on to start the animation, the first thing I animated being the red balloon. For this I used the auto key and at frame 25 moved the balloon to the bear’s hand.

Afterwards I started to animate the bear, once again using the auto key. I wanted to create the balloon lifting Ted and to start this off I planned for it to make the arm move to an upright position before lifting the bear. Therefore a few frames after the balloon string is in Ted’s hand the arm will start to rise. I set the arm in frame 27 in the normal position and at frame 37 upwards.

Currently the arm lifts up and leaves the balloon behind. So I then used auto key to move the balloon up to the top position and tried to keep the same amount of string below the hand as before. When I watched the animation I found that the string did not always align with the hand as the string moves straight up while the hand moves in a more circular motion. Therefore I added more key frames in the balloons movement to keep it aligned with the hand throughout.

Next I selected both the bear and balloon and turned on the auto key. I then moved to frame 37, after all the animation which has currently been completed. Here I placed a key frame with the position with the bears arm raised and then moved to the last frame. At frame 60 I use the move tool to move the selected objects higher on the z axis.

This movement was at a constant speed which I felt was not quite right. So after the first few frames of the bear rising I added an extra key frame and lowered the balloon and Ted slightly. This made the initial rise slower.

I was quite pleased with the movement at this point, apart from Ted’s legs as they remained in a horizontal position throughout. So I selected the two end bones of the bear’s legs and once again selected auto key. I applied a key frame to the timeline at the point the bear starts to lift off the bench, then a few frames later I lowered the legs. I was careful which frame to do this on as I wanted the legs to touch the bench until Ted was too high to do so. I then added more key frames between these two points so that at no point the legs disappear into the bench panels.

At this point I noticed that the balloon string was not perfectly positioned throughout the time when the bear is rising off the seat and so I changed these key frames slightly.

Then I edited the legs position in the last frame by making them hang at the same angle as frame 43 when Ted has just left the bench.

Finally I imported the robot, scaled him down until he was in proportion to the rest of the scene and then placed him by the bench.

I am going to leave this part of the animation now as the main thing left to do is get the robot to walk with the balloon and give it to Ted. I believe this is going to be complex to do and so will leave this until I have more experience animating in 3Ds max.