Week 6-Bone Plans

The next step in creating my idents is to add bones to one of the characters ready for animation. Since last week I have thought about how I will structure the bones so I can get the movement I want. Below are sketches of how I plan to draw out the bones.
I want the robots movements to be quite human-like and so added bones which are similar to a person’s. I have only placed bones on the arms and legs as the robots body would remain rigid throughout as this would be the area with electronics. Also, the head will not move up and down as this would result in the head becoming detached, therefore a bone will not be needed for the head joint.

The teddy bear is meant to be the robots toy; therefore there will be little unaided movement. I have planned for there to be one long bone for the arms and legs as it will not bend when moved. The main thing the bones will be used for is positioning the body parts.

Week 5-Creating the Robot

To make the robot for my animations I will began by creating the body and working outwards from there. For this I started by drawing out the box with a length of 21.354, width of 34.094 and height of 32.66. Also, I increased the number of segments for each of the dimensions. I chose the number of segments for the length and width as 10 and the height as 20 as this resulted in each segment being a square.

Next I went on to create the legs. For this I used a cylinder with a radius of 4 and set the height to 20.749 as I felt this length was proportional to the box for the body. When I was happy with the cylinder I cloned a copy and aligned them under the body.

After this I went on to produce the foot. For this I decided to use a sphere with a radius of 9.273 and chopped it into a hemisphere. Then I selected the scale tool to squash the shape to create a foot-like shape. I then aligned the shape at the base of one leg and once again used the scale tool to make it in proportion to the rest of the character before cloning a copy for the opposite leg.

I then created an arm by drawing out a cylinder. I set the dimensions as a 3.301 radius and 20.266 high. Also I changed the number of segments to 25 high and 9 for the cap. Finally I cloned a copy of the shape and symmetrically placed it on the opposite side to make a pair of arms.

Next I went on to produce the head of the robot. I decided to start with a cylinder for this as I felt this would be the most suitable to create the shape of head I had planned during my preparation. I changed the size settings to 14.058 for the radius and 19.577 for the height as I felt this would be in proportional to the rest of the robot. I then went on to create the dome at the top so converted it into an editable poly and selected the soft selection. Then I selected the central vertex at the top of the cylinder and altered the falloff value to 18 so it only affected the top. With the move tool I raised the area.

I was not that happy with it at this point as I was unable to create the curved shape I was looking for and so undid the soft selection steps. Instead to create the top I drew out a sphere with the same radius as the cylinder and used the chop tool to make it into a hemisphere. I aligned it to the top of the cylinder.

Afterwards I used the scale tool to flatten it slightly as the dome was larger than I wanted, but when I looked at the character as a whole I felt the head was too tall. To resolve this I reduced the height of the cylinder.

I felt the best thing to do next would be to create the hands. For this I started by drawing out a box with the length of 10.285, width of 10.067 and height of 6.602. I wanted to create a realistically shaped hand and planned to use the extrude technique to create fingers, so to do this I first segmented the box to make it 3 segments in length, 4 in width and kept it at 1 in height. Next I converted it into an editable poly and selected the vertex icon. I then selected the vertexes at the end of one part of the box and used the scale tool to move them closer together.

After I clicked on the polygon icon, selected the end segments one by one and extruded them. I did this by opening the extrude window and typing in values to the extrude height which would create a proportional, realistic looking hand. I started with the middle finger and worked outwards, setting the extrude value for the middle finger to 8, third finger to 7.3, first finger to 7.6 and little finger to 6. Finally, with then end segments still selected I used the move and rotate tools to space out the fingers.

I was pleased with the fingers and so went onto the thumb. To start I selected the two segments at the base of the box and extruded them to the value of 1.0. Then, with the segments still selected I used the rotate tool to make the thumb slope out from the wrist.

I then extruded the thumb and rotated it outwards slightly as I did for the fingers.

When I looked at the hand as a whole I thought the fingers looked too fat and so selected the end vertexes of each finger and, with the scale tool made the finger tips slightly narrower.

I changed the shape of the arm to a cone so I could make it get gradually smaller from the shoulder to the wrist. I made it a bit smaller than the cylinder, set the top radius to 3.203 and bottom radius to 2.2179. Then I scaled the hand so it was in proportion to the body. When I was happy with the proportions I cloned the objects and placed them on the opposite sides. Also, I increased the size of the body to fit in with the rest of the character.

Afterwards I went onto create the computer screen. I planned to put this on the left of the robots body with buttons to the right. So, to create this I made the box for the body into an editable poly and selected a number of polygons on the front. Then I opened the bevel window and altered the figures until I was happy with the screens appearance, this being to the height of 0.403 and outline amount of -0.6.

So far I was happy with the robots appearance and so went on to create the elbows. For this I drew out a sphere with a radius of 2.744 and placed it in the middle of the arm. I then cloned a copy and placed it evenly on the other arm. To get the position symmetrical took a lot of time and several alterations with the move tool.

I also used this process to create the knees.

Afterwards I went on the make the buttons. For this I created a cylinder with a radius of 1.161 and height of 0.872. Next I cloned the object five times and spaced them evenly to the right of the screen. I made sure that all the buttons touched the main body.

At this point I considered the character as a whole, and felt the feet did not suit him, so I decided to recreate them using the same methods as I did for the hands. Therefore I started with a box and changed the number of segments to 5 in length, 9 in width and 1 on height. I then made the shape into an editable poly. Firstly I selected the vertex icon and moved the vertexes at the top of the foot to create a curving shape.

Next I changed to the polygon icon and opened the extrude window. Then I selected each of the segments at the end of the foot one by one and extruded them to different values. For the big toe I extruded it by 2, the second and third toe by 1.6, the forth by 1.4 and little toe by 1.15. Once all the toes were extruded I was not completely happy as they were touching and were not easily visible. Due to this I used the move and rotate tool to space them out in a way which I felt was realistic.

Lastly I selected all the vertexes along the inside of the foot and moved them outwards to make the big toe wider than the rest as I initially thought it looked quite unrealistic being the same width as all the others.

As I was happy with the foot at this point I cloned a copy and used the mirror window to make it symmetrical to the first. I then replaced the original with the new feet by aligning them at the bottom of the legs.

Next I moved on to create the face. Here I started with the hair. In my designs I created a few short, spiky hairs on the top part of the robots head and still plan to include these. So, to do this I will use a cylinder.

I drew out the shape and placed the first strand on the top of his head. Then I altered the values of the radius and height to get the length and thickness I wanted, resulting in the radius being 0.279 and the height 3.041. I then cloned a copy of this shape and placed them across the top of his head, placing them evenly apart and trying to make the two sides symmetrical.

Afterwards I went on to create the eyes. I started by drawing out a sphere and set the radius to 1.607. I then cloned a copy and placed them on the front of the head, all the time trying to keep them an even distance from the centre and top. Also, I tried to make sure the same amount of the eye was sunken inside the head.

Next I created the mouth. For this I felt the best shape to use would be a cylinder and so created one with a radius of 0.811 and length of 10.346. I increased the number of height segments to 25. I then selected bend modifier and applied a bend to the angle of 90 degrees so the character would appear to be smiling. Finally I moved the mouth to the position I wanted.

The building of the robot was now complete, but I felt the hands and feet did not quite work with the rest of the character. To resolve this I applied a mesh smooth to these parts. I then changed the iteration amount to 1 and smoothness to 0 to make the edges slightly smoother, but not too smooth that it did not fit in with the other parts.

I was pleased with the robots appearance overall at this point and so decided to go on to adding colour. Firstly I produced the material for the body. I wanted this to be a shiny metal and so chose the anisotropic shader and selected a dark grey as the colour. I then changed the specular level to 120, glossiness to 30 and anisotropy to 10.

Next I created the buttons colour. I felt that the best colour would be red for this part as a brighter shade would stand out from the main body colour. Again I used the anisotropic shader and changed the specular to 65 and glossiness to 10.

I then went on to create the screen. For this I created a combination of materials for black, red, yellow and green, all with the blinn shader and a specular level of 30 and glossiness of 90. Then, in editable poly mode I selected different polygons on the screen and applied one of these materials to it. I arranged the colours in such a way that they would represent a computer screen giving out readings of the robots electronic activity. I also used this shade of black created by the blinn shader on the mouth and hair.

The final set was to create a material for the eyes. For this I wanted the eye to be human-like rather than just a plain colour and so create a bitmap in Photoshop for this.

I then changed the UV tile size of the diffuse map by making the U value 2 and V value 1. Lastly I dragged the materials to the spheres and rotated them until the pupils faced forwards.

I am pleased with how my work has progressed this week. Next week I will continue with the robot by adding bones to the limbs before moving on to the teddy bear.

Week 5-Creating the Scene

To produce the ground I decided to use a cylinder as I felt it was the best shape to use so the land looks like it disappears in the distance. So that I could fit all the play equipment and the land disappearing in the distance I set the radius to 1170.404 and the height to 0.5.

Next I exported all of the play equipment from their individual files and imported each of them into the file where I have drawn out the cylinder.

I then placed them all next to each other and used the scale tool to reduce the size of some of the objects so that they were in proportion to each other.

When I was happy with the play equipments size and felt it was in proportion to the ground cylinder I went on to arrange the content as I had planned in my storyboards. Also, I cloned the bench twice and placed them around the edge of the play equipment.

After I was happy with the arrangement I went on to create the outer fence. To do this I used the line tool to create the shape of one fence panel and edited the position of the vertex points until I was satisfied with the shape.

Next I made the spline into an editable poly, selected the polygon icon and extruded the shape to give it a third dimension before capping the open edge. Then I used the array window to create a row of 35 instances of the fence panels evenly spaced. I set the X array dimension to 20 to get the spacing I wanted between the panels.

Finally I grouped the array of fence panels together.

After this I applied the bend modifier to the value of 50 degrees to the grouped fence panels. Next I cloned the fence group and placed them around the play equipment.

The last step in creating the background was to apply a material ground. I planned to put the park on a field and so used a preset material as a diffuse and bump map. Despite adjusting the tile size and other settings I also selected the UVW map modifier on which I selected the box mapping parameter to make it appear properly on the surface. I also set the tile size to 10.0 for both of the maps.

Finally I applied a material to the fence panels. For this I used the blinn shader with the diffuse colour of white. I set the specular to 0 and glossiness to 10. I used the wood preset as a bump map with the tile size of 10.

I am pleased with the scenes appearance and so will now go onto creating the characters.

Week 5- Adding Colours and Textures

I felt the next step was to add colours to the playground equipment. I have thought about the types of colours I want to use and have decided to use a combination of bright colours together to make it exciting for the children.

See Saw

I have decided to use red and yellow for this. To start I created the yellow texture which I wanted to resemble a slightly dull plastic. For this I used an anistropic shader with a specular level of 30, gloss level of 5 and anisotropy level of 20.

For the bar across I thought a painted metal would be realistic and suit the object and so created it in red. I once again used the anisotropic shade with a specular level of 50, glossiness level of 10 and anisotropy level of 70.


Slide

I was going for a realistic appearance for the slide and so started with the slide. I tried to create a dark metal similar to how I imagine iron to be. Once again I used an anisotropic shader and chose a mid shade of grey. I changed the specular amount to 150, gloss amount to 40 and anisotropic amount to 65. When I rendered the scene the slide had a surface like I wanted.

Next I thought about the colours I could use on the rest of the slide. As the metal part had an appearance which would be dull to my target group I wanted the rest to be more exciting. Due to this I made the handlebars red. With the anisotropic shader I set the specular level to 60 and glossiness to 10.

For the steps I used the anisotropic shader to produce a plastic material. For this I set the specular and gloss amount to 10 and the anisotropic amount to 50.


Roundabout

For the roundabout I wanted to create a really fun look, especially as it will be the central object in the playground. Due to this I used bright, contrasting colours. I decided that it would not wise to use the green for the base as I plan to place the park on grass. As a result I’ll be creating a red plastic material for the base.

I selected the anisotropic shader and used a specular level of 20 and a gloss and anisotropy amount of 50. I then repeated these settings for the seat material, but changed the colour to a bright green.

I thought the handle bars of a real roundabout would most likely to be made of metal and so tired to created a painted metal material for these parts. I set the specular level to 70 and gloss level of 10 and anisotropy level of 50 to get the reflectiveness amount I was looking for. For this material I tired the exact same shade of green and red which I used previously for this piece of equipment and picked the red as I felt it worked best.

At this point I was reasonably pleased with the colours, but felt the material of the seat was not quite right. To me it appeared to be slightly slippery which would not be safe for a child’s playground. Due to this I recreated the green texture, but added a bump map with the preset noise map. I selected the object XYZ setting and changed the tile size to 40. Lastly I applied this material to only the top surface of each seat using the polygon selection method from the editable poly menu.


Swing

So far I have used a lot of red and so this time wanted to use different colours, but ones which still worked with the other equipment. When I opened the file I quite liked the preset colours and felt they went well with the rest of the scene. Due to this I tried to recreate these colours but adapted them slightly.

Firstly I created a bluey purple colour which would look like painted metal. As a similar material was created well with the anisotropic shader previously I decided to use it again. I found the values which worked best were a specular level of 50, glossiness of 10 and anisotropy level of 70.

I felt the material most likely to be used to make a swing seat would be rubber and so I tried to recreate this in the materials editor. I chose a colour slightly closer to red and applied a specular value of 35, glossiness value of 3 and anisotropy level of 5.

To complete the swing I created a dark iron like metal material using the anisotropic shader for the chains. I increased the specular level to 250 and gloss level of 10.


Bench

For the bench I was trying to create a traditional style and used some of the preset bitmaps as materials. I started by creating the wooden planks which go across the supports and applied the wood preset as a bump map. I set the grain size to 7 and the tile size to 7 with the world XYZ setting. Lastly I selected beige as the diffuse colour.

For the supports I tried to create the appearance of concrete using dent bitmap as the bump map. For this I set the tile size to 9 with the object XYZ setting. I set the parameter size to 200, strength to 20 and iterations to 2. Finally I added an off white as the surface colour.


Helter-Skelter

I have decided to use more colours than I have on previous objects as this has many more parts and will hopefully link this with the other apparatus. Therefore I will incorporate shades of green, blue and purple.

I began by working on the slide and tried to create a green plastic. To do this I used an anisotropic shader. I set the specular amount to 35 and glossiness amount to 10 while the anisotropic level to 25. I was pleased with this in the material editor, but when I applied it to the slide I was not as pleased as the join between the two parts became visible.

I tried to resolve this by extruding the end of the main part of the slide to the value of 80 and used the move tool to place it in the direction I wanted before removing the smaller part at the base. I then aligned the box so that it completed the slide as it did previously.

Next I went on to create a material for the roof. I chose to use a bold blue which would look like a plastic with a slight sheen. For this I used the anisotropic shader and used the same settings as I did on the slide.

After this I looked at the helter-skelter as a whole and felt the colours in use worked quite well together. Due to this I have used similar colours to this for these parts.

Firstly I made an olive green material for the stairs and tried to give it the appearance of dull painted metal. To do this I used the anisotropic shader and set the specular level to 60, gloss level to 15 and anisotropic level to 70. When I applied this material to the steps I felt it worked really well as it will link the yellow and green objects in the scene.

Lastly I created another painted metal material, this time in lilac and for the safety bars. I wanted the appearance to be the same as on the steps as they are the same thing, especially as they are next to each other. Due to this I used the same shader and settings as for the material on the stairs.

After I applied the colours to the objects I realised the central support did not go all the way to the top. Due to this I created a cylinder and made the radius the same as the central column and increased the height so it reached the roof.

Week 5- Continuing to Create the Scene

This week I started from the point I finished last week and so did more work on the helter-skelter.

Helter-Skelter

The first thing I did was to add the safety bar to the stairs. For this I used a cylinder and set the radius to 0.89 and the height equal to the height of the stairs. I then cloned several copies and placed them around the edge of the steps.

Next I reduced the height of some of the side bars so they were level with the bottom stair and did not block the entrance. Then I used the scale tool to adjust the width of the slide so it did not intercept the steps.

This worked well for the majority of the stairs, but not for the platform at the top. Due to this I used a cylinder again with the same radius, but made the height shorter so it levelled the top of the other bars, but only from the platform.

I was happy with the slides appearance at this point and so went on to create the top. I felt the best shape to use for this would be a cone and so drew one out with a base radius of 38.508, top radius of 0 and height of 24.34 as I wanted it to end with a fine point and be in proportion to the rest. I then placed it on the top so it was central to the rest of the slide.

After looking at the helter-skelter I felt the slide came to an abrupt end. Due to this I decided to add a flat section onto the end. For this I used a box and placed it at the end of the slide.

I then created supports for the end of the slide by creating a cylinder. I set its radius to 1 and height to 5.952. Lastly I cloned the shape several times and placed them evenly under the slide.

I am really pleased with the way this has turned out and so I am going to move on to a different part of the project.