PROBLEMS!

While rendering, I came across a huge problem... everytime I tried to render, the alloted time was massive and after a few hours, the computer crashed. I tried time and time again to fix it, but to no avail. I knew the problem was hair and fur.

So I took out the hair and fur. To begin with I tried using a map image to use as grass, but it looked awful, I tried using different maps like bump, I tried changing settings like glossiness, I tried tiling it and moving the material alone on the plane but this still looked very un proffessional. So I just changed the colour to green.

The outcome to this was a really quick render, and a more proffessional look.

Editing Plane

The plane I used for the ground was too square in the sense that you could see the corners in the final render.

To solve this problem, I made the plane bigger and used soft selection in order to make the plane 'hilly' and more realistic.

I changed the falloff in the soft selection in accord to which area I was changing, 100 is the size shown in the screen dump above.

Ascending Camera

After the camera following the helix, The next camera will follow the machines ascent from the sky in a vertical line. For this I used a free camera and just lowered it with the select and move tool, using the auto key function to animate and generate keyframes.

Target camera animation

For the second scene in my animation, I needed a camera to circle the machine. In order to create this created a helix from the splines menu, I changed the number of turns to 2 and gave it enough room around the machine to allow for an overall view instead of a close up.

To allow the camera to follow the path I used a path constraint. I went to Animation > Constrains > Path Constraints and linked the camera to it.

First animation within the environment

Today I started animating the models within my environment. The first thing that I wanted to do was to make the sail of the flying machine spin. In order to do this I simply used the rotate tool to turn the sail.

I used the auto key facility in order to set keyframes to capture the animation. I extended the frames in the timeline at the bottom of the page by using the time configuration box and changing the end time too 300

The next aspect of the animation that I wanted to create was to make the machine fly up into the air and back down to the launchpad again. 

To begin, I selected the whole model, all the different components and also the dummy model. I then used select and move tool in order to move the model upwards, and then back down to the launch pad

Environment 1

Today I concentrated on completing designing the environment for my animation. This took some time with rendering time as I wanted to keep checking what the finished product looked like.

For the trees, I used the inbuilt foliage tool, that I experemented with in a previous post, within 3ds max and chose different types of tree.

For the grass I created a plane and made it brown to act as the dirt, I then used the hair and fur tool to create the grass. To use the hair and fur tool I selected my plane and went into the modify list and selected hair and fur. In general perameters I put the hair count up to 1000000, hair segments 7 and hair passes 1, the density is at 100, i changed the scale as I wanted to make the plane bigger. I changed the colour to green.

I then merged my launchpad into the environment, followed by the crash test dummy and the Da Vinci machine. When merging I ensured that I also merged the materials as when I tried the first time they didn't import and the models turned out grey.

I wanted there to be a crowd in my scene so I used the 3dsmax biped models like the ones that we used in an earlier tutorials. I placed them around using both male and female skeletons. I selected certain polygons and changed the colours to make them look like they are wearing clothes. For the moment they aren't doing much but in the animation I want them to be clapping and cheering when the arial screw takes flight.