Wall Smash Test

For the bit in the film when the Big Alien smashes through the wall, I was playing around with particle and fractal effects in 3Ds Max

There's an amazing tutorial on Youtube where he goes through the process step by step in great detail. All you need to do is download a free plug-in which he provides for you with a link

The link for the tutorial can be found here for anyone who's interested:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxCPtUnN-Ns


For my first attempt I followed the tutorial exactly just to get the hang of things. It was a quickly modelled wall following the guy's instructions, and eveything else I followed exactly too.
And here's my first result I got from following the tutorial.

I was very very happy with the results. For the final comp I needed to change a few things like the size and amount of bricks, the speed, bounce, size of the hole etc.

I made the floor too small so the bricks fall into space which is pretty funny. Hulk Smash!!

Ultimate Image

For Business Studies we've had to create an Ultimate Image, as in an image which represents you as a person/artist ... and here's mine!


It has a lot of meaning behind it (lots of cheesy stuff) but I'm happy with how it turned out.
I better explain what I mean by there being lots of meaning behind it, so now prepare yourself for the dreaded CHEESE!

The 3 characters are ones that I have modelled the past couple of years of uni. I have modelled others, but they weren't anatomical like these. The further back the characters go means that they were the earliest characters I modelled, with my Big Alien at the front as he is the one I'm working on at the moment. (The only bad thing about adding him in was that his textures aren't finished, but luckily they look good enough to work in the image) The monster at the back was my first attempt at modelling a character, and Modo from Biker Mice From Mars was my 2nd anatomically correct character.

We've been learning about layouts in Business Studies so I laid them out in a triangle so that it draws the eye down to the Big Alien in the middle. I decided to make a half and half image with coloured characters and the wireframe counterparts because as a CG Artist one of the things to look for is a good clean mesh, so I can show off both my skills of modelling and texturing in this image. I was inspired by Alex Ross' comic concept cover for Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe, as seen below. It gave me the idea of halving the characters into two with the coloured and the wireframe while making them look like one being


it's CHEESE time!
You might be wondering why I used my Tree from my environment project as the thing to split down the middle? Well I thought that the Tree could represents my ever growing growth of skill and knowledge as an artist. The Tree is my source of energy which lays above the clouds which represents my imagination. The light source emitting from behind the Tree is my power source which is shining down on the character models to represent my imagination's power helping me create these characters ... I warned you it was CHEESY!!! :)


Here's an example of the Ultimate Image if we were allowed to put text. It's just my name in the middle as I am the creator and it's a nice blue to compliment the orange colours beaming around the image:

Big Alien Renders WIP

After handing in for 1st Submittal I also did some extra details to the Tank. I was stuck with texturing in Photoshop over a lot of Easter so once we got back to uni I was able to texture in Mudbox which is so much nicer to use while texturing!

I've been dirtying him up the past few days while also finishing off my Business Studies work, so not much has been added, but here's what I've done with the dirt so far. The greener bits around the hard skin is a falloff of subtler hard skin, so that the actual bits of hard skin don't look as if it's just attached to the body, now it looks more like it's growing around it. The dirt on the face is actual dirt, but I've only managed to add it to the head so far:

Spaceship Renders

After first submittal I added extra wires to the Spaceship, so here are some renders of the Spaceship before and after the added wires. Rendered out from 3Ds Max:

1st Submittal !!

We had our first submittal the day we got back from Easter, which was a lovely thing to come back to, with problems rendering and computers crashing to add to the stress ... Anywho! I didn't manage to finish everything I wanted for the 1st submittal, basically the textures for the Alien, I was hoping to get them done ages ago, but because of having to run around chasing people and setting shots up for the animators, it's all dug into my personal time more than I thought it would, but the good news is that the Spaceship is completely finished, and the film is looking great! :D

Anyway, recap over, here's what I handed in for my 1st Submittal ... this is only my personal work, unfortunately you guys have to wait a bit longer before seeing any of the Film footage ;)

WIPs

So now that all the models are modelled and unwrapped I've been busy texturing my Alien and Spaceship.
They've been taking a lot longer than they should have because as a Director these 2 models aren't the only things I need to spend my days working on, so most days I don't even get to do my own work ... but at least it's getting there and the film is looking real nice! :)

Here are some WIP images for the 2 models starting with my favourite, the Big Alien:

• Alien only has a basic Diffuse Map with Ambient Occlusion
• Only the Body has been textured so far, not the Hooks or Bracelet
• Been working on Normal Maps with xNormal, really nice programme but still need some tweaks to the Maps, so they haven't been included in these images
  

And then the beast of a Spaceship:

• Only Diffuse Maps again for the spaceship
• Ambient Occlusion doesn't work nicely while projecting onto the UV unwrap so it will be added later on as a separate render pass
• Some textures are only there as placeholders at the moment, like the objects below the spaceship
• The giant rock mountain looks pretty gross right now! ... I've had trouble unwrapping it because it's so high poly and I should have unwrapped it while it was still a box (silly me) but at least I know for next time now, so I've been trying a procedural map, and failing at the moment, so the rock texture will definitely be changed!!
  

GROUP BLOG!!!

Everyone check out our group blog!!
If you guys are interested in seeing how our project is going then check it out!!
You get to see what everyone has been up to on our side and the Motion Design side so it's worth a look!

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http://3dmotionatrium.tumblr.com/

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Also, we've been thinking of a name for our film and we've come up with "DAY 83" so it gives an idea of how long the invasion has been going on for ... what do you guys think? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! :)