Hi Guys,

I'm about to embark on my final Uni project which will be an animation short based around the game I previously posted in the finished work section.
There will be models, tests, scenes, animations and the like posted up in this thread as I progress up to the finished thing for January 2008.

First up is making a higher res version of some of the trucks from the game. I'm going to work up the cab on the first truck and then use it as a base for the other types of truck that I'll need. It's a bit of a crazy mesh in places at the minute but it'll get tidied up





Si

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Examples of bTraffic - a traffic animation tool for Maya
bFlocking - a tool for Maya 8.5+ to generate flocking and swarming behaviours
Jan/Feb Challenge 2007 Entry and W.I.P
May/Jun Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Mar/Apr Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Jan/Feb Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Nov/Dec Challenge 2005 Entry and W.I.P
Sep/Oct Challenge 2005 Entry and W.I.P
Jul/Aug Challenge 2005 Entry
www.flash-fx.net

Hello Si,

you're in the same boat as me!! It's a good idea to get things started as early as possible, do you need to get the thumbs up from your tutors too or are they already aware of what you're doing?

Good luck,

Mat.

Hey Si

Good luck with your project! I remember mine seems ages ago but this time last year I had just handed it in!

Its a great idea to get everything planned out, as if its like at my uni, you get hit with a load of other project too towards the end from other subjects!

Remember to keep everything documented and reference everything that you gather from the internet (best off trying to get the full detials as you gather them as sometimes the page becomes unavailable after a while, as this will help you out with the write up at the end of the project and should help to make it as painless as possible as all your ref and development is in one place.

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"No pressure, no diamonds" Thomas Carlyle

good luck mate! Will definitely be keeping a close eye on this project. Hope it goes well.

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arran3D

arran3D blog

thanks guys

mat - yep, the same old boat, lets hope we both come out the other side with a cool final animation that can help us towards a job.
I'm meeting up with the tutor this friday and will be going through the idea and the scripts and hopefully all will be good. I get the impression that there may be around 5 minutes of action so it might get cut down or split into two parts (the second I might finish straight after the course).

steve - I bet it was a stressful old time at the end! Have you got your final work up anywhere at all?
Luckily apart from a group project in september this will be pretty much what I can concentrate on for the rest of the year.
Thanks for the advice on the references and source material. I stumbled on that way of working for the other modules I did recently - you're definitely right about it helping you build up your accompanying work without having to go back and waste time accumulating things. I've already got a list of sites (will get the actual pages now you mentioned that they can often go down) and am adding more things as I progress

arran - thanks I'm sure it'll start off slow and then get pretty frentic but fingers x'ed it goes well

Here's another quicky I knocked up earlier. This is a standard bus and will again be modified slightly so I can use multiple versions for traffic scenery. Found that I couldnt smooth it though as my mesh must be poor, probably from a big lack of experience in doing hard surface modelling.



Si

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Examples of bTraffic - a traffic animation tool for Maya
bFlocking - a tool for Maya 8.5+ to generate flocking and swarming behaviours
Jan/Feb Challenge 2007 Entry and W.I.P
May/Jun Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Mar/Apr Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Jan/Feb Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Nov/Dec Challenge 2005 Entry and W.I.P
Sep/Oct Challenge 2005 Entry and W.I.P
Jul/Aug Challenge 2005 Entry
www.flash-fx.net

Not sure either how they do it on hardsurface models but I believe it's more edges near the areas you do want to maintain hard to hold the form. Kurt does some of it in the free basic human form if I remember correctly but it was more from an organic standpoint. Same ideas different areas to apply the hard edges too I guess.

Another little helpful bit for game stuff is messing with the normals rather than smoothing an entire object. Drag these two little mel snippets to shelf

// All hard normals:
polySoftEdge -a 0;


// All soft normals:
polySoftEdge -a 180;


Works on object, faces as well as edges. An example could be to first soften the whole object and then mark up the edges you do want hard. Lots of back and forth. Shelf is lovely ey

I use these a lot so made a couple of icons to go with them. Grab if you wanna
https://www.neod.com/mattias/tmp/allsoft.bmp
https://www.neod.com/mattias/tmp/allhard.bmp

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Currently working on reclaiming Space
The Salvation Prophecy

thanks for the info alphaflyte
I'm already using softening and hardening on the edges (invaluable to get a nice look before smoothing). But the mesh does not lead to a nice smoothing, even after some tweaking. I played about with the settings on the smoothing options and got a slightly better look but in the end thought it would be good enough to increase the mesh around the curves and not bother smoothing.
Thanks for the icons btw, I'll be adding them to the custom shelf - It'd be nice if people aggregated all the possible shelf icons into easy to download packs. Then a script with a simple association with the name of the action and an image in a folder could be really handy.

Si

---

Examples of bTraffic - a traffic animation tool for Maya
bFlocking - a tool for Maya 8.5+ to generate flocking and swarming behaviours
Jan/Feb Challenge 2007 Entry and W.I.P
May/Jun Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Mar/Apr Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Jan/Feb Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Nov/Dec Challenge 2005 Entry and W.I.P
Sep/Oct Challenge 2005 Entry and W.I.P
Jul/Aug Challenge 2005 Entry
www.flash-fx.net

Hey Si

I've not got my work online, in fact after looking at it after posting I was quite embarrased by it, looking back, at what I can do now.

I looked into creating dynamic effects and then comparing them to real world effects of the same things as well as compositing them into real footage in place of the actual simulation. Looking at it now I could do a lot better than I did as I know know more about lighting etc, it was pretty much my first maya project, I hadthe summer to get used to the software and design a project based within it and then do the project!

With this project how hi res are you going to go? Also are you going for realism on it too?

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"No pressure, no diamonds" Thomas Carlyle

Hi Steve,

It's always good to look back on your previous work and see how much you've progressed - like you say though, sometimes its better to keep it for private viewing only (I have some real poor early stuff!)

That sounds like a really cool thing you did, its really interesting to see how accurate or real you can get 3D work. Would you ever go back and redo your old stuff with the knowledge and skills you have now?
Learning maya in the summer and creating a project on it must have been crazy, how did you manage to get through it all? I mean I still keep finding problems with things that make me tear my hair out for hours and days) on end and I've been using it for the last couple of years.

I had a meeting with my tutor today and he's said to get more detail in the concept and overview and write a treatment - things should be more clear after that
After thinking about the modelling I might simplify the fine detail geometry on the current test vehicles and use displacement maps on them instead. Then when I create another variant from an existing vehicle I can simply modify the generic shape and modify the displacement map quite quickly.
I'm still undecided how cartoony/realistic it'll be so I guess that will affect the final resolution as well

Si

---

Examples of bTraffic - a traffic animation tool for Maya
bFlocking - a tool for Maya 8.5+ to generate flocking and swarming behaviours
Jan/Feb Challenge 2007 Entry and W.I.P
May/Jun Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Mar/Apr Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Jan/Feb Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Nov/Dec Challenge 2005 Entry and W.I.P
Sep/Oct Challenge 2005 Entry and W.I.P
Jul/Aug Challenge 2005 Entry
www.flash-fx.net

A little update here
I've been looking into science'ing my project up and have been looking into boids - artificial flocking.
The idea is to use the technique for an element of my final project that will require an element of flocking behaviour (and that will hopefully save me keyframe animating 20+ items running across a landscape!)

Here are a few tests and an implementation of the method - just keep refreshing the pages to run them again.
1) rule 1 - boids determine the centre of a flock (shown with the circle) and move towards it
rule1

and a slight mod whereby the boids dont lose their velocity:
rule1 mod

2) rule 2 - boids keep a certain distance away from each other
rule 2

insect like swarming (combination of rule 1b and 2)
swarming

3) combination of rule 1 and 2 and adding rule 3, boids try to match each others veolcity:
rules123 combined

Si

---

Examples of bTraffic - a traffic animation tool for Maya
bFlocking - a tool for Maya 8.5+ to generate flocking and swarming behaviours
Jan/Feb Challenge 2007 Entry and W.I.P
May/Jun Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Mar/Apr Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Jan/Feb Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Nov/Dec Challenge 2005 Entry and W.I.P
Sep/Oct Challenge 2005 Entry and W.I.P
Jul/Aug Challenge 2005 Entry
www.flash-fx.net

Very cool Si,

what software have you used to make the tests and how will you transfer the behaviour to your 3d models? Of course I'm assuming that you've not used Maya and Mel to program the tests, I could be wrong though!!

Take it easy,

Mat.

Hi Matt, hope your project is going well

I did them in flash using actionscript 2 (looks a bit like java nowadays) and based it on a the original boid information and a pseudo (generic, non-specific) code example. Theoretically implementing a similar structure in Mel should be straightforward, being a C style structured language not vastly different from PHP's structure which I've used for years.
I had a play with Mel the other week and liked how you can use both Mel and Python when scripting (I'm learning Python at the minute too) - the only drawback I found, correct me if I'm wrong here - is that you can't use python to write expressions, only a variant of Mel. Also controlling things based on the time or current frame seems a bit overly complicated to what I'm used to. I would much prefer to write a Python function and execute it per frame through some kind of custom control rather than having to put it inside an expression (and therefore Mel) that is automatically evaluated every frame.

I'm aiming at getting a behaviour pattern so that the boids leave a small constrained place and spread out avoiding objects and each other as they travel towards a final location which they further spread out at and stop behind an object like a wall. Another behaviour I'd like is to have some random boids stop behind obstacles (staying under cover) for a random length of time before moving forward - something along the lines of the guys leaving the landing craft at the beginning of saving private ryan (if thats not giving too much away)

Si

p.s, I'll put the flash code up on my site at some point soon so that people can have a look and play with it

---

Examples of bTraffic - a traffic animation tool for Maya
bFlocking - a tool for Maya 8.5+ to generate flocking and swarming behaviours
Jan/Feb Challenge 2007 Entry and W.I.P
May/Jun Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Mar/Apr Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Jan/Feb Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Nov/Dec Challenge 2005 Entry and W.I.P
Sep/Oct Challenge 2005 Entry and W.I.P
Jul/Aug Challenge 2005 Entry
www.flash-fx.net

I didn't know all you guys were doing maya as a uni course?? my god, no wonder you have so much time for it.., and I thought all you did was sit in front of a computer just for the sake of it??

well good luck with your courses, looks to me like there's some very good 3D people at your schools if you guys are anything to go by. I did a maya course once but it was only 1 point accreditation?? not for uni, but I did learn a lot.

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take it easy and life will be easy

thanks mirek03, maya is very addictive as you probably well know and any excuse to use it as much as possible is good

The uni here mainly concentrates on 3Ds Max so I am more or less alone in using Maya. I still do dabble a little in Max as to be honest they are pretty similar. The modelling is very similar when you use a 3Dconnexion space navigator to navigate around the viewports - no having to learn a different set of keys and mouse commands woohoo!

Si

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Examples of bTraffic - a traffic animation tool for Maya
bFlocking - a tool for Maya 8.5+ to generate flocking and swarming behaviours
Jan/Feb Challenge 2007 Entry and W.I.P
May/Jun Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Mar/Apr Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Jan/Feb Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Nov/Dec Challenge 2005 Entry and W.I.P
Sep/Oct Challenge 2005 Entry and W.I.P
Jul/Aug Challenge 2005 Entry
www.flash-fx.net

Hey Si that looks sweet!

Ive been dabbeling with a bit of MEL at the moment to get info out of maya, just simple coordinates per object per frame, process them with matlab, then re importing the formula back into maya to see the difference of the calculated motions compared with the actual motions.

Ive not had a go with python yet, might have to at some point though

Be good to see how your work comes out.

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"No pressure, no diamonds" Thomas Carlyle