For the final project of 3D modelling and animation we had to create a 3D model with the level of detail of a Xbox live avatar and then recreate an environment to put it in. My experience with 3D modelling has been painful, I find the whole subject area tedious and complicated. There are so many values for each object, texture, lighting, cameras, animations etc that it felt overwhelming at first. Looking back at some of my earlier pieces of work, such as my nurb man, I cringe at how bad it was compared to some of the models I have been creating in this project. One of the issues I used to have when modelling is that I would use lots of separate bits to build one thing, as opposed to starting with a simple rectangle polygon and extruding it into a fully shaped human. This self development has been rewarding but arduous with lots of reading and watching hours of tutorials on YouTube, some of which I will link because they were of tremendous help to my project.
For my location I chose a place close to my heart, the student guild bar, now known as the centenary club. I planned to use the interesting corner in the club which has bookcase wallpapered walls and some interesting seats and chairs I could model and texture.
To start building my environment I started with the usual floors and walls, with a few cuts using the cut face tool to create some angles and extrusions, found in the tiered flooring in the centenary club. I added a reflective metal edge to the raised platform to make it seem more realistic using a ‘free to use’ texture found online which I will link to at the end of this blog. For the texture of the floor I created one from scratch using Photoshop I feel I created a good representation of the hideous floor found in the real centenary club. I used my scene photographs I took at the very start of this project throughout to make sure I was creating an accurate representation with correct scaling. The centenary club has some nice spotlights around the edge of the room which I tried to include without flooding the room with light. A great use of these spotlights was above my banner I created in Photoshop and then imported onto a plane as a texture.
The first issue that had me pulling my hair out was trying to get textures to appear how I wanted them on different angled and sized objects. The red checker texture, which I also created in Photoshop on the rounded backed seating in the corner was a nightmare for this. Eventually I found a tip someone gave in an online forum saying create UV> automatic mapping might help and it did. after a few tweaks I had the pattern displaying how I wanted.
Creating the cornered seating was also a learning curve as I couldn’t think of the best way to create a 45* angle between the straight parts without overlapping textures or distorting by extruding and rotating. In the end I duplicated the straight part, rotated it overlapped it with the original and cut the overlapping parts down the middle for each piece and deleted them. This solved the overlapping textures but I feel there must have been a better way of doing this without having separate pieces.
There was a character modelling tutorial I had found on YouTube a while ago and I really wanted to try out that method of modelling. It involved created a rectangular polygon, cutting it in half and deleting one side and then ‘duplicate special’ the remaining side with -1x to make it mirror itself. I then enabled the reflection settings so that both sides would be altered and symmetrical. With a few extrudes and a lot of playing around with vertex’s, edges and faces I had something representing the model I had originally planned on creating. There were a few problems that I ran into which was that I somehow managed to make the inside edges sink into the model slightly which caused what looked to be a seam down the middle. This sucked but no matter how much I played around with the edges and vertexes I couldn’t fix this without messing it all up so I just settled for what I had. I had already scrapped it once and started again by this point due to the head on my model.
So by the time It came to texturing my model I planned on using UV mapping but after looking at my absolutely terrible topology I had created from trying to fix some of the problems I had it was clear UV mapping would be rather difficult. A few attempts later and I thought there must be a different way so I wondered off to Google for an hour. Then I saw the method of painting directly onto the model after using a 6 plane automatic mapping of the model which seemed like the way forward. Although the tool was a bit hard to use for creating perfect edges on the model it was a great start on seeing what parts of the UV were which. I then opened the UV roughly painted into Photoshop and fixed a few of the edges as best I could. Luckily the model we were meant to be creating was simple so a simple paint job fitted the model quite nicely.
There were a couple of parts of the model I was not happy with. The hands had gotten mangled without me knowing at some point probably by selecting edges by accident at the same time as changing a different part. I soon found that the limit on history wasn’t enough for my taste, before I would realize mistakes it was too late to undo them and I also realized i’m not very good at remembering to save often.
I decided to give my model a skeleton so that it would make animations easier when it came to it later on. This was a very easy process considering I had never done this before. I had one issue with smooth skin in that every time I moved a joint it would drag nearby bits of the model around for example if i moved the arm it would drag the shirt with it. To solve this a bit I used a rigid skin when connecting my skeleton to my model.
Now my model was complete I imported it into my centenary club scene and all that was left to do was camera work and animating the model. I wanted to create a short tour of my scene using a single camera so I just set a few key frames with different positions and rotations on the camera chronologically. I did play around with motion paths but it wasn’t really necessary in this case and without it I had more freedom. To animate my model I simply rotated a few joints to create a short wave and have his leg tapping the bottom of the chair he was sat on for different key frames.
I wasn’t sure how long the film of the scene and model was supposed to be so i opted for 600 frames which could be 20 seconds long at 30fps or 10 seconds long at 60fps. I wasn’t to sure on the best way to render my scene so I opted for what seemed the best quality, mental ray however it was unable to create an avi so I batch rendered 600 jpegs which I then put together to create an avi with 30fps 20 seconds long excluding title frames with ambient music. When exported with my preferred quality settings the resulting file was 1.8gb! I sacrificed resolution and fps for a drastically smaller file size of 76mb in order to be able to send my work and upload it efficiently.
References:
http://www.cgtextures.com/texview.php?id=75092&PHPSESSID=na4q6e50kl3g7d0hppntckh3u4 (Metal Texture)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1B2E56A47897E628 (Model Tutorials Used)
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Decktonic/Stars/Decktonic_-_Stars_-_08_Fair_Game (Music used in movie)
Drop box:
Banner Texture: https://www.dropbox.com/s/e086scgkpateroe/banner_texture.png
Bookshelf Texture: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pbsgu5lssdxgg3p/book-shelf-texture.png?m
Metal Bar Texture: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8yj9fetnk3ryovp/metalbar_texture.png?m
Sofa Texture: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ns1c1ic5ecc54rc/sofa_texture.png
Project Folder: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ulxii3ytdwsq3w7/bar_scene_project_folder.zip
Movie: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9ki3i52q2kvanjm/bar_movie.1.jpg.avi
creative clifton 
