Unity Project Website

So well now I present you the website that should be showing my Unity project.

Note that the project is not yet finished. There are many things that need to be fixed and that need to be done. (some materials got messed up after conversion, collisions are not really working the best they could..I did not even start working on light/shadow maps)

Here is the link. Enjoy.

Unity Project

3dsmax continuing...

So well...I have problems with collisions in the Unity game engine. I spent two days figuring out which model is making the game crash. I found it out but I did not really know what to do with that. Anyway I set it to convex collisions and now it more or less works. It's slow around 12-30 fps which is not what I should be getting. There has to be another problem somewhere.

Anyway everything gets converted and compressed and sometimes it generates errors on the textures for some unknown reason (at least to me).

So here you van have a look on what I have so far....not sure if I'm going to continue working on another rooms. I haven't even done the lightmaps/shadowmaps yet and this is going to take ages.

3dsmax - the work is continuing

Maybe it starts to be looking as 'something'...

3dsmax - Continueing with more objects

I created the floor plan of the first room (walked around and measured everything). Then I made the floor plan in Adobe Illustrator and imported it in 3dsmax. I encountered a weird error but saving the ai file as Adobe Illustrator 8 solved the problem.

So here's my work in progress...

3ds max -creating objects

It's time to work on objects I will want in my scene. So well here are two simple objects - a chair and a table.

3ds Max lesson no.2

Learning how to map using Unwrap UVW.

Using Unwrap UVW we can generate a template for our textures and then we can create the textures in Adobe Photoshop for example. To try how this works I quickly created a rectangle with subdivisions so it could look like a DDR platform.

I then created the texture and used it via the Material Editor.



We also learned how to blend textures. For that we did not use the Standard Material but Blend Material which allows us to use two different materials (can also be a blend material or any other). We used a mask to let the 3dsmax to know where and how it should blend the two textures.



I used the very same mask that I used to generate the terrain.

3d room model and QTVR

I present to you my (terrible) room I made in 3ds max^_^

We were supposed to create at least ten objects in a room. Take 13 shots from a camera placed in the middle of the room. Each shot would be under a certain angle. With a specialized program we would then create a quicktime virtual image.

I'm working on it still even though I'm not sure if I will finish it. Here are few rendered shots. The room is not finished and probably won't ever be as my modeling skills are really low.

I learned how to use 3d studio max to some extent. I used primarily edit poly/mesh but I discovered many ways how to work with a model. I realized that there are many modifiers that allow me to do something more precisely and in a much easier way than doing everything the hard way (moving vertices or polygons individually). But I did not spent so much time on it and that's why I'm not sure if I will be able to rediscover all this next time.

I learned more on texturing and UV mapping which is good and also I learned something about lights, cameras and projections.

As an introduction to 3ds max it was good but it did not help me much as next project was doing a model of a human body and animating it (500 frames.).

Flash Animation

Stop motion is finally over. So now it all came to trying to come up with a Flash animation. I knew that my animation will hardly be anything good but I needed to try to learn something.

I wanted to do an animation of something appearing. At first I wanted to draw something and color it step by step and to show that. But I could do this via stop motion as well. So later I decided to do a kanji character appearing.

I started with doing the whole kanji and then I started masking it stroke by stroke. I had no idea how to do the increments or how fast it should be. I tried doing it so it would be visually good, but that's where my problem lies. If I would want to add sound I would encounter a huge problem. The way I did the animation is completely wrong. It's not realistic and thus the brush strokes sounds would be completely wrong.

I learned something about masking and animating objects (symbols) and such which I'm glad. But next time I need to think about an animation as a whole not just parts (video, audio).



Sakura Animation

Stop Motion animation

Next step after my hand drawn animations was a stopmotion animation.
It is an animation technique where you make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. I choose poker cards as my object.

It might seem easy to do but it showed to be much more difficult than I imagined. I tried doing this animation probably 10 times. Each time I had problems with my camera moving (even when being on a tripod), cards changing their position and lights.

Doing this animation I learned a lot, but I'm not really happy with the result.
My main problems consisted of:

Getting the right angle
Setting up the camera on the tripod
Having good lightning

Stopmotion Animation

3ds max introduction

Our first lesson about 3d studio max was quite intensive. We had a 5 hours review of all the features and modifiers in 3d studio max that we could use. After the lecture we had some time to create our first models. My model was a table with something that should have resembled a IIDX controller.

Then I made a scene with all kinds of dice (d4 - d20). I did not manage to map the textures correctly though (even though I had my own dice with me. I just couldn't come up with a correct system to have the numbers on the right spot). Render not available..probably lost somewhere on our network drive.

Dragon Whelp Animation - colored

The digital animation was much better from my point of view. There are some frames I missed in the hand drawn animation and I hate myself for that. I never managed to get it right after I drew all those 50 frames. After I drew everything I scanned it and then colored each frame in Photoshop.

(If the animation would be slower and I would add few frames I should be able to fix it)

The final short animation looks like this



Dragon Whelp animation

Hand Drawn Animation

After storyboarding was done. I had to start drawing each frame. I wasn't sure that my animation would give me some good results. I've never done a longer animation than few frames so I wasn't sure about it at all. So I drew those 100 frames using my tablet first.

When I was done I made an animated GIF out of it. It looked good so I've done the very same but on paper.

Hand Drawn Animation

Our first assignment was to create several hand drawn animations that would consist of 100 frames in total. I had no idea what to do so I started with doing a storyboard of few Para Para movements (Japanese dance - danced in clubs). I decided not to draw a silhouette of a person doing it but just a 'wooden figure' (see storyboard below).

Later when I was taking another paper (stored in my Magic album) an idea came to my mind. I saw there in my album an altered Mountain with a Dragon Whelp painted on it. I was like...'hey I could draw a dragon getting out of an egg!' This in the end ended up to be my another 50 frames.

Very primitive storyboards follow. You can get at least a general idea of what is coming next! I tried to make each animation at least 50 frames long.