Ballzy247's SAE Blog: May 2015

Friday, 8 May 2015

3D Ship Asset - Part 2

By James Ball

Just a quick thing I forgot to mention in the previous post before we begin. The wings of the 3D Model are different to the wings in the model sheet. Yes I know this and my reasoning behind this is simple. Balance, the ship looked to off balance with its wings that far back in the 3D view. Okay, back to it.

In this post I will discuss a little bit about what I went through during the UV Unwrapping, Texturing, Lighting, Rendering and Exporting Stages of my 3D Ship Asset.

UV Unwrapping

To prepare my model for UV Unwrapping, I first broke my ship into separate objects so that it would be easier to work with later on down the track. In the end after about 8 hours of work I ended up with 7 separate UV Maps and various off shoots to work with.

Texturing

Then it came time to do the Texturing. I spent about 2 and a half days or about 26 hours computer time on the texturing and if I had more time I could easily add in more detail or more of a story if you would to the weathering process. But I didn’t have any more time and I had to stick with what I currently got, which all in all is really not that bad I feel.

Back Thruster

Left Thruster

Right Thruster

Cock Pit

Left Wing

Right Wing

Main Body

Lighting

When it came down to the lighting, I decided to play it safe and go with a slightly modified 3 point lighting set up and add a bounce light underneath the ship as well. In order of brightness I will start with the rim light which in the case of this scene acted as the sun. This light was very bright and was in fact a light yellow tinted free spotlight to save on render time. The second brightest light was the Main Light or the light behind the camera that had a tint of Blue as if it was artificial light coming from a window of another ship and the third light was the Bounce Light to take out the harsh shadows on the right hand side.

Rendering and Exporting

I used the Mental Ray Plugin for 3DS Max and rendered the final animation out into 240 individual Targa Files at the resolution of 1024px wide by 720 high, ready for use in Premiere Pro. Once I was in Premiere Pro, I placed the files into the time line and set it so each image was set to 1 frame. I then exported tho movie out as a H.264 MP4 file with audio turned off, frame rate set to 24 frames Per Second and 720P HD.

Please enjoy the final result.

I hope that you enjoyed Part 2 and I hope to see you soon in the future. Feel free to leave any questions/comments in the comments section below. :D

As always, this is James Ball signing out.

Thursday, 7 May 2015

3D Ship Asset - Part 1

by James Ball

And we are back to it again sorry it been a few weeks but I promise, it HAS BEEN WORTH IT!

For our next assessment in our 3D media class we had to create one of the following things.

1. A Mech

2. A Tank, and . . .

3. A Spaceship

If you haven’t already guessed it by the title, I’m making a 3D game asset of a spaceship.

So to begin this endeavour how did I start? Well from the beginning of course! No I’m sorry that was a lame joke. Ok let’s get to it.

To Begin with I spent about an hour with pen on paper and drew silhouettes of various shaped spaceships.

After that was done with, I left it for the rest of the week and got on with other assessments. But then came my next 3D Class and for the whole 3 hour session all I done was just surf the net and look at many, many different designs of space ships great and small. Another week had passed with other assessments and for another hour of the next 3D Media session I kept looking at more reference images. So after a couple of weeks of research and brooding something in my head clicked and in the space of about an hour I managed to crank out these 3 pages of pages of concept sketches.

I day before my next lesson I decided to try and combine the 2 images from the last page together to create something else. The first thing I saw after drawing the pencil doodle at the bottom of the page was a Manta Ray

Manta Ray Feeding - Mantatrust.org (2011/12)

This is the main that ended up giving me the mort inspiration the following page is what happened when I played with the idea and eventually leading me to a final workable design.

The image below is almost what the final design was going to look like but was enough to get me started with the modelling.

Before I started to model, I took the model sheet I had created into Photoshop and set it out neatly in 3Ds Max ready for modelling. To save time, I only modeled half of the spaceship. I started with a rectangle and extruded it out to form a box. I next added enough pollies onto the surface for me to work freely with. The following is where I got up to after 14 hours of modeling.