It's been a while, how are you?

So, I know it's been a while since I updated my blog but I'm going to continue using over summer and beyond.  Talking of "beyond", I'm very pleased to say that I was offered an unconditional place on GCU's master's course entitled "3D For Virtual Environments" which I greatly accepted, which means I'll be down in Glasgow towards the end of August and I'm looking forward to it - I have a lot of old school friends down there and will even be sharing a flat with one of them!

Something else which is exciting is that I'll be going to America in a week for 12 days to stay with my Cousin, her Husband and their Daughter which I'm looking forward to.  My Cousin works for Disney and introduced me very kindly (via email) to two people who work there in the games department (who are also exceptionally kind for taking time to talk with me) and I've been talking to them for a while now and maybe I'll even get the opportunity to meet them when I go over!

If you've read through some of my other blog posts then you'll know that I want to be a Rigger or Technical Director, I knew this would involve a certain amount of scripting so at the moment I'm dedicating around five hours a day trying to lean MAXScript which is the native scripting language in 3ds Max which what I'll be using at uni down in Glasgow.  One of the people I've been talking to at Disney is a Rigger and he's been telling me a bit about Python in Maya which he uses at work; I quite like Maya, although I'm much more familiar in Max, and I realise that it's the primary software for the vast majority of companies that produce films and cinematics for games, but not just that it's also becoming more popular for creating game content so it's something that I'm definitely go learn to use it along with MEL and Python.

At the start of the summer, just like last year, I sent out many CV's with covering letters to companies all over Scotland and followed them up with calls and emails, but still no luck.  However, I called Axis Animation in Glasgow (who produced the award winning opening cinematic for Dead Island) it was Sunday and, to be honest, I wasn't really expecting anyone to be in.  But to my surprise there was one person in, a Senior Producer, who was very pleasant and who I talked to for several minutes and she mentioned that they were moving to a larger premise in the near future and would be hiring some more staff and that I'd be in a good position after the course at GCU to get a job with them!

Anyway, that's a brief round up of the 3D related stuff I've been involved in recently.  A lot of exciting things happening in the near future and I'll be sure to keep you posted.

-Harry

Have A Look At MY Prezi's!

I've made all my Prezi's I've created so far Public so that anyone can view them; previously I've mentioned the client presentation, client pitch and my graded unit, now you can see the Prezi's I created for them, also you can see my latest Prezi which I created for Aberdeen College's student show which includes the majority of my work which is arranged chronologically.

Student Show Prezi:
http://prezi.com/yeusfksxcj5u/harry-houghton-3d-animation-work-for-aberdeen-colleges-student-show/

CGFX Client Presentation:
http://prezi.com/i97upc-dxn3k/nash-for-cgfx-presentation/

CGFX Client Pitch:
http://prezi.com/xelxi0ulnave/nash-for-cgfx-pitch/

Graded Unit Presentation:
http://prezi.com/wikmovzavtlr/aberdeen-college-hnc-3d-computer-animation-graded-unit-presentation-skateboard-character/

You'll notice that there's not a lot of text in my Prezi's, that's becase I don't think it handles text very well so instead you'll see lots of picture which I instead talk about.

Client Brief Helicopter Animation

After I had rigged the helicopter I began to animate it, in the end I had around 700 frames of animation at 25 frames per second.  Our brief said that our total animation (which also had included still shots and close-ups of certain areas of the helicopter) should be a minimum of 50 seconds and we already had a 10 second introduction featuring an animation which involved the CGFX company logo, so I cut out the first 200 or so frames of our animation so that it wouldn't go on too long (render times were also also something I was concerned about).  Once the animation was complete, I started experimenting with the rener settings - now, I feel as though I have to mention that this was on Tuesday evening and we had to make our presentation (which still hadn't been written) on Thursday, I knew we'd finish on time but I was unsure about how good the video quality would be (I was adament that we needed to include motion blur to really sell our animation).  Thankfully 3ds Max's QuickSilver renderer came to the rescue, allowing us to render at 720p and have really nice glossy reflections, AO, indirect illuination and motion blur with each frame only took approximately two and a half minutes to render.

In total, there were four memebers of the team working on this brief and I had positioned four cameras in the scene, so I saved scenes containing each individual camera and set the timeline to read the frames that the camera had to render and the next day distributed them among my other teammates and got the animation rendered out in a couple of hours.  Another member of the team, Aaron, was also rendering out the helicopter in the HDRI environment with mental ray and the close-ups, which included clay, wireframe and diffuse, with Vray.  After he had rendered out everything, I composited everything together in After Effects and since I was the only one who knew how to use Prezi, I created our presentation which included a lot of rendered stills.

The brief was a lot of fun, but I found communicating and sharing files over the internet to be quite challenging and looking back, we didn't give ourselves any room for error - distributing the scenes for individual rendering worked great but it would've been hard to get it all rendered if all four of us hadn't been doing it.

You can see the final animation here: https://vimeo.com/42083546
Below is a frame from the final composition.

Client Brief Rigging

Ultimately I'd like to one day be a rigger, so I put myself forward to be the one who would rig and animate our object, the rig is very simple, other than the landing gear where there's a piston rig, it's just basic linking.  I used spines as control objects to make the scene look a bit more clean and easier to animate.

Cleint Brief Fully Assembled

It was finally time to put all the pieces of the helicopter together and I was pretty nervous, only being in college for one full day and two half days means that you don't get a lot of time to sit with your team members and make sure that everything is to the same standard (I mean that in terms of size), so it came as no surprise when the main rotor blade was about 100 times larger than the main body.  There were further problems to compound the issue; we needed to import our objects into Nick's scene becuase he'd already set up a rig for the landing gear and scaling bones with links and constraints is not advisable, but the rear landing gear was out of proportion with the front and when positioned correctly would touch the ground from in the helicopter.  So I deleted the rig, scaled the objects and put in another rig which solved the problem.  There is an issue of the landing gear properly fitting inside the helicopter when the side and front flaps are closed, but we'll just have to use clever camera trickery to solve that...

(The main rotor was modeled by Aaron, the landing gear was modeled by Nick and the rear rotor was modeled by Scott)

Client Brief Texturing

My plan from the start was to create the helicopter body with nice relaxed UVs and a clone with Planar mapping.  The reason for this was so that I could use Mudbox to paint on the second object and then use Mudbox's 'Transfer Paint Layer' to the first object.  I briefly mentioned this a few weeks ago to the client, CGFX, during our pitch in college and at the time one of the representatives, Graeme Palmer, suggested that I should use Max's 'Render To Texture' feature to transfer a diffuse map from an object with Planar mapping to one with nicer UVs as that was what they used in their work, I tried both methods and the one that Graeme Palmer suggested work best.

Client Brief UVing

It's been a few days since I've updated my blog, UVing wasn't hard, it just took aaaages - in the end I had 179 UV shells all of which had to have map seams manually selected, and then positioning the islands so that they fitted inside the 0-1 square was a bit tricky.  The reason I wanted to make the most of the texture space was because I'm expecting to render out some close up shots and so I'd like the texture to hold up at close range.