Animation 2004 - > Cosc 3P98

xXx – By Dimitri Klentos    


Introduction

 

With the idea of winter on my mind, my topic of choice for my final project was something to do with Snowboarding.  The following animation has been partially inspired by the film xXx starring Vin Diesel.  (In the movie, he attempts to escape Russian terrorists by snowboarding down a mountain.)

 

Models

 

          Some of the models that I have used in my animation were both from other programs, and also created by me.

 

§       Bryce 3d

·        Models that I used from this program we’re mountains. The vertices of each mountain was calculated using a 2D Triangulation Algorithm and once calculated I imported the mesh into 3D Studio Max.

§        Poser 5: 

·        Using the program’s basic character model, I added winter clothing to the character from the Poser’s clothing library.  Once I deleted the old mesh, all that was left was the new character model and I then imported the new body mesh in the program. 

·         Note: à  The character’s face, was entirely authoured by myself, of myself.  Poser has the ability of creating a 2D face texture that can be mapped on a 3D Head Model.  Here is a sample of the 2d texture being mapped onto my 3D model.  I then imported the character mesh into 3D Studio Max and applied the texture mapping into Poser generated.

o       To Pull off the 3d Character Mesh of your face you need to take a picture of the front and right side of your head to make the texture actually work.

·        Hands and shoes for the mesh were imported from Poser’s Clothing Library into 3DS Max, however the textures for both the hands and Shoes I had to provide on my own.

 

 

3D Studio Max

o       Several models in this program were created by me.  The lake in the 3DS Model was created by me using a simple rectangle.  Once the rectangle was created, I converted it into an Editable mesh and moved the vertices around.

o        Although the mountains were created with Bryce, I had to edit the meshes a little so I could get my character to weave back and forth through the scene.

o       The Snow Board I created on my own.  I edited the mesh of a simple rectangle and curved each end up slightly.  Then I applied a texture of a chopper on the snowboard that I found on 3P98’s Extreme Chopper Gallery.

o       The house in the movie in which the character jumps was created by me.  All I did was create 4 walls and a prism for a roof.

o       I created the eyes on the character myself, when I imported the mesh into 3D Studio Max, texture wasn’t imported into the movie so I had to re-create them.

o       Once Huge Pain: I had to fix a major problem with the head of the character.  The 2D Mapping wasn’t as accurate as I thought it would be.  Here are some before, and after photos of the Head.

 

 

Textures

 

·        Textures such as the rocks around the mountains were applied from 3DS’s Material Library

·        The ice cap on the top of the one mountain in my scene was created by myself by applying a snow embankment found here.  The Snow texture was created by me.  I simply did it by changing the diffuse colour on the mesh.

 

Interesting Topics

 

            With my 3D character Model, I had to completely devise a method of making the character move his arms and legs while keeping the mesh still intact.  This proved to be very difficult because I could not just group the character’s arm to the shoulder and move the entire group or else a huge gap would occur from the chest to the shoulder.

 

          The solution in 3D Studio Max was to create a character rig involving two interesting topics:

         

          Skeletal Biped: In 3D Studio Max when a character’s mesh has been created, a Skeletal Biped can be applied to a mesh and be used to create movement in any joint in the body.  For my animation, I created my own character mesh

         

          Envelopes:   This topic involves applying a radial envelop around a skeletal Biped, so that as the Biped moves, all the surrounding Vertices around that mesh will align themselves to the envelop so that as the biped moves, the appropriate meshes surrounding the particular body parts move along with them.  Several factors such as the radius of the envelope, Parent Overlay to the previous envelop, and Child Overlay to the next envelope all affect how good the character Rig can be.  As well for this I created my own envelopes and it greatly improved with the binding of the character mesh as I moved the biped.

 

Credentials:

 

The following sound clip was taken from the Movie Trailer of Spiderman II.

 

 


 

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