Week 11-Completing the Project

My task for this week was to finish the work assigned to me so that another member can create the video before the presentation next week. To start I applied the glass material to the cover on the pressure gauge dial. I found the instructions of how to create this material in Introducing 3ds Max 9: 3D for Beginners (Derakhshani, Munn, McFarland, 2007, pages 473-4) and tried it out during week 9 where it worked well.

To begin I went to an empty slot in the material editor and from the material browser selected the raytrace material. Then I set the transparency colour to white as this would make the material fully transparent. Next I removed the tick from the box by the word reflect and increased the reflection value to 20. The final change I made in the basic parameter rollout was to the index of refraction, which sets how much of the surrounding materials are refracted in the glass, was set to 1.55.

Next I made changes in the extended parameter rollout in the material editor window. Here I set the reflection type to additive and set the gain value to 0.7.

After this I went to the supersampling section where I turned off global setting by removing the tick from the box. Instead I ticked the box by enable supersampler and made sure “Max 2.5 Star” was selected from the drop down list.

The final alteration I made to this material was to change the specular highlight settings in the basic parameter section. I changed both the specular level and glossiness values by increasing them greatly, firstly by changing the specular level to 98 and secondly the glossiness value to 90.

The last step for this material was to apply it to the cover of the dial. Once applied I looked at the result of this in the render window.

When I saw the outcome I was really happy with the outcome as the face of the dial was now visible. There is a little reflection by the spindle on the dial, but not too much to make the needle difficult to see.

Next I went on to create my final piece of animation, this being the camera movement for the first 3 parts of the storyboard. The purpose of this of the final video would be to set the scene where the steam engine would have been used, this being for a dredger on a lake in Zurich in 1892. Before starting the animation I first checked the timeline was the correct length. This section of animation was planned to roughly last for 15 seconds. The timeline was currently set to 400 frames and with a frame rate of 25 frames per seconds this equalled 16 seconds of animation. As this was about the time originally decided by the group to use for the section I was working on I decided to leave the timeline at 400 frames in length so that there was additional space for editing.

Following this I added a camera to the scene. I selected a free camera as I wanted the focus point of the camera to change as it moved towards the dredger and felt as a result of this plan the free camera would be most suitable. Then, using the move and rotate tools, I position the camera in the scene where I roughly wanted the animation to start.

Afterwards I used the spline tool to draw out a path for the camera to follow. Before creating the spline I set the type to smooth as I wanted the cameras movement to be as fluid as possible. Once I had the initial line drawn I edited the position of the vertexes to make the line curve like I wanted it to.

I was now satisfied with the shape of the spline and so selected the camera and went to the animation menu. Here I chose path constraint and attached the camera to the spline. I then went to the final frame in the timeline and then repositioned the spline with the move tool so that the dredger was in the centre of the camera shot at this point.

I felt this had gone well so far, but the original plan was not for the camera to move for the full length of the timeline, just for the first ten seconds. To resolve this I moved the key frame at frame 400 to frame 250.

This corrected the end; however there was still a problem at the start. The animation was meant to open at an image of the mountains to set the scene, but currently the camera was facing the wrong direction. To resolve this I selected the camera and turned on auto key before using the rotate tool to position the camera so it faced the mountains.

Afterwards I moved the keyframe at the beginning of the cameras movement forwards along the timeline so the camera was still at the start and then started to move after roughly half a second to a second as I felt this would look most professional.

Now I was happy with the animation of the camera I tried rendering a single frame to see the outcome. I was quite pleased; however there was a gap between the top of the sky and the top of the rendered image. To correct this I first tried to move the spline path lower, but this did not hide the entire gap and did result in part of the dredger being cut off in the image. Instead I increased the height of the cylinder which contained the sky material with the scale tool. This was successful in removing the gap.

Next I went on to create the fade of parts of the material on the dredger. For this I planned to use the material morphing technique I had tried out earlier this week as it worked well.

To begin this task I worked out where I want the machine to be placed and therefore which sections of the dredger I wanted to fade away. When doing this I took into consideration the size the steam engine will need to be scaled to when merged into the scene and as a result the amount of the front of the dredger which needs to be faded away. I did not want to fade away the whole of the front of the dredger as this would display the inside as well due to the fact I do not know what else would be inside or where.

Once I had an idea of where I wanted the machine to be positioned within the dredger I made the different parts of the dredger into editable polys. I then entered polygon mode and went down to the material ID section to set the material ID for the areas I wanted to fade. Several of the material IDs had already been used for one of the objects and so set this section to the next available material ID, this being number 4. I set this material ID to all of the areas I wanted to fade.

I then opened the material editor and created a new material. I needed to create a transparent material to use in the morpher so I could fade between the dredger material and the transparent one during the animation.

Afterwards I created a morpher material in an empty slot in the material editor and added multi/sub object material to the top two channels in the morpher material. In the first multi/sub object material I applied the normal dredger material to all four channels so I could use this as the first material and then in the other multi/sub object material applied the original dredger material to the first three channels of this material and for the forth applied the transparent material I had previously created.

Following this I selected the objects which make up the dredger and from the modifier list chose the morph modifier. I then clicked on “choose morph object” and selected the one object which made up the dredger. This resulted in the "choose morph modifier window opening where I highlighted morpher before clocking on the bind button.

At this point I found that I was unable to use the same morpher material for more than one object and so I created two more morpher materials with the exact same setting as I applied to the first. Then I placed the morpher on another part of the dredger by choosing to pick the morph object before choosing bind.

The preparation of the material was now complete and so I turned on auto key and made changes to the percentage values of each channel accordingly due to the position of the slider along the timeline. I did not want the front of the dredger to fade until the camera had stopped moving and so I kept material one at 100% up to frame 300 and then between frames 300 and 350 faded material one to 0% whilst fading the second material in to 100%.

When I checked this in the render window the colours of the dredger were not changing. I tried this over and over again, but I was not successful through any of these attempts and could not work out what I was doing wrong. This was quite disappointing as the trial I completed for the material morpher earlier this week worked really well. I discussed this problem with the group and as it was the end of week of 11 it was decided to just have the camera movement for this part as the scene still needed to be rendered and the video created. As it was estimated each group member would have roughly 15 hours of rendering to complete I left this as camera animation alone.

My role within the group was not complete in relation to the project files. All that is left for the remainder of the semester is to prepare for the presentation during week 12.