Final thoughts and Evaluation

So writing my final thoughts. I can say that i this module is one that I enjoyed the most. Building something from scratch and see it come to life is so much fun.

As I said last semester I didn´t have any knowledge of 3d before going to Anglia Ruskin and was a little afraid starting it. But after a whole school year doing tutorials and thinking about the projects I have grown confident in modeling and animating.

This semester I did 2 3d modules, the other one was 3d character animation. If I am being honest I might have been thinking more of the character one then this one. I think that is a little fair since it both involves animation :)

About my creations this semester I think one of the Idents - the rolling logo is much much better then the other 2 but still think the others aren´t that bad considering animation. The lighting is not great and that is the thing I am unhappy with.

It seems I got a little stuck in my creativity for the three logos. I mainly focused on camera path then actually animating the logo. The only animation of the logo is for the rolling one. I could´ve done something similar to the BET 365 Idents - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R49Y2P6f18

Maybe I could have bent the logo and made it juggle a ball or something. But I feel I have the knowledge to do so now after this assignment.

One thing I regret is that I was going to make a to complicated Ident In the beginning where I was going to model a car and make it drive. I could maybe do that now after doing this module and the 3d character one but in the beginning of this module I had not, though I wanted to :)

I really enjoyed the structure of the Module, that you are doing tutorials and your project is clear all the way through the semester is something that I liked.

I thank you for this year and maybe we will meet again in the future :)

Signing off for the last time

Baldvin Olafsson

SID:0815818

Research boards and mood boards

When creating my mood board I thought about what kind of TV station Stöð 2 sport is(channel 2 sport) It is a sport channel with it´s main focus on football, basketball and Formula 1. They also have tennis and track and field but they usually don´t have that live.

With this in mind I put a football and a basketball in the picture to represent those sports. I added Cristiano Ronaldo there also since he is probably the most famous footballer today.

I found a formula 1 car with the help of google, I don´t know anything about car sports so I can´t really tell which car this is or who is the driver for it :(

The best sprinter in the world today is there also Usain Bolt. I think he is already a legend in his sport so I had to have him on my mood board.

I have Roger Federer representing the mood of Tennis. He is my favourite Tennis player.

In the background I put some grass and sky picture. It gives you the feeling of a nice football field i think.

Finally I have the Stöð 2 Sport logo.

Through my research I took a look at other Tv sport stations like eurosport, setantasport, itv sport and skysports. I looked at what sports they had on and their logos. They all have that in common that football is their biggest sport.

I also took a look at some Tv Idents on youtube:

ITV - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n2vRH8VA-c

BBC NEWS SPORTS - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWI3KZ41K3I&NR=1

BBC SPORT 2008 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oojj-oHAO7Q

Skysports - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Wp_kTwo7h8&feature=related

Skysports - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ou4IEkSqzM&feature=related

Here is something for a gay tv station. Thought it was kind of funny - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F66_kB9oKiQ

And finally here are some really nice Idents for BET 365 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R49Y2P6f18

Ident number 3....is it maybe the best one?

Now it´s Ident number 3.

I wanted to make some animation to the logo itself. In the first 2 idents I played around with the camera so there is enough of that already.

My vision was to make it come rolling against the screen and then stop.

Honestly I had no idea how to create this. I started out playing with the pbomb and the wind. That was not giving me what I really wanted. Maybe I wasn´t using it right or something.

After alot of thinking my rommates Olafur and Hannes recommended to me to use a plugin called RayFire.

Rayfire website:

http://mirvadim.com/

After a little tutorial from my roommates I felt I could I was good enough to achieve what I wanted.

I created a plane and added a grass material on it. Then a created a sphere to be around the whole scene. For some reason I feel better working in a scene with a sphere or a box around it.

I imported the logo. Then i realized i had to create the logo blowing away from the screen and then reverse it using adobe premiere. I tried using the curve editor but didn´t get it to work.

I created a bomb and a wind and added them into the rayfire tool with the logo. After some tweaking I got the logo rolling away from the screen in a perfect way as i wanted. 

Now I had to put some lights in. I made a Target spot light and a line which followed the logo rolling away. Then I constrained the light to the line and edited the timeline so it would be above the logo at all times.

Finally I created a path for a camera coming from above and to the logo.....since I was going to reverse everything I had to have my brain in "reverse thinking mode". :)

After I rendered it and reversed it using premiere I saw a problem. The logo was way to dark in it´s final position. So I went back to 3d max and added another light  which pointed at the logo. I made it gradually decrease the light from frame 1-10 and after that none light at all.

I think this is my best Ident so far. Hopefully I will make more in the future and get more experience

Ident number 2

I put a glass material on the logo this time and was trying to create the scene a little more sporty then in the first Ident.

I added a box around it and put some images from all kind of sports on it so when a the camera goes into the scene it will show the logo surrounded by sports.

For the camera path I added a helix, starting out from the top of the box and going downwards and around the logo. I added a camera and constrained it with the the helix path.

For lighting I decided to try to make a light come from the camera. So I created a another helix exactly like the first one and added a spotlight to it.

With this I got a nice shadow from the logo casting on the walls. I think the see through glass logo looks really good.

1. logo

The first logo I created I was playing around with the cameras. I visualized the scene being dark with lights to light up the logo. I didn´t want much because I was really going for the dark look.

I decided I wanted 3 cameras.

1. camera was planned to go half round the front of the logo

First I imported the logo into the scene. I created a sphere around it for the environment. Don´t know if it mattered or not since I was going for a dark scene but i felt it would. Always good to go with the feeling :) I also put a sky image on the sphere and 2 modifiers UVW mapping and Normal so the sky would show from with in.

After that I created the lines for the cameras. Created one line and then one camera etc. When I create the camera I have to go to camera>motion>assign controller>path constrain and then pick the path.

I used a free camera.

I did this with all the cameras and then I had to align them so they would point to the logo

Then my biggest problem was how to create the lighting. I am not the biggest 3d expert but lighting I feel is the hardest part.

I started playing around with all of the lights and tried to find out a good way. Then i changed the renderer to Mental Ray renderer and that was the time something started to happen.

I started by adding a Target spot light and pointed it to the side of the logo. An area spot light was also created. But I still had something missing. So i added a few omni lights and Stuck with that.

I exported the 3 cameras and then edited them using adobe premiere. I had to take one of the camera and reverse it for a better result.

This Ident didn´t turn out as good as I wanted it. But it shows my skills in working with camera paths.  I definately need to work on my lighting technique in the future.

Logo

I know I talked about in the last post that i wanted to do a car animation with a logo on the side of the car, but yeah i decided not to do that. Instead i am going to focus on the logo itself.

I started by creating the logo.

I build a box. Then I wrote a text 2SPORT 2. I aligned the text on the box and then extruded it so it would go through the whole box.

I used boolean to extract the letters from the box so i would end up with a box with wholes in it in the shape of the logo.

Airplane?

Hi,

I have decided I want to create a car animation. It´s going to be a rally car driving really fast with the Channel 2 sport logo on its side or the logo will drop hard down from he sky after the car. I will be doing a storyboard for this.

To create the car I have to do a copy of a blueprint of a car.



I did a tutorial how to create an airplane using blueprints



So now I will be starting on modeling the car

Later,
Baldvin

2nd Week

Hi, Well know we are in the second week of 3d animation. This week it has been snowing and really cold here in Chelmsford, feels like my country Iceland :) This week we learned how to make objects follow a path. This is a simple stuff. For example you make an object then you draw a line. Then select your object go to animation/constraints/path constraint. Then you will have a line coming from the object, draw that line to the path and click on it. DONE I tried to build a camera going between houses. It wasn't as amazing as i wanted it to be but I am still learnig :) One day it will be awesome.

3D animation 2nd semester

Hi,

today I was taught the ground rules of animation. I learned how to use the timeline, how to use key frames, auto key and set key.

Then I was taught about the Mini Curve editor and curve editor. I played around in that by creating a bouncing ball and manipulating it movements in the editors.

Then I learned how to use a dummy. That will probably be a tool that I will use alot this semester :)

Finally I was to make a little animation and post it here on the blog, so here it is.