Conclusion

Now i can say that the kitchen has been completed fully at a good standard, and i am pleased to say that i am happy with what the team have achieved. Overallfrom the start of the project our group hadcome together to produce a great idea of using tom and jerry theme kitchen as our enviroment. At the very begining of the project our group had a few disagrements and what not, but what group dosent. While disscussing our issues with each other in the formative,we felt that when we settled our differences we though it was time to crack on with the work. What else can i say i enjoyed the project it had its ups and downs but overall it was good.

Modelling the enviroment was something new and very enjoyable to do, seeing the first stage of the project to the final outcome is very pleasing and just shows the hard work and dedication we all put in to it.

Render farm complete

Just came in today at 9:00 to check the render status, and yes it renderd successfully which was good news. Looks like the render farm actually lives up to the good news i hear about it. Well basically at the moment our team is just compositing the movie file in Adobe After Effects where we are adding the transitions and sound files. I will post up the the results for the final outcome of the kitchen scene file.

Thursday night

Just about to leave college closing soon, so i might aswel give an update on the progress thus far. Well basically my section of the scene had already been renderd out successfuly on the local machines and the time it took to do that was 17hrs for 950 frames. We still needed to render out Richards and Deans scenes, and we knew if we had sent it out to the local it would take over 18hrs as they had more frames in there scene. Dean sent his file into the render darm for the first time and oh my it was soo fast and helpful. Dean decided to do a quick test by sending my scene to the render farm and let it render. The time it tooked to render was only 45 mins compared to local which took 17hrs OMG lol.

only 10mins remaining till college closes we decided to send all three of our scenes to the render farm and just leave it over night. Hopefuly fingures crossed it al l goes ok ill report friday to see it it fails or succeeds.

I see changes

From the very begining our first idea we had for the kitchen was to have it set at night where the moonlight will gaze through the window and will cast a shadow around the kitchen. The only source of light from this scene will be from the candles and the moon itslef. One good we had for the moon light was to have dust particles in the air. The next phase of the kitchen was the tom and jerry theme, this i liked the best as it did achieve the theme we were after. The third and last phase we have now chosen and we are going to stick with will be more of a realistic scene. This one is taken from a new york apartment at sunset. Below will be a comparison shot between all the stages we went through on the kitchen.

Render complete

FINALLY render has completed and i think i made a bad decision about letting it render on local instead of render far. Altogether the time it took to render all 950 frames was 17 hours and this was left over night. I heard Same renderd the same amount of frames on the render farm, he had to wait about max 2 hourse for his pending staus to change but after that it renderd 1000 frames in an hour and a half. So at the moment i have imported my renderd scene into Adobe AfterEffecsts and letting it render.

Fisrt attemp at final render

Yesterday was the day we decided it was time to render, after discussing that we were not going to be using the cockroach in any of our scene due to difficulties with the camera and animating all three of us decided that we would produce a fly through of the kitchen instead. After the animating of the camera was complete i started to render my final version of the scene to the public drive with out using the render farm. The reason for not using render farm personally is because i have been hearing a lot of people complaining with the rendered outcome, i decided i would just render it out the normal way.

The total number of frames my scene has is 900 and i have left it to render from yesterday around 9pm. While i am writing this blog ma scene is still rendering but probably has another hour to go. Next post will be on render completion.

My roles, contribution and development

Nearing the end of the team project i have finished all my sections of assigned, here is a list of my involvement to the team.


MODELLING

• Chessdraw
• Shelf
• Sink draw
• Chair
• Table
• Sink cupbaord
• Kitchen interior
• Fisrt Prototype Cockroach
• Broom stick & Bucket
• Plates
• Calendar
• Chopping board & Knife
• kettle
• Bread
  
• Door
• Poster

RIGGING

• Prototype cockroach rig

ANIMATING

• Water flow sink
• Cupboard door
• Broom
• Door
• Microwave
• Washing machine

TEXTURING

• Contribution to texturing

PARTICLES

• Water particle
  

My animations

Catch up!!!!

Such a long week even though its only Wednesday, SO much changes and SO much fuss. Basicly our group objective was to create an enviroment based on the tom and jerry theme but with a cockraoch instead of the mouse who will wonder around the kitchen. During the last weeks of deadline, our schedule stated that animation will start 2 or 3 weeks before deadline, so we would have enough time to solve any mishaps that may occur during rendering. Wht had happend is that we had fallen behind of the schedule because we just kept on modelling and modelling even do i stated that we need to get a start on the animation. I understand that we are just using one scene which we need to add as many objects in, but still modelling when deadline is near is a no no. Because of this we are no longger animating the cockraoch and placing him in the scene. Yesturday me and dean stayed till 8 trying to sort of the animation for the cockroach by parenting the camera to it so it would come out as a over the head shot. While playing round with the camera while dean was sorting out the lighting, i was getting fustrated as it would not animate to the way i wanted it.

I said is enough it enough and just wanted to smash the screen because i was soo annoyed, we just came to the conclusion of just doing a first person camera fly through the scene instead of our original idea of the cockraoch. What we have done now is for each of us to animate our own camera in three different kitchen scenes so after rendering we just add the lot together. I managed to do my bit with the camera and took a total of 900 frames, still need to add richs and deans ones. The animation i produced of the door and so on will hopefuly be shown in either richs or deans animation, but in the end i still would of like to see the animation between the cockraoch and the kitchen.

Animation of door & broom

These animation are just a rough idea of what is supposed to take place, final animation may be different to these ones. Originally i was going to make the broom fall on top of the cockroach, but due to time we are thinking of removing the cockroach from the scene. Bascily the animation between the broom and the cockroach happens like this. While the cockroach makes hes way back to his exit he looks at the fridge and notices the poster of Alesha Dixon, while gazing at the picture the wind blows down the broom which happens to land on the cockraoch and kills him off.

Washing machine & Microwave animation

Changing storyboard

going through the storyboard there are some scenes that we can not achieve any more for example the clock and some others. Im going to make a quick storyboard and do some changes that can actually be achieved in our scene, nothing over the top

Updating my roles!!

Originally my roles were set as Modelling/Rigging/Animating, as i have done more then i was originally assigned my role are now

Lead Modeller/Animator-cockroach and kitchen utensiles/Rigging/Texturing

Creating water particle

From the early stages of creating the sink we thought that having water flowing from the tap would a nice touch to the animation. To create the water particles i first had to open my kitchen scene, next i made sure i was under the Dynamics heading and select PARTICLES>CEATE EMIITER. I was given the emitter which i had to place under one of the taps mshown below



















After alligning the emiiter under the tap i just produce a quick playblast of the scene, the results showed the water particles going all over the place in different directions and were relatively small particles which had to scaled. What i did to solve ethis problem was to open up the attributer and set emitter type to directional and particle render type to streak. I also changed the direction of the water flow by selecting the emitter and hitting T, this made me change th position of where the water was going to hit.



















The next step was to make the water falling motion more realistic, by selecting the particles i was able to change the gravity of the water under the heading FIELDS>GRAVITY. Changing the Magnitude to 3 under the attributer of the gravity produced a smooth water falling motion down the sink.



The ony problem i seem to be having is that i cant seem to render out the water flow under mental ray but only through Maya Hardware. Hopefully i should have the problem resolved soon and will post up the solution aswel.

Animation of doors

When i began modelling the kitchen i made sure when creating the draws and cupboards, i made them open and close. Here is a example in my short sequence

Quick fly through guide

This is a qucik fly view render i did last night to sum up some of the view the cockroach will be seeing. This was renderd out as a playblast but hopefuly the full redered version will be done soon

Preview of water flow

This is little preview of the water particle effect i created for the sink, i will be posting up the tutorial on how i made it soon

Annoying

just wanted to say cause we are all using different maya files and doing our own bit of adjustment to the scene, the clever idea would be to let the person who is animating use the latest file as this is the final one we are going to use and the other members just carry on with the modelling and import it over when ready. The reason for me saying this is that everytime i import something over to my maya file and make a few adjustments to it i have to repeat the same process again importing what i did to either deans of rich file as they were adjusting the same file also. To me this is just wasting time and could easily be used doing another objective. This has happend few times nw and plz i dnt want it to happen again.

Modelling Bread

Miss Alesha Dixon!! put her in lol

When richard produced the indian and chinese take away leaflets an idea came into my head, and a very good one at that. I said to my self why not place a poster of a celebrity on the wall or fridge and the first person to come to my head was Alesha Dixon, to me she is the most beautiful women in the world lol. I will show paste the image i want to use as a poster below.




























This was going to be the image that i will using as the poster on the fridge, but firstly i had to create the magnets for it to stick on to. The magnest were made fairly quickly as they only consisted of two poly cylinders, one for the outer magnet and the other for it to clip on to. The color was chosen by Richard and he decided it was time to put the poster up.

Modelling Chopping board

The next part of my objective was to create a kitchen chopping board, again for this i found a particular image that i used as refrence to modell the chopping board. image will be shown below


















The way the modelling started off was by me creating two polygon cubes, one for the handle and the other for actual blade. Once they were placed i changed the perspective to top view and selected vertices mode. From here i began adjusting the vertices to make a similar bendy curve the knife has. Once the knife was made i imported three spheres and scaled them down to fit on the handle of the knife, as you can see from the above image.

The next step was creating the board itself whihc quite easy, all i did was create a polygon cube selected the face and brought it inwards. After that i extruded the face giving it two layers to the chopping baord and that was it. I will post images below to show the renderd version and also when it is textured.

Creating Calendar

Creating the calendar was easy as all i had to do was crete an image plane and assign the calendar texture to it. Firstly i will show you the calendar i will be using as a lambert texture. The oroginal image was just the calendar it self with out the red circles. The reasdon for the red circles was to indicate each member from Team3A birthday, mine being 1st Richards 7th and Deans 10th. We though this would be a nice little touch to the calendar, the circles were done in paint then saved as a jpeg file.

























Me and richard though that there was something missing from the calendar, as our project was based on the Tom and Jerry theme why not incorperate them in to the calendar. Rich found a top and jerry calendar images where i then imported them both in to photoshop.I croped the top half of the image from the original calendar and placed it with the Tom and Jerry image Richard found, i will show example below.
























For the actual calendar in maya i did not just use one plane, i wanted the effect where you see several papers behind one another for example all the months. The way i done this was just to dupliate each plane and arrange the size of each of them so it would sart from large to small. Now i will show you the renderd version

Modelling Bucket and Mop

For me to start to model the mop and bucket i had to first refrence it from an existing content, lucky for me a mop and bucket were already featured in a Tom and Jerry episode and was guide on modelling the bucket and mop. I first started off by creating a subdivion primitive cylinder, i selected all face on the top of the cylinder and scaled them down resulting with a whole for the bucket. Next step was to create the handle and this was done by creating subdivion Torus and altering the vertices to give it a more rounded off shape. This part took a while as the handle was not scaling down correctly, so in that case while playing arounnd with the vertices and edges i had to give it a unique stylish shape which i think rather suites the bucket.

The next step was to create the broom and was done by using a polygon cylinder which was then converted to subdivions. This was the easy part as all i did was duplicate the broom and and scaling it down to it as a little handle above the broom, and thier you go broom done. I will show image below



















Looking at the refence picture i had to produce the smiliar colors for the mop and bucket shown on the Tom and Jerry image above. I was going to use the same metalic effect i did on the kettle for the bucket but i thought that i would ruin the style of it being cartoony. So i just stuck with the natural bland colour normaly shown in the series by assigning them ecah as a lambert. I will post a pictures of the textured bucket and mop below and one allocated in the scene.

I first started out by placing a cylinder to the scene and changing the subdivision axis to 8 and subdivision height to 4, I did the same for the kettle lid but just altered the subdivision height to 2. I selected the upper poly edge of the lid to and scaled them all in to create a bevel, i also selected some of the edges on the top and deleted them. What did next was to select each edge on the main cylinder and scale them down increasingly larger as I went down, the same was done for the lid and an extrusion on the top face was done to create top handle as on the image below.




















As you can see from the image above it seems that i have smoothed both the lid and base quite a bit, but that is not the case. Here I have used a new technique to produce the model smooth looking without adding more edges or vertices to it. The way it was done was buy converting the polygon to subdivision through the modify heading, then pressing buttons 1-3 will allow you to see the model in higher resolution and smoothed out and without pressing the smooth button. I found this technique out today as i as fiddling around with the subdivisions.



















This is the end result which i am quite happy with, i learnt more new techniques which will help me heavily in future modelling. Still cant believe the results looks this good with out smoothing it at all which i have to admit i did with most of my modelling which lead to vertices we did not need. After finnishing off the modelling if was time to add thetextures to the tea kettle, for this i had to refrence an image of a kettle i found on the internet. I will show you below

















As you can see the color and style resembles that of what would find in Tom and Jerry so this is why i chose to take refrence from this pib but altering the kettle as i went along. I chose to texture this under blinn as this would result in a more metalic finnish, changin the Eccentricity to 0.889 gave it the pefect metalic effect to the kettle. All i did next was to finnish it off by adding the correct colors, image shown below

Figuring out the the Maya mental way render

During the start of the project our group have always renderd the scene using maya mental ray as this would results in better looking lighting effect. Towards the lst three weeks of the project we were prompted with an error with the maya mental ray. While rendering the image it would be displayed as a shady grainey effect and jaggerd which looked rather horrible. At first the team decided to go ahead and try resolve it our self by playing around with the setting for rendering and lighting. The results were unsuccessful and we were still left wondering what the problems was.

I spent about three days trying to figure out the problem but it was just not happening,so i gt the help from some third years and still no luck at all. Week gone past and i was not going to let this ruin ma whole schedule so today i came in the morning and from the help of Dan Dali i sat for almost an hour until Dan cracked it (THNX DAN). Basicly what was wrong was the cone size from the lighting had to be changed to maximum which allowed the light to makes it way throught the window with out having any troubles. I will post a link of the results

STUPID STUPID STUPID MISTAKE

In an unfortunate event my brother formatted my memory stick whiel formatting hia pc and this is where all my work files were placed. Lucky enough I had most of the Maya files and print screen saved on me personal hard drive, but the maya files which adjusted with the polycount were not there as i did not save it on ma personal hard drive. The worst part of it was that i had lost my case presentation for Dan which has to be handed in in a few days, im so dumb for not backing these files on my personal hard drive but what can i say it happend it heppend. Where i had the whole day planned for modelling in maya they day was taken up as i had to start my case study, which in the end i did a fair amount forit so i was able to continue maya.

During the week our team members set objectives whihc had to be completed over the weekend. Reason why i was not alble to fufil the objectives was becuase i was having problems rendering in maya software the computer seems to crash on me. But for some reason the file seems to render fine on the uni pc and also sending it to one of my friends they did not seem to have any trouble rendering.

Third years to the rescue

During the afternoon session of the class i was really stressed out about the lighting and texture aspect of the project. The reason for this is that we have loaded up Richards flame texture several times on top of the candles and seems to render out perfectly but when you decide to restart the program Maya decides to not load up the textures. As i was having this problem some of my third year friend noticed i needed help and came to my aid (Alex,Prince and idean). I had heard a lot of positive comments about the work idean produces on Maya so it was very good of help to lend an helping hand.I debriefed him about the situation with the unloading texture flames and he suggested a different approach to the fire on the candles. He stated it would be much easier that i loaded up VISOR which already had pre built in effects from Maya such as fluid and fire.

The second issue i had was with the textures, as they are loaded up some of them seem to stretch across. The resolution to this was going in to planner mapping by CREATE UVS>PLANNER MAPPING. Here i found out i will be able to alter the stretch effects of most the textures i load up, also they explained to me the functions of bump map textures. What i learned was that the paint effects i added on the flowers takes up a lot of CPU power to run, i was advised to convert the pain effects to polygon.

Rigging Cockroach

After the initials stages of modelling the cockroach i then had to proceed on rigging the ugly cock, fisrt of all i had to start with uploading the cockroach model. Here i have begun rigging the cockraoch, going to animation mode and selection SKELETON then Joint tool i was able to place each bone in the leg of the cockroach. After placing the bones i then clicked on snap to point. What happned at first was the joint size being displayed very largely so i had to go into
Display>Animation>Joint size and from there i alter the joint size 1.03.

After snapping the bones to get them alliend with the bends in the leg, it was time for me to create the spine as this was the most important set of bones which will let me parent them to both legs. after creating the spine it was time for me to parent each leg to the spine, this was done by selecting particular bone in the spine to the the first joint in the leg and then pressing on P to parent them both together.
















Once they have been parented i then had to mirror the joints over across to the right side. I first selected the bottom set of joints then clicked on SKELETON-MIRROR JOINT, i clciked on the little box first to change the axes to YZ so it would mirror the joint across exactly. The same was done with the top half of the joints, after that i then selected all the joints and the body itslelf and merged it as one. What i needed to do now was to bind the rig to the skin as this will be key to animating. I made sure i was in the Animating column then clicked on
SKIN>BIND SKIN>SMOOTH BIND.

Test render

This is a test render i did after class which took me ages to do figuring out how to use adobe after effects lol, stayed up till 8 at uni with the help of mehmet i managed to give u this render.

Long hard work

After realising the poly count situation it was time to reduce the amount, i will be posting up pictures of before and after versions of each indivisual objects i have modelled so i can show you the longness of what i had to go through :)

Solution to un smoothing

well while fiddling around with the settings I came across with a solution. The way it works is by first selecting the object in object mode after that you see where the three little icons are on the right hand corner of the screen such as the attributes and etc, click on the first one. This is the important bit because all the models I done have been smoothed more then twice and for each time it has been smoothed we have to reduce the subdivisions level down to 0.

So by doing this you have to find the tab (Polysmoothface) depending on the times the model has been smoothed it will be more, once their change each of there subdivisions levels down to 0 and there you are all sorted

Huge error

While in class on Friday we gathered together to show Jared our progress thus far,this was also good as we had encountered problems and difficulties in our project which needed resolving. The main problem the group had was when rendering a single image of the kitchen especially the sections where the table and chairs were placed and the result would lead to the system crashing so we needed to sort this out ASAP. While showing the problem to Jared he came to the conclusion of the scene being smoothed to an high extent which lead to the high numbers of poly count, the only way we could render the scene with a vast amount of poly counts would be if we had a super computer.

The solution given to us was that we had to lower to poly counts by deleting the vertices, also this includes the amounts of faces your particular model has. We did not really know how to go around doing this correctly as our way was so time consuming, but out of nowhere Dan E helped me out greatly be informing me of an easier method. The way that is work is by first selecting all the vertices in vertex mode, then click on EDIT MESH> DELETE EDGE/VERTEX this way it deletes both the vertices and the edges in one go instead of doing them one after the other.

Whats this

While deleting most of the vertices i came across the table cloth which had 10000 poly count and so did the table itself. But what got my at attention was by clicking on the chairs which had an outstanding amount of poly counts which were at 66000 each and remember we have 5 chairs in our scene which equals it to 330000. The problem is not from the table cloth and table its from the chairs

Modelling Cockroach

After smoothing the outer shell of the cockroach i had to produce the cockroach antennas from a cylinder polygon. I added more vertices to
the cylinder so i was able to adjust the the roundness of the antennas, i had stretched it both side way and vertically. The left side was produce so i just clicked on the left antenna and duplicated it, moved it to the right side and rotated it so match the antenna on the left side.
















The next step was to make the cockroach legs taken from an example from the internet, basically i input three cube and played around with the vertices to make the legs start big then become thinner as the legs get longer.After sorting out the vertices i aligned each polygon cube together so i could combine them together. Selecting vertices mode i shift selected each cube and selected the option merge to centre, this brought the vertices together then all i did was combine each leg and that was it.

















After duplicating each leg i placed them in their allocated position, looking at some images of cockroaches on the internet i noticed the fin tiny fabric of hairs placed on each leg. I created a cube which was then proportioned and rotated thus fitting on each leg as you can see on the image below.

Catch up

Tuesday i came in dedicating my whole day to modelling but i totally forgot about life drawing class which we had later that afternoon, was a bit of a turn off but surprisingly i enjoyed it. Getting together with the group we were able to update each other on the progress so far such as richards dedication to research he was able to find a very useful and helpful tutorial that we will utilise completely. Dean had modelled set of candles which were to be placed on the kitchen table and cutlery at a good standard and also contributed on the research aspect.

Well about my self i would say ive managed to model the kitchen around about 85% complete, during class we had to rearrange the location of some of the kitchen utensils such as the sink cupboard and top shelves. Apart from modelling my part of the kitchen which i am very happy with the only thing i have not done to show for my work is updating my blog. While im enjoying my time modelling i lose track of updating my blog with the progress i made but just to let you know i have produced print screens for every one of my pieces i have modelled so watch out for the the huge update of the blog coming soon.

Apart from the kitchen being modelled i have also starting modelling the cockroach which will be the main character in our scene. So far everything is going good for the cockroach bout 45% in modelling it, just added most of the legs once i finish that off i will then start to rig the cockroach. Here is a little preview of the cockroach so far.....















Fuzzy signing off

Creating sink & top shelf draws

This for me was the thing i enjoyed most to model,as i was bringing my idea to actual form. The sink cupboards and shelf have been modelled using my photos as reference but i have tweaked it a little. The image below you can see that i have created a set of empty sink draws




















Adding a bit more detail to the empty draws i then created the draw itself to slide in the position, i did combine the two as i wasted the draw to open and close during animation so combining it would not work.




















Also for the bottom half of the draw i have added a door which can also function by opening and closing. If you look closely you can see i have added a nob handle on both draw and door, this was created using polygon sphere and just scaled down to postion.




















Image below shows the complete version of the sink draws, the easier way creating them was to modell one and just duplicate them three times and then allign them together. I have combined all for draws together but not the doors as they need to be animated.




















This image below is a shot taken to show you the ways the door will function, notice hw inside the cupboard itself you can see i have created little shelved to make it more realsitic and also to place kitchen equipment on.






































The next part was to create the top shelving that will go across the top of the kitchen wall. Similar to the sink cupboards i created a set of draws different sizes to place along the wall. Just like the air filter i have at home i have created a similar one to this scene which is located under the middle draw, shown in image below.




















This is the completed version of my top kitchen draws, and will be placed along the right hand side of the wall. I also want these doors to act out in the animation so i have not combined the door draws to the draws itself.




















Here is the final version with the doors opened, the trouble i first has when opening the door was that when select the rotate button and move the door it goes all over the place. What i found out i had to do was to centre pivot point and snap the move tool to the coner of the door, this will allow the door to open and close perfectly