Mystical Meadow

This week in Maya I learned the basics, well I learned how to transition from 3ds Max to Maya. It's not to much different but the way that everything is laid out is going to take some getting used to, plus I kept trying to use 3ds Max hotkeys in Maya which for the most part did nothing. The above image is a Mystical Meadow with nice green grass, multi colored crystals, and a little fog moving through the grass. To make this scene I used the paint brushes from the PaintEffects shelf in Maya which has a handful of 3d objects that you can paint onto your scene.

Deep Space Expedition

SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!                                              !(Do you get it? It is a big space)

This week was the week I have been waiting for, I got to see what everyone else has been working on and I got to present my video. The main goal that I had set, other than teaching someone about black holes  was for me to try and learn all sort of ways to use particle systems. I used the Super Spray, PF Source, and PArray particle systems to make all the visible components, that interact with the black hole. More importantly, this week signifies the end of 3ds Max and the beginning of Maya. Starting next week and continuing on into the near future will be the posting of work done in Maya, another Autodesk product that is similar to 3ds Max.

Render Render Render

This week in max the science animation has finally come to its closing. The finished video will be shown in next weeks post after the class presentations. Over the course of this past week, I attempted to polish up the animation for final rendering; however, my least favorite thing in max happened a little more than 10 times which is the crashing of the program (shown in the screen shot above). The image below, on the other hand, is what I was able to make in 3ds max while it was cooperating with me. When I was satisfied with the supernova part of my animation (the lower image), I spent the rest of the week simply rendering out the scenes and compiling them into the final video.

Planet Destruction

This week in max I tried to learn how to make the vortex tool work with meshes, i.e. planets, and what I found out was that it can't because the vortex only works with particle systems. I figured that there would be some way to make it work though because there are a seemingly endless amount of things you can create with max. What I found was the PArray particle system which can be used to copy the shape of any mesh. Then using the bind to space warps I bound the PArray to the vortex and was able to achieve whatis shown in the video above.

Space Fun

This week in 3ds max I started a new project in which I will be showing the journey of black holes though our universe. The image above shows one of the last frames of a black hole (the black sphere) consuming a galaxy of stars (the blue particles). Black holes themselves are relatively simple to make considering that there are basically nothingness, so I just used a sphere with a flat black non-reflective material. In order to add something to the scene that you can actually look at I used four super spray particle systems (the blue stars), and bound them to a vortex space warp, which makes the particles get pulled in towards the black hole.

Finished Character and Fun with Physics

In spite of the title I do not actually have a video that can go up on my blog as of today because when I went to upload for this weeks post the file size was too large. Some time next week I will compress the file and upload the video of my finished character in addition to my week 12 post.

This week I made a wrecking ball that swings by a chain into a brick wall causing it to break apart and topple over. This was achieved by using the same MassFX tool that I used to make the mirror shatter from a few weeks back.

Something new that I learned this week was how to use the cloth modifier. In the picture above, the table was set up as a collision object for a plane that had a cloth modifier applied to it.

Mesh and Bones

The first thing I did this week was make some arms for my character. Then I put some new materials on the objects in the scene so that it wasn't just purple everywhere. Using the bone tool I made a custom skeleton for my character so that I could start animating him. The actual animating part never happened because I spent the last two days of this week having some trouble with both the Physique and Skin modifiers.