After assembling the scene I started to work on the lighting. I had some difficulty with the lighting, I found that there the scene was casting shadows in a odd way during at some parts of the animation. In the end, I disabled the shadows and decided shadows wouldn’t be required in the final product.
With the lighting I had set-up, the batch render took around 30 minutes to render the 360 frames at once.
In After Effects I decided to enhance the clip with an audio that I downloaded from the website Bensound.com (Epic).
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With the Treasure Chest completed, I begin to assemble the scene for Pirates Gold which took me less than an hour.
The process I took was to import the provided assets and place them where I wanted them to be. However I left both the treasure chest and board in the centre of the scene while I moved the trees, grass, sea shells and starfish appropriately.
After placing them, I decided to improve the scene a bit more by modelling one or two rocks for scene which I thought improved the aesthetic of the scene slightly.
I was happy with the way how the scene was set-up:
The following is an account of my 3d modelling assignment for my MDU115 class at SAE. We were given a rough storyboard and were tasked with modelling the treasure chest and following a production pipeline through to the final export of the animation.
MODELLING
Starting in 3ds Max with a cube I used subdivision modelling techniques to add detail and to base of the chest.
Then Using the same techniques I created the lid. Here's the completed Chest.
UV MAPPING
A UV map was created by manually unwrapping the surface so that textures could be accurately mapped onto the chest.
TEXTURING
This is the basic setup in Photoshop for texturing. at this stage there is just the base colours applied for the wood and the metal. I set up an action that automatically hid the UV outlines and exported a png file replacing the old version. This made viewing the updates on the model in 3ds Max more interactive.
RIGGING
After texturing the model I got into the rigging and animation stage of the pipeline. I set the base of the chest as the parent and added the lid under it in the hierarchy.
Animation
For the animation of the chest falling I used MassFX on a box to simulate the fall and bounce. I then copied over the keyframes and modified them slightly in the curve editor. Looking back at the animation now I feel like there may have been a few parts that seem a little bumpy and it could have benefited from a few more tweaks or possibly even being animated by hand. I also animated squash and stretch using the stretch modifier both on the chest and on the crabs.
For the coins I used the Mparticle system in 3ds max. I added the emitter into the chest rig so that it followed the bounce and then animated the rate of emission.
I setup the chest base, lid and gameboard as collision objects so that the coins would bounce off these surfaces. There were a lot of issues doing the coins this way. I had two days of repeating the particle system from scratch as there were issues with the particles colliding with things that weren't there. I eventually found that there was a weird glitch where the collision objects were growing outside of the bounds of the mesh. I didn't find a complete solution for this but I found the deactivating and reactivating the collision modifier fixed the problem. Below is what the problem looked like when visualising the collision mesh.
SCENE ASSEMBLY
I tried a few different setups for the scene and eventually decided to place the essential elements (Sand, Board, Chest, Background) and then work out the camera movement I was after. Then I could place only the objects that were going to be in front of the camera.
LIGHTING
Following the tutorial online I added a skylight and for some reason it wouldn't render on my computer. I tried several other lighting setups but I couldn't achieve the soft shadows I was after without the rendering time going outside of the deadline so I opted to just render without lights and rely on the baked in lighting on the textures.
RENDERING
I rendered out 1255 frames in RPF format to allow the export of the camera into after fx. The whole render took 2 1/2 hours. I realised that I'd left the particle system turned off during the first render so I re exported out the last few hundred frames. This was the advantage of exporting individual files.
COMPOSITING
I took the RPF files into After Effects as a sequence and extracted the camera data from it. An issue that I had was that the camera data had kept it's 25fps rate while the sequence imported at 30fps so they were out of sync. After I reinterpreted the footage It all synced up and I had a usable camera. This allowed me to create a particle system, Use Element 3d for the title and create a 3d light with a lens flare for the sun. I also added some dust effects to emphasize the animation when the crab jumps, board slams down and the chest hits the board.
I did some colour correction and added a vignette to make the overall look more dramatic.
At the end I animated the "pirates gold" title from Element 3d to swing in and hit the footage. I used an adjustment layer with the shatter effect to break it apart.
I then put it all into a new comp and added some shake to some parts to make the impacts more dramatic. Then I put the pixel motion blur on the whole thing to smooth the whole thing out. It's a pretty powerful plug in that analyses the motion in the footage and adds motion blur.
FINAL PRODUCT
This is the final render with a bit of sound design and CC Music.
All in all it was an interesting project with a few hiccups that taught me a lot about 3ds Max. It also made me realise where some of the gaps in my knowledge are. I'm excited to keep practicing uv mapping and texturing and also learn more about lighting, shadows and how they affect render times.
