Gravestones and Display Cabinet

After creating the map plane I went on to create two variations of gravestone to go into the surrounding area, as well as the display cabinet that can be found in a room on the bottom floor of the guild.

To create the first gravestone I used a box to make the outline shape and then used the shamfer tool to curve the top two corners. This gives a good representation of a standard gravestone. I then textured it with a simple gravestone gray texture, as this model will not be seen in detail or for very long.

Gravestone 1

The second gravestone was made by creating a simple box on the ground and then using the inset and extrude tools. I used the inset tool to make a face for a slightly smaller box, and then extruded it out from the larger base one. I then continued this step until I had the disiered shape of a block bottom with a cross on the top.

Gravestone 2

The creation of the Display Cabinet will be covered in the next post.

Adding The Surrounding Area

Among other things I started to design the outside and surrounding area of the guild. I made this more easy by using google maps to find a birds eye view of the guild and place it onto a plane. I then used bitmap fit to scale it correctly and then rotated it until the guild was facing the right direction.

I then started to design basic shapes and continued the road out to start giving the surrounding area some depth. As the project continues I will continue to add buildings and detail to the area. This is important as the animation will show the guild and area from the outside.

The map on the Plane

Other Rayfire Animations

A few other earlier animations made using the Rayfire plug-in.

Photo"Shot".

Earth.

Rayfire plug-in For Max Studio's (Learning A The Technique)

Over the past week I have been spending time working with the Rayfire plug-in tool for 3D Studio Max. This plug-in allows the user to create highly detailed explosions, destructive models and other such effects that can be used for destructive purposes. As a group we decided that we might be able to use something from this package to help animate the building model. I decided to follow up on this and learn some ways in which we could possibly have the walls of the building crumble. The key advantage to this feature is that it heavily reduces the amount of work needed to be done to create such effects, as well as having its own engine to create the animation.

To begin with you create a model as usual, for this example I created a simple garage/shed building with 3 box's as sides and 2 to make the roof. After which the next step is to open then Rayfire toolbar by selecting create object and opening the drop down box and going to "Rayfire Tool".

Basic Model.

RayFire Tool bar.

Once the tool bar is open the next step is setting the objects as impact objects, unyielding objects, bombs or shooters. In this example the model will be placed as an impact objects via simply clicking add, whilst being selected in the simulation tab, and the floor plane will be set as unyielding in the physics tab, to give the model a base. Making the floor unyielding makes the object a floor for the model to fall onto without being effected by the same animation effects. As a reference the bomb tool is very effective, allowing you to use a pointer to create a blast area and creating slices in the object according to the bombs location.

Adding impact objects.

Adding unyielding objects.

After adding both sets of objects the fun starts and the user can move onto the Ray/Xplosion tab and play with the different settings. These vary from different slice techniques, slice iterations, noise and chaos. Different slice techniques allow the user to create different destructive patterns via changing the point of origin. For example bomb as mentioned before uses a point and creates slices around it, and more iterations nearer the bomb point. However creating this I used the irregular fragmentation type, meaning that instead of creating the slices around a point, it creates slices randomly with no correlation between size and length. Number of iterations is how many slices are to be used, and noise and chaos effect how bumpy and pointing each of the separated objects will be, 0 giving straight edges and 1+ giving increasingly bumpier edges.

Fragmentation selection.

The objects fragmented, ready to be animated.

After the fragmentation program has created all of the slices for the objects the final step is to allow Rayfire to animate the destruction. This is done by going onto the physics tab in the Rayfire toolbar and setting the start frame etc, and clicking on the play button. This then sets key frames along the time line and creates a stand alone animation ready for rendering.

Animation bar.

The final animation.

After looking at the plug-in for several hours I've found I have got quiet good at the tool. It has a lot of different animation tools which are easy to use and quick to run. I have found myself creating a few little animations recently that have taken less then 5 minutes to create. The next step is to continue learning and playing with colliding and moving objects to give the fragments more movement then just gravity.

After looking at the tool I have however come to the conclusion that the tool is to "messy" for our walls in our group animation, but could possible be used on the buildings surrounding area, as a way of singling out the building for the main animation. 

Support Beams

To create the support beams I made one basic rectangle and then positioned two of them together as the main support beam . This gave me the starting point for positioning the rest of the beams. I continued by placing seperate beams at either ends of the centre beam and then joined them together with five more beams to create a mesh pattern. 

Support Beams.

After this I then continued to put in the last beam, and corner brink work which linked onto the stairs and the damaged area. 

Final Beams.

Stairs and Railing

To create the stairs I simply created a block, and sized it to fit the pathway. I then created two clones of the block and moved them out, aligning them with there 1st block to create the stairs. After this I then went back to the first block and resized it to account for the damage. This damage will be added in later into the gap shown in the image below.

Front Stairs.

To make the stairs look authentic I made the last step slightly bigger then the other two, so that when the road began to curve, it would continue to fill the gaps between the building and the road.


The next step was to create the railing on the side of the steps. This was done by creating two rectangular shapes, along with two cylinders. These were all then placed together using the vertex snap tool, and moved to align with the stairs. The final thing to do was to bevel and extrude the top of the railing to give it a finished look.

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Front Railing

Evaluation So Far

As the project is not yet finished it is hard to evaluate, however I can comment of what I thought of it so far. The project has been a struggle at times but very informative and interesting to learn. I don't consider myself a very good drawer, and find it even harder to draw organic objects, however I feel that during the 6 weeks I have continued to improve and learn new things.

My regrets from the project are only that it has taken me longer to develop then others. I don't feel I have worked any less, just that I have taken longer to do each task. The first week of the project I got a good start and continued to work at a good pace, however once I moved onto working with the nose and rearranging the cheeks, my progress began to slow.

In the next few weeks I plan to heavily work on the UV-Mapping in my own time, so that I can have a fully textured model. I would also like to get to the stage where I can put hair onto the model.