Crate Demo

We started of creating a regular box, indenting each face, and extruding each face slightly, using the modifier.

 Then extruded the door piece to the back, and created a new box using top view port and brought the new door out to the front.

 From here we split the box and created two doors and shrank them to door size, and split them so they are two separate objects, we then went into UVW editor to start applying some skin, moving the irrelevant parts, and utilizing the main parts which are the faces using the “ select by element UV toggle “

After playing with the material editor, and the UVW editor, we were able to proceed into this, using multiple textures and parent mapping. the parent mapping enabled us to create several different approaches to the texturing.

Shortly after this our tutor showed us a brief demonstration on how to animate 3DS objects, at the bottom of the screen is the timeline, one has to activate " Hierarchy " in the top right, and activate Pivot and click affect pivot only, while having the object you want to animate, highlighted. doing this you can place a centred pivot where you want a joint, deselect, reselect and repeat. 

once this is done, you can activate auto key in the bottom right, and start moving objects and animating them as you would normally.

Task 1

Our first lessons of 3D animation consisted of constructing and skinning items, such as barrels and boxes.

We first attempted to recreate a barrel, we did this by first creating a cylinder shape, then using the side view, and turning it into a editable poly, and editing its vertex's to bend it into shape, or into a more barrel shape. from here we extracted two of the 4-6 segments around the entire barrel, this gave the barrel more shape, from here we had looped each of the edges and gone into the modifiers and used meshsmooth to create a more smooth appearance to the barrel.

We had used pretty much the same methods to create a box, except this time round we had indented each face of the box, and then extruded it in, to create a crate appearance, from here we went to the modifier list and went to "unwrap UVW" which draws all of the lines for the box. if we click on UV editor its possible to edit each section of the box with skins in photoshop. upon open the editor the item may be a little distorted, down to its size, but if you go into mapping and flatmap the object. it will turn it into a more viewable object, from here if you go into the top right and click " tools " and then click on render UV template, Render again, and you can then save your modifican as a JPEG.

From here if you open it up on photoshop and modify skins onto your creations you can then open it back up into 3DS max by " Mapping " the skin onto the object. this is a much more effective way of skinning individual objects in 3DS max.

I had also updated my 3D street view, adding a type of car model, and adding lampposts to the streets. 

Also 3D modelling can also be used by line tool'ing images using Alt+B.

1. Research to gain inspiration for your own design work, considering other artist’s/designer’s work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7SoKwVbtdY

This is a link to a tutorial on creating pre production blueprints, the author of the video has a video series on pre production blueprints, as he previously spent 7 years attempting to construct games, only to keep having to reconstructing them because he felt he didn't need to plan, upon hitting the point that it was imperative to plan for producing games, he decided to create pre production tutorials for other aspiring game designers.

 This work is an image and example of some pre production work, you can see that there has been a mix of ideas placed into this image, and it just goes to show it doesn't matter where you are, you can create ideas from any environment and mix them together, the above image for example was undoubtedly taken in an outside area with palm trees and background items and essentials. 

There are many differences in game engines which make one engine much more compatible for one team than what another game engine would be for the same team, some game engines are much more compatible for building open world games than what others are for platform or action games.

http://www.esenthel.com/?id=compare

the Link above describes other differences between different game engines, as game engines can be more compatible for certain consoles or devices. which is why some developers would much rather use a game engine built for specific purposes.

We also had originally experimented with creating buildings using various tools and techniques using extrude, bevel, inset and various other tools to recreate buildings and shapes to represent small areas. this was part of our experimental phases with learning how to recreate basic buildings in 3DS max.