Bouncing Ball

Here's a quick experiment I did with a ball. For this experiment I followed a sequence of drawn images and used them for reference when producing the bouncing ball movie in 3D Studio Max.

Final Animation

Heres my final animation for my invisible architecture project. Hope you like it. Please post comments on what you think, so I can built on it.

Thankyou.

Melvin Scan

Here is a clip I created using Adobe After Effects. It shows the progressive scan from wire frame view of the model to the final textured model.

Meerkat Lip Sync

This is an animation I did based on a short sound clip from the Will Farrell movie 'Anchorman'. I created this animation using a phoneme library which I had built previously for my meerkat model.

Ball and Tail

This is a short experiment I did when I was looking at how a tail interacts when it is attached to an object through it's movement.

Mack Bones

This is a short animation which I created based on the rig for my dog. To create the rig for my dog I used the 3ds max bone system. In this animation I've tried to inherit the real movement for a dog when they walk, sit and beg but in a more comical way. Enjoy.

Melvin 360

Here's a 360° view of my model which I have taken into Adobe After Effects and applied the rings emmiting from the base of the model and the text which appears from the bottom left corner.

Melvin Walk

Above is a short animation I created of my character walking. I plan to produce a short animation using this character. The storyline ideas are still in the process of being thrown about so I haven't decided on which one to go with yet. I'll keep you up to date on the ideas, hopefully I will have a short animation posted soon enough.

Melvin Textures

Here are the texture maps that I used on my model and also some renders which I saved whilst working on the character.

Melvin Progress

Firstly, I worked on the characters head. I started with half a cylinder at the base of the neck, then worked my way up the head. Whilst working on one half of the model I added symmetry to the modifier stack so I could see what the finished head would look like once I had mirrored and welded the two halves together.



Secondly, I started with the same shape as the head, the half a cylinder and used the same methods of extruding and modifying the vertices to fit the concept.


Then I did the hair and glasses. The method I used to create these parts of the character was box modelling. I started off with the basic cube model and extruded and bevelled the squares until I ended up with the parts for my character.


As you can see from the concept, the arms were drawn by the side of the model. But then I thought about it and realised that if I modelled it this way, I would have major problems when it came to the bones and skinning stage. So for the arms I extruded outwards from the original top part of the body I created earlier, which meant I had to visualise where the arms would fall if I raised them up to the 3d character model pose.


For the trousers I used the same method as the head and top part of the body. For the shoes I used the box modelling technique which I used for the hair and glasses.


For the textures of my character I used the UVW unwrap tool to generate a texture map for me to draw on in Phototshop. In my next post you will see a copy of the original UVW map and the modified one which I created.
I wanted to have a play around in Photoshop so that my model had various t-shirt designs.



The bones system in my model is a basic one containing 3 spine bones, a neck bone, a head bone, 2 arms, a wrist bone, 2 legs, an ankle bone and two foot bones. I used the IK Limb modifier for the legs to allow me easier movement when animating the model.


I developed a library of phonemes for my model. This will enable my character to talk and I can then lip sync to the imported voice over and sounds.



Here's the finished character. I set up a look at constraint for his eyes by creating text and a circle, then converting them to editable splines. I then attached them together and converted them to editable mesh. This allowed ammore realistic movement of the eyes and it also allowed me to know which area in the scene my character will be looking at.


Thanks for looking.
Any comments will be greatly appreciated and if you have any questions I will be more than happy to answer them.