my red nose

What channel will I be advertising?.
I decided after looking at my channels, and thinking of what I could do for them, that I wanted to choose a comedy channel. I decided to make one for an imaginary channel called “COM” comedy channel for older viewers.

My channel – This channel only opens after 7 o clock, this is after the watershed. Which is a term used to describe a time in television schedules which divides the period when it is permissible to show television programmes which have 'adult content' such as bad language, nudity etc. I wanted this to be, so that my ident has less restrictions and can not easily offend younger people.


For my comedy channel, I wanted to create a main character which represents my channel in each ident. I decided to use a red nose, as for comic relief (represents comedy) they use the red nose to symbolise, fun, laughter, and happiness.


I found an image of the new red nose and thought i would try and reproduce it.

Firstly I created a cylinder for the base of the body. After making it an editable poly I then selected the colour I wanted, and played with effects to try and creating a smooth plastic effect.

I did this by focusing on the Blinn shader, as this i the best for plastic. With Blinn I could add a specular colour and add glossiness.
Once I created the Main ball for the nose, I didn’t spend too much time trying to make it look plastic, as I will firstly get all my main shapes before I do the finishing touches.
Secondly my red nose needs eyes and a nose. I made both eyes and a nose by creating other cylinders. Once I made them into editable polygons I stretched them by editing the vertices and stretching them to create longer rounded more rectangular shapes for the eyes and nose. I made the nose the same shape as the eyes, and the same colour as the main ball. The two eyes made white using the material editor and also I made brighter, by using Blinn shader, and increasing the glossiness to 70 and the specular to 70. This made them very shiny. I then inserted them into the head, using all of the view ports.

Time configuration

Before I did any animating, I had to increase my frames from 100 . There is a small button which looks like a window icon thing at the lower right beside the timeline. Click it and you get the editable timeline prefs.This needed to be changed as the timeline was only set to 100. I set mine from 100 to 700.

Skin and Bones

at first I played aorudn this and thoought this was a great was to move my charecter, however I realsied my red nose did not have any limbs, he was just a sphere, so this wouldnt really be the perfect animation to use bones with. I got to this by going to Systems then bones, then I created bones and used the animation - IK solvers - HI SOLVER/IK limb solver to make it move.

Editing sound

For each of my idents, I would have my soundtrack throughout it. There would only be one soundtrack, so I would need to combine all sounds together if there would be more than one. For each of my idents there was more than one sound so I needed to use an Audio editing program. I used Cool Edit Pro.

I inserted all the tracks I wanted to use to the left hand side, and then dragged them on to the position I wanted them on the screen.
I then tried uploading the file to the cure modifier, however this wouldn’t work, an error appeared. I looked into it and and realized that it would only accept Wav files.
Straight away I looked into a program which converts from MPS to WAV. I found this great website online for free which converts it for you, and when I entered it in, it worked perfectly.
However, Cool Edit Pro does convert it , if you go into SAVE AS and select a WAV instead of MP3.
Another useful tool that I was taught how to use is the ‘Curve Editor’. This can be used to change many different aspects of how the animation performs and looks. The different curves represents different parts of the how the object reacts and changing these curves changes the animation. The ‘Curve Editor’ can be used to create the whole animation
The side panel, allows but this can be quite complex. Sound is the second option down; if you click on the plus symbol next to sound it allows you to add the sound.
This is what it looks like when the sound is embedded into your timeline.


The ‘Dope Sheet’ is tool that can be used to edit the animation and it can be used in conjunction with the ‘Curve Editor’. The ‘Dope Sheet’ is useful for adding sound and making sure that all of the different elements to the animation align with one another.Another useful aspect of 3Ds Max that I could use is the ‘Motion Panel’. This is similar to the ‘Curve Editor’ and ‘Dope Sheet’ and can be used to affect the way the animation behaves and plays. This panel is located at the menu at the right hand of the screen and is represented by a picture of a moving wheel.Schematic view is a tool that can be used to see the hierarchical view of all of the elements that make up the animation. This can be used to select specific parts of the 3D object that might be obscured by something else.


Creating my C and M for each Ident.

On the main toolbar on the top I selected 'Create'

I then clicked 'Shapes' and then on the button 'Text'

When you do this, menu will appear under 'Text' button.
Search for the 'Parameters' and delete text that says 'MAX Text'. Now add your own text, in this case this is '3D TEXT'. Now click in the 'Front view' viewport, the 2D text shape will appear in the viewport.

What we want to do now is to make this 2D text shape into 3D text shape. We do this with the extrusion. First select the 2D text shape, then go to 'Modify' and click onto menu 'Modifier list'. Long menu will appear, now search for the 'Extrude' and click it. What you did right now, is that 2D shape is become a 3D shape already, however the text is like a thin plate. It does not have any depth so it does not look like 3D text

I did a C and M individually as I wanted them to move at different times.



Click on the 'Segments' and change value from 0 to 10. Now set 'Amount' parameter to 100. As you can see 3D text now appears.


Audience.
To make the audience move as if they are applauding and fidgeting, I simply clicked on the auto set key until it was red and then moved each member of the audience up or down, in a random order, at different frames
I also made them move left and right on different frames after my red nose screamed, to give the frightened shivering affect


Moving my red noses mouth - Morphing

I wanted to morph, the red noses smile, so that it changed from the smile to a circle, as if he was singing. I thought this was going to be simple however, when I tried edited my original smile I realized that there were too many vertices and it would be difficult to morph as when morphing the same amount of vertices is needed.

I decided to move his mouth manually. I did this by using the soft selection tool,


When I selected auto key at the bottom of the timeline this means that what I am doing on the frames below is recorded. I went up the frames, to 20 as this is where I wanted him to begin to sing. In the properties I selected soft selection. I then selected his mouth and moved the bottom lip downwards, as if his mouth was open. Going up the timeline I did this, to try and make it look like he was opening his mouth.

After doing this I realised that it looked very messy, so I decided to try to morph it.

Morphing
Morphing is commonly used for lip sync and facial expression on a 3D character, but can be used to change the shape of any 3D model. There are 100 channels available for morph targets and materials. Channel percentages can be mixed, and the result of the mix can be used to create a new target.
On a mesh object, vertex count on the base object and targets must be the same.
I selected Modify, and in the modifier list found Mopher.
I then selected the image that I wanted to morph, and then selected the empty box above.
When the timeline below is red this means that Auto key is on. This means the actions are being recorded. Once you have clicked on the empty box and selected the image you want your object to morph to, I then selected a point on my timeline where I wanted the morph to happen. Besides the empty box(which should no longer be empty) there is 0.0 this is showing how much percent you want the morph to work. By selecting 100% the shape will transform exactly to the shape selected in the @empty@ box. I found that this was an easier way to change the shape of the mouth.



Making my curtains


Firstly I looked at many google images of theatre curtains to give me an idea of what ?I wanted :


My plain curtains were made by using a drawing a squiggly line, which moved in and out, and extruding it. I then selected a dark red colour, and that is how I came up with this affect. For the pole across the top and small mini curtain, I created a long tube, made it Red and put it at the width of the curtain, the mini curtain is just a smaller version on the large curtain, but I extruded it less.

To make the curtain move.

I firstly needed to create the objects that the curtain will attach to. I made 11 individual small cubes. They were hidden behind the curtain so it didn't matter what they looked like. I then converted each one to an Editable Mesh.(name each one, I suggest something like Hanger1, hanger2, etc. It is important to be able to tell them apart) I then added all of the hanger objects to a Deforming Mesh Collection. If I have two curtains on the window I make one for the left and one for the right.
I created the curtains by making a plane. Make twice as many segments as I had hangers minus 2 (for me 11x2=22-2=20 segments) and no less then 8 segments height wise. If you have too many segments in height the curtain swings wildly as it opens.

I placed the curtain close to the hangers but do not intersect the hangers or you will get an error. Line up the hangers and the vertices.

I created the animation for the hangers in 3DS max( I gathered on the right or on the left.) When I had finished I put timeline back to start so curtain hangers are at their widest position.


Then I added the reactor cloth modifier to the curtain, and put the curtain in a Reactor Cloth Collection.

The I Assigned the curtain vertices to the hangers.
Highlight the curtain
Select Modify
Expand the reactor cloth modifier
Select Vertices
Move down and open Constraints
Select “Attach to DefMesh”
In the window a little blue man appears and the text “Attach to DefMesh”
Highlight the line with the little blue man.
When you do a new subheading above Constraints will open. Select the box labeled “None”.
Click on the first hanger. Its name will replace the word “None”.
Now click the vertice that you want to attach to this hanger.
Repeat steps f – k for each hanger you have. I have 11 instances of “Attach to DefMesh” in the window.

I then clicked the little Hammer symbol in upper right corner., then Utilities, Reactor, Preview in window.

This worked for me. HoweverI have played around with the properties of the Curtain to get it the way I wanted it.

The curtain caused many problems for me. As the settings were hard. I wanted the curtain to be heavy yet move smoothly and this took a long time to achieve this affect. Once I finally got the affect I wanted I then realized that I had to create another one exactly the same.

At first I tried copying it , using the clone, however this didn’t work and error messages appeared saying that there were too many instances. There was no way of working around this problem, so I had to do the whole thing again. Because of this I put the Idea of the moving curtain on hold as this was very time consuming, and probably not even that good.

If I had more time, I would have done another curtain for the other side. So For now I decided to scrap this Idea as it was too complicated, and simple have the plain curtains in the background.




















My Idents





















Ident 1 – Singing Ident


After building my template of the theatre, and having made my red nose already. It was time to animate. For the first animation, I wanted my red nose to sing, I found a classic theater song “Phantom of the opera, and tried syncing his mouth with the song. I edited the song, so that it cut straight to the chorus. I imported the sound into the graph curve, just as it says below and, before I did this I put all the sound affects I wanted into cool Edit pro and made one whole track from it. (wav) To find out in more detail how I created my soundtracks, for more information about how I created the soundtrack go to page 5

This is the collection of sounds I used to create my sound track:
Throughout the whole soundtrack is an opera song that I found of the internet, “the phantom of the opera” I had to edit this quite a lot however, as it was the whole song, and I simply wanted the chorus. I repeated the chorus twice.
the second sound piece I included was the crowd cheering at the beginning. This only lasted a few seconds, but was for as he started to sing.
my third sound, is my red nose man screaming as he sees the bomb coming above him.
The fourth sound affect is the bomb falling on him.
Last of all the final sound piece is the crowd applauding and laughing at the end,
Once everything was in the correct position I save the file as a WAV file and inserted it into 3D MAX. For more information about how I created the soundtrack go to page 5
My original plan was when the red nose was singing at the end of the song, someone to throw a pie at his face; however I changed this, to a bomb falling on him. I incorporated a bang noise from the bomb, and then the crowd laughing and cheering into the soundtrack.
I made the bomb by creating a sphere and a tube and sticking the tube on top of the sphere. Once the song had ended and where the bang on the soundtrack was I lined it up using the graph curve and lowered the bomb to squash the red nose.
I wanted the bomb to be in the centre of the screen, so that at the very end I can add my C and M around the bomb, to make it read COM, which is my comedy channel title.

Creating my text logo at the end of the Ident. At the very end of the Ident I wanted the letters C and M to appear at either side of the Bomb, so altogether it looked like the word “COM” as if the bomb was a “O” I described how I did this above

Making my red nose sing

Above I explained how I used the Morpher to make my red noses mouth move. For this Ident there was a lot of mouth moving as he was singing throughout it.
The main problem with the morphed mouth is that you needed to try and lip sync it. This was probably the most time consuming thing of this Ident. As you can see to the left, if I set Auto key on and click on any frame, if I select 100, on the column on the left then the morphed object will be 100 percent of the smiling mouth, where as if I select 0 , then this wont be the big smiling mouth, but the little normal mouth.



It took quite a while to lip sync this, as I meant I had to keep scanning over the timeline to listen to were the music played and where he began to sing. The louder he got and the higher pitched my red nose got I made sure it was set to 100, when he paused for breathers, and was in silence it was at o.

Lighting.

I really liked the lighting that was already used on my scene, as by shining other lights on my theatre stage this would ruin the shading I have from the curtains.

All lighting above just seemed to ruin the colours, like this example to the left.
I decided to add lighting, yet only at the beginning when the red nose came on to the stage through the curtains.

I used Mr Sky Portal lighting. The mr (mental ray) Sky Portal object provides an efficient method of “gathering” existing sky lighting in interior scenes without requiring high final gather or global illumination settings that would result in excessively long render times. In effect, a portal acts as an area light that derives its brightness and coloring from the environment. This gave it a good spotlight affect, as if a light appeared when he walked through the curtain,

Camera

I used a Free Camera, to show the bomb landing zoomed in.
It also showed the C and M clearer then in my perspective view.

Audience.
To make the audience move as if they are applauding my red nose singer, I simply clicked on the auto set key until it was red and then moved each member of the audience up or down, in a random order, at different frames







Ident 2 – Nervous Explosion


The actual explosion




To make the explosion, I created a sphere and added the Parray modifier on it.

Select the PArray and go to the modify panel. PArray is an object based emitter which means the particle will be emitted from the objects you choose. In the basic parameters rollout, under the object based emitter section click pick object and click the red nose in the view port.

This was the particle array modifier. I then edited the preferences such as how fast I wanted it to happen, and what time did I want it to begin and end.


Making my red nose talk

Above, I explained how I used the Morpher to make my red noses mouth move .
For this Ident , there wasn’t much moving of the mouth.

By looking at the soundtrack waveform below you can see where I would morph my red nose, all the larger waveforms, are all sounds from the red nose, they are all louder.
At each of these in the animation, I made sure that just before the sound, the morpher mouth was set to 0, and then as they sound is heard that it was set to 100. As soon as the sound from him can not be heard anymore that frame is set to 0 morph.



Soundtrack for explosion



For the Ident number 2, where he explodes, after being nervous and angry as no one is listening to him I am using several sounds affects.
People talking, throughout most of the sound track people will be talking, a crowd of people, as in the audience.
The small bits in the wave above which get bigger, are sound affects I added, of a man, clearing his throat and saying hello?
Just before the break of silence, the large wave form, is of a man (my red nose) screaming for the audience to shut up.
There is then a silence, and after the silence the largest waveform is the explosion.

Audience.
To make the audience move as if they are fidgeting, I simply clicked on the auto set key until it was red and then moved each member of the audience up or down, in a random order, at different frames
I made it so that after my red nose screamed to tell them to shut up, they all stopped and didn’t move.

Creating my text logo at the end of the Ident.
At the very end of the Ident I wanted the letters C and M to appear at either side of the explosion just like the bomb in Ident 1, so altogether it looked like the word “COM” as if the exp[losion was a “O” I described how I did this on page 7

Cameras
I played around with cameras in different position but I didn’t think any of them looked good. Because all my important things happen straight ahead, even if I used a camera to zoom it, it didn’t give the right affect I wanted and just seemed to miss out and cut out important parts of the animation when doing so.


Lighting
Just like the last Ident I really liked the lighting that was already used on my scene, Yet I thought Id add the Free light again, to make it look like a spot light on the red nose has he emerged.







Ident 3


Cameras

I spent a long time fiddling around with the cameras, trying to see if there was a better angle somewhere else.

However I wasn’t pleased with what my Ident looked like from different angles.
So for now I have left it at my perspective view, as this showed everything exactly how I wanted it too.


Lighting

I wanted to change the lighting so that it looked different from the other Idents.
As you can see form the screen dump above, it shaded the floor mainly.

Audience.

For this Ident my audiences are all going to leave the room, as the comedian is so bad, for this I had to individually click on each red nose and make it move to the left or right side of the theatre, this just involved using the auto key and dragging them to the side. I also rotated them, as if they were turning around.
This was very time consuming to get this affect.

Creating my text logo at the end of the Ident.
At the very end of the Ident I wanted the letters C and M to appear at either side of the Bomb, so altogether it looked like the word “COM” as if the bomb was a “O” I described how I did this on page 7. Fr this Ident I also wrote another piece of text, “ there will be none of this”

Making my curtains

Please take a look at Page 11 where it explains how I made my curtains.

Making my red nose talk

On page 12 I explained how I used the Morpher to make my red noses mouth move. For this Ident there was a lot of mouth moving as he was telling a joke. I used the soundtrack and a lot of previewing, and stopping to lip sync to where the voice is.
As you can see from the above screen dump, there was a lot of mouth moving for this script. This was solely mouth movement as this was the timeline once I ahd selected the mouth morph.

Joke soundtrack

This was the joke soundtrack. I found this joke by searching the internet. I wanted a WAV of a bad joke, so searched for “bad joke” however, when doing this I came across a joke which wasn’t meant to be bad, which was the one I settled with. It was a guy trying to be funny, when he really wasn’t so I thought this would be perfect for my red nose. I didn’t have to edit this alot as all I wanted was the first part of it.

above are all my soundtracks put together, once I had finished adding the sounds I wanted I then saved it as a WAV file.




Personal Evaluation.

Looking at my work now, I am pleased that I have learnt more this term. I felt like I enjoyed finding out new things and researching onto tutorials to find out ways to get certain effects or movements. However If I would have had more time I would have like to have been more creative, and used more of the effects such as the skin and bones, and even have stretched to a creating a human.

The main problems I experience with 3DMax were all to do with the Auto key, and If i had the auto key down whilst I was moving things around it would record it.

What I learnt most from this project was probably the morpher tool, and if I had a lot more time. I also had problems with using cameras, and foudn that the lighting was always best how it was, and adding more lighting took away good parts of my animation. This shows that 3Dmax's defauly lighting was very good.



References :

This is where I go Phantom of the opera soundtrack.
http://www.moviesoundteracks.com/



This is where I got my cartoon sound affects from.
http://www.a1freesoundeffects.com/cartoon.html
http://simplythebest.net/sounds/WAV/cartoon_wavs.html
http://www.ilovewavs.com/Effects/Cartoons/Cartoons.htm

Research board

Here, I looked into what comedy means to people. My main image in each of the indents is going to be the red nose, from comic relief. I chose this as it represents comedy. I found an image of a boy wearing one and smiling. I thought this represented comedy and how it makes us feel, happy. I also found some small images such as the clown, which we think of as comedy, and also people wearing the red nose. The nose is going to be the main part of my project, so I am going to focus on this the most.
s

mood board 3

idea 3.

• the red nose walking down street.


• He sees another nose walkign down the street.


• another red nose comes along quietly


• smashes a pie in his face.

Mood Board 2

My second Idea

• Cocky Red Nose


• walks out on to dancefloor


• music changes and he starts dancing, mad.

Mood Board

This was my first Idea.

• Shy Red Nose


• Big red curtains and a microphone.


• big red nose walks on to the stage very timid.


• cant speak is very shy.


• Hes so nervous and shy that he explodes.
  
  

Creating my calandar month July

How to create the sea

Firstly it needs to be converted into a editable object. This is done by right clicking on it, clicking convert to and choosing editable poly. I inserted a box onto the scene covering a small part of the plain. I edited it so that it covered a small piece of the plain, at a diagonal angle. I then imported a textured image of water, into Max and by selecting 'M' the material editor, I converted the box into the water texture. Now i wanted to make my sea more realistic, to do this I needed to make waves.
I right clicked on the box and converted it to an editable poly. In the properties I scrolled down and used the tool ''quick slice' this enabled me to slice up the box so I could edit it however I wanted. I sliced it up into roughly 12 odd random pieces. With these 12 pieces I used the Vertex selection and played around with the height of the sea making it look wavey.

To create the sand
I created a plain box and added a Map to the box. I wanted the box to be sand, I selected M Material Editor, to bring up the material editor and clicked on Maps. This brought up options of pre set maps I could use, I clicked on bit-map and selected a bitmap I had earlier saved which was the texture of sand.

To create the sun

I created a small Sphere, in the Material Editor (M) I selected a map of a sun affect. I dragged this onto the sphere. This gave me the basics to my sun.I then clicked on the sun and clicked on the modifier list to the right of the screen. In the large list, I selected hair and Fur. Once I clicked on hair and fur it added hair to the object selected.

The Hair And Fur modifier is the heart of the Hair And Fur feature. You apply it to any object that you want to grow hair from: either a mesh object or a spline object. If object is a mesh, the hair grows from the entire surface unless you make a sub-object selection. If the object is a spline, hair grows between the splines. There are lots of properties that appear for the hair and fur, there are also more settings such as hair root and tip colour. After playing around with these this is what I came up with

You can add as many hairs as you wanted by changing the hair percentage.

Palm Tree

I wanted to create a Palm tree as i thought this was very 'summery'. I looked at a few pictures of palm trees to get more of an idea of the trunk of the tree.

I created the trunk by creating a small square box, and i used the vertex to deform it slightly. I added the mesh smooth to give it a different affect:

The MeshSmooth modifier smoothes geometry in your scene by means of several different methods

I then used the rotate button and scale button to make each small cylinder slightly different. I stacked them on each other at different angles to give the impression of a slanted tree.

To create the branches on the trees I create one small rectangular box. I then used the soft selection tool on the vertex of the box to deform the shape. I created 7 of these and positioned them around the balls on the tree. I then edited each individual tree branch using the scale and rotate tools.

The Soft Selection controls allow you to partially select sub-objects in the vicinity of an explicit selection. This causes the explicit selection to behave as if surrounded by a "magnetic field.

Using The Bump Affect

I have now got the correct shapes for the tree base, this wasnt however the right texture that i wanted. I found a good tree texture of bark and put it as a bitmap image. This however was still not really realistic, so I decided to use bump

You can select a bitmap file or procedural map to use for bump mapping. Bump mapping makes an object appear to have a bumpy or irregular surface. When you render an object with a bump-mapped material, lighter (whiter) areas of the map appear to be raised, and darker (blacker) areas appear to be low. Above, you can change the settings once ticked to add or decrease the amount of the affect. For example, diffuse colour isticked and this is set to 67, I decreased this from 100 as further down I increased bump from 100 to 200. Increasing this meant that the bump affect was improved.

To make the balls on the tree I made three simple spheres and decided to use the 'Bump' setting which is in the map properties.

I selected 'Dent' from the map browser as my bump map image, and chose two brown colours. This gave them a much better affect, as it wasnt just oneplain colour.

Lighting is very important for the image. I spent many hours trying to decide where the lighting should go. I wanted it to be as if the sun is shining and a shadow is beign created from the tree. This was my final image.

Shaders

If your changing the the colour or a material for a shape you must use the material editor. You can get this by pressing 'm' or clicking on material on which is in the 'rendering; menu toolbar. The material box will appear which looks like this: Here you can see 6 spheres, you can apply your own shaders and materials. Below this there are a list of many different types of shaders, i will go through the most used ones with you

I am going to create a variety of shapes so you can see the different affects on different shapes. This will allow you to compare the different affects to each other

The anisotropic shader works perfect for metal materials, because it changes the shape of the specular from round to elongated. Here is my shapes, using the anisotropic shader:

Blinn - This is the standard Max default - This is a basic shader which can be used for most materials, it has a no anisotropy. Metal - This was in use until the Anisotropic shader was introduced, it is more simple in the way it works, there is a dimple in the specular graph, which means that the shader is useful for dull metal materials such as brushed stainless steel. Orin-Nayer-Blinn
This is much softer in tone than Blinn and produces a very soft feel to the material. It is ideal for organic materials such as skin, velvet, as it slightly absorbs light.


If you really want to get a good texture, you are best using an imported Map from your computer. These always give unique affects that you just cant get from the simple shaders.