Tie Fighter - More Texturing

I have made the changes to my tie fighter that I wanted to in the last blog for texturing this model and am happy with the final result. I used a reference image to enable me to achieve the correct colour of the ship. I could not however get the texture on the wings to work, I added in a new material and chose the file I wished to import yet it had no effect on the model at all, I believe this could be down to me not fully understanding how to use files as textures. Despite this inconvenience I still feel as if the texture looks appropriate on my model.

 

In-Class Exercise 9

This week I was messing around with motion paths, I used the bezier curve tool to create the motion path itself, then selecting the ship and then the motion path I went into Constrain > Motion Paths > Attach to Motion Path. This method is going to be crucial in my animation as I can create a path for my ships to follow and editing the front axis to the Z axis I can make the ship always face in the direction of the path. Also using the graph editor I was able to edit the speed that my ship would move at, this will also be crucial as it will enable me to change the speed of the ships in flight and to have the star destroyer fly slower than the fighter and shuttle.

Tie Fighter - Texturing

I have completed the texture for my tie fighter, the only tools I used for this was the assign new material tool to add new materials onto my fighter. The cockpit was done the same as my shuttle by using a Phong E material and adjusting the specular shading and reflectivity of the faces to create a nice shine. The wing panels were made using the Lambert material, I chose this as it has a slight amount of reflectivity to them but nowhere near as much as the Phong E used for the cockpit. The reactor and engines glow was achieved by assigning a  new Lambert material and going into the materials special effects tab and increasing the glow intensity to get the desired look.

Overall I am very happy with the outcome of this for its simplicity, I feel like it is very close to what it should look like. One thing I could perhaps improve is adding in some textures onto the main body and the detail on the structural pylons, however I do not think that this would be necessary at this time. Other things I would like to change is the overall colour of the fighter to a more blueish grey and adding in another texture to the wing panels to add a grill like effect to them.

In-Class Exercise 8 - Part 2

This part of the exercise involved animating a ball falling and bouncing a couple of times across the screen. In order to create this I first made the ball shape and positioned it in an appropriate place, from here I used the set key tool to create the first keyframe of the animation. The rest of the animation was simply selecting the next scene and moving the ball into a new position and then setting a new keyframe. I felt as if I could have done a better job in this task as I did not quite understand how to use keyframe animation properly, from what I understand I only needed to create a few keyframes and the computer would automatically fill in the missing frames. However when I tried this the frames in-between the keyframes did not look how I wanted them to, this was probably due to me not setting the correct keyframes. I plan to revisit this exercise after finishing my final animation and hopefully figure out what went wrong. In order to get round this problem for the task I just set more keyframes than was necessary.

In-Class Exercise 8 - Part 1

This was the first exercise in animation, it was my task to create a set of 2 objects and learn how to use handles to animate the shapes a created. Handles seem to be a very useful way of animating as they allow you to animate more complex arrangements of shapes, they work by using a basic shape, in my case a 2D circle, to act as a parent for the objects you wish to animate. Through this manipulating the parent object via rotation, scaling or movement will apply that effect to all the child objects. In my scene this enabled me to rotate the 2 objects by simply rotating the 2D circle, I can see this being very useful as it will enable me to have greater control over the directions my ships are facing whilst they are moving hopefully leading to a smoother animation thus improving its quality.

In-Class Exercise 7

For this session my task was to create a basic skydome. I started by creating a sphere primitive and deleted the bottom faces creating a dome shape, then using the reverse tool to reverse the faces so that the side that would be rendered is on the inside. The next step was to add a new material, a surface shader, to add the .jpg file to. A surface shader was chosen as this type of material does not interact with any lighting affects at all, this is something new that I learnt and I am certain it will come in handy when creating the background for my animation.

Imperial Shuttle - Texturing

For my shuttle I looked up a reference image that I could use to base my texture on, the first thing that I noticed was that the shuttle was very bland like most imperial ships and would probably not require complex texturing due to the 3D details that I added onto the wings. I started by taking the whole shuttle and editing the parameters of the default Lambert material in order to make the whole ship a lighter colour to better resemble my reference image.

Next I started work on the cockpit, I selected the 3 faces that made up my cockpit and added a new Phong E material as this came with specular shading options that I could use to reflect light off the cockpit.

I then moved on to the engines, for this I created a new plane primitive and inserted it into the engine bay and added a new lambert material to it. In the lamberts settings I changed the colour to match the shuttles engine colour in the films and changed the glow intensity in order to give off a nice engine glow.

The last part of my texturing involved darkening certain parts of the wings and front of the body, this was done in the same way as the cockpit, by selecting the required faces and editing the lamberts colour to one darker than the rest of the ship.

After I had done all of this I felt like the texture was good enough to move onto my other models, I am happy with the way it turned out as it looks very similar to my reference image however there are a few minor details that I could add, such as darkening some parts of the wings and the cannon housings.