Project Overview
Project Overview: My goal for this project was to create an outdoor-type environment to show a few of the techniques that I have learned for modeling, mapping, animation, and particle systems.
What I Did: All terrain Snow particle system All lighting Camera animation All of the outpost building's models and mapping Daylight system What Other People Did: Trees from AEC library standard in 3ds MAX 2009 Rifle by ThorstonFolkers Software Tools: 3ds Max 2009, Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0
Final Video Render Time: Around 56 hours
System Specs: 2.13Ghz Intel Core2 CPU, 1 GB RAM, 256MB ATI Radeon X1300PRO video card
Project Timeline:
Activities and Accomplishments |
|
| WEEK 1 | Research / List of needed web sites |
| WEEK 2 | Concept sketching / Design |
| WEEK 3 | Modeling landscape |
| WEEK 4 | Daylight and snow systems |
| WEEK 5 | Indoor lighting and sky portals |
| WEEK 6 | Camera flight paths |
| WEEK 7 | Animation and rendering |
| WEEK 8 | Generate graphics and video, create project web site |
My thoughts on this project : This project really stretched my knowledge of modeling, mapping, lighting and animation. When I had come up with the idea for this project, I honestly thought I knew what I was doing. "I've done more complex projects than this already... How hard could it be?" Wow. I really had my work cut out for me. Even though I had some shortcomings along the way, I eventually managed to find any information I had no real idea about, and perfect some of the things that I knew a fair amount of.
The first problem I encountered was finding a reasonable way to map the terrain. My original thought was that I would just take a high resolution picture of some grass to make the maps and bumps. I even tried this, and it worked well enough, but it really didn't fit with some of the detailed maps that I had in the rest of my scene. Plus, the maps tile so that there was always this one brown scattered uniformly throughout my scene. I ended up using a plug-in to make the terrain maps. Gugila GroundWiz version 1.500. I think it turned out really well. The snow sticks only to the places on the terrain where real world slopes and elevations would truly allow.
Lighting gave me some troubles as well, however, I did a lot of research and found some nice techniques to make attractive lighting.
I'm really proud of the final product, even though it may not be the greatest work in the world. I got to apply a lot of the techniques I learned in my 3d Design class at Capital Center, and I had a lot of fun with it.