Evaluation

Having completed this module I am confident that I can use all the basic features and also some complex ones. I was apprehensive in the first half of the semester that I would not be able to model everything on my storyboard. Although I did not do every scene I had originally planned, I know that the ones I have done have sufficiently covered all the techniques that were shown in the tutorials.

My favorite model was the hotel as I feel this had the most likeness to the actual hotel.

In the second half of the semester I came across some problems with materials and rendering. In one of my scenes with the plane chase parts of the plane rendered with a different material, even after adding the correct one. I believe this to be some sort of glitch with the program and I was unable to resolve it. Another problem I had was with the daylight systems. The daylight system I created for the tutorial worked fine but when trying to add one to my hotel scene it produced many errors when rendering. Unfortunately this would have been the best type of light to show off the glass and other building materials. Because of this problem I had to merge the hotel into a new document to fix the errors, I was then unable to change any of the suggestions from my tutor. One of which was make the ground around the hotel more realistic.

Other improvements I would have made had I had more time would have been to create all the models myself. I was not able to complete my car so sourced a free model from the internet. I would have liked to have improved the sound tracks and would of had more sound effects to enhance the action shots.

Creating the dust, and smoke using particle systems was very interesting to me and I liked being able to adjust the settings to get the exact render I wanted. Overall this module has been very enjoyable and I will look forward to further improving my 3D animation skills.

Final Trailer

This is my final trailer. I am happy with the end result the sound files were sourced for free on the internet.

First Scene

To create this scene I made the environment and cut out of a person. I borrowed the jeep from http://www.3dm3.com/modelsbank/model429.htm. Then created a PRray in particle system for the dust, I followed the tutorial below for this,
http://www.escalight.com/tutorials/3dsmax-tutorials/desert-chase-part1.html

Smoke, sparks and wind and an explosion

http://www.republicofcode.com/tutorials/3ds/cigarette/

http://www.3dm3.com/tutorials/explore2/

With the help from the above tutorials I have made the basis of my explosion for the hotel and I have created some realistic sparks and smoke for my plane.

To create the smoke I made a superspray and used the basic parameters in the cigarette tutorial alto ugh I made my particles much bigger. I then made a very strong wind so that the smoke would give the illusion of the plane moving fast and binded the smoke and wind together. To finish the smoke I made a material using a gradient on the opacity and setting it to 5 and making the diffused colour as white.

For the sparks I used the help from the explosion tutorial and used the parameters for the superspray only. I then assigned the wind to it like the smoke.

This is the lens effect setup which I will be using on my explosion.