Final Meeting

Today was our last meeting before our presentation tomorrow.
I wrote the script to be used last night, and today we recorded the vocals, after booking out an MP3 recorder from media services, it was decided that Adam's voice was more "museumy" than mine, so he was used as the voice over artist for the video.

No problems putting the animation into Adobe Premiere and creating the video. However, the vocals did run longer than the video, we sorted this out by looping the video. This was actually a blessing in disguise, as the camera in the video now focus' on each separate part of the pump as Adam discusses it.

Although the members of my group wouldn't have been my personal choice, I feel we worked well together, and all tasks were divided evenly between each of us, this made the module run smoothly! Overall I'm happy with the final video and hope that we receive a good grade for it!

Rough Render of The Boiler Pump

Museum of Power - Arthur Mumford's Boiler Pump

The majority of my time has been spent modelling and writting on our group blog, so my personal blog has taken a back seat over the last few weeks. But, here I am updating it with the latest work!

My model is looking good, and my group and I are currently putting all the pieces of the pump together, ready to export to Adobe Premiere to make into a video.

Below are some screen shots of my side of the pump, along with a brief video.



Here is my side of the pump along with Steven's pistons, both parts of the pump now have textures applied to them:

Museum Of Power - Group Project

I was allocated the tasks of collecting all needed information on the boiler pump, along with creating the small end of the pump where the steam exits.

I started off by making the indented top of the pump complete with the four nuts and bolts.
In order to make the indented top, I had to select the required amount of faces from the editable poly modifier and use extrude to pull them down a small amount. However, I noticed from the reference images that the four corners of the indented top were rounded and not square, to make them rounded I selected the edge modifier from within editable poly, selected the inside edge, and pulled it in slightly. I did this for the remaining three and then added a turbosmooth to make the edges nice and smooth!



I then continued modelling the rest of the pump. Below are a few pictures of the pump so far. Once the modelling is complete, I will add textures to it to make it more realistic.

Week 5, FINISHED.... For Now!

Right, today I made the final tweaks to my image. Although, I didnt get round to making the ear or any animations, I'm very happy at the final result. It no longer looks like Shrek's evil twin, but like an actual human.... almost!

I personally thought this module was a hell of alot of work for the 5 week time frame. However, I have learnt many valuable skills in such a short space of time. I am looking forward to using them again in the future!

Week 5, Final Few Bits!

Lips!! Although Eric didn't show us how to do this, it was pretty simple. It was just a case of pulling out quads and sub-dividing them to create plenty of quads to work with! Here is the final image of the lips, turbo-smoothed.

Week 5 - STILL Ongoing

Right, today I decided it's time to sort out my cocaine-ravaged nose. I added plenty of quads and followed the tutorial religiously! After plenty of messing around, this is the final, un-smoothed nose! I am really happy with it!

Week 5 - Almost There!

I have now followed the tutorials as far as creating the back of the head. My model is now looking more like a head and less like a halloween mask! Although Mr Maslowski decided to skip ahead with this part, I was able to model the back of the head without to much hassle thanks to the kind of template that was formed when using the sphere trick to create a 'mohawk' effect from the forehead to the neck.

Week 5 - Continued

I have now added a 'turbosmooth' and a 'mirror' modifier to the image, this creates the solid mask.

The image below is as far as I am taking the mask phase of my model due to the lack of time available. Ideally, this would be a 12 week task and I could start from scratch with new topology, but as that is not the case this will have to do. Unless I find time towards the very end of the week.

Week 5 - Time To Move On

After speaking to Jo, I have come to the conclusion that a lifelike, handsome model of my face is now a lost cause due to the time constraints and my terrible topology. The work is due in at the end of this week, so I have decided to push on with the next tutorial. I hope to at least have the head and ears done before hand in. I really wanted to have a realistic looking model finished in time for hand in, but thats just not possible now.

After thinking I had cured most of the problems with my model, I then noticed the nose..... not alot to say about it to be honest apart from, oh dear!

I followed the nose tutorial the best I could, but again, thanks to my topology errors, my nose looks a lot like Daniella Westbrook's!

Week 4 - Problems!

Until now, I assumed my reference lines and topology were correct. However, after following the tutorials up to the point of pulling out the quads, I realised they were not correct - far from it infact!

After using splines to trace over the topology, I then converted them to faces by following the online tutorial, and then started pulling out the quads so they were level with the side view reference image. Up to this point I thought all was well, but it wasn't until I started tweaking the mask that I found the gaping holes and pinching effects! I fixed these the best I could by 'target welding' the points wherever possible, or using 'bridge' where I had to connect two quads together. I also had quite a lot of over hanging skin aka duplicate quads. These I simply deleted.
By going into the 'sub object level' and using 'cut', I was able to create new quads which made tweaking easier in places where the quads were large.

Week 3 - Topology

This week was when the real challenges begun. Drawing on the blue reference lines wasn't too difficult. However, thanks to my wonderfully smooth face, it made it difficult breaking the image up into quadrants as my reference lines were few and far between!
This caused my image to have some large quads around the cheek, chin and forehead area. Hopefully this won't affect the modeling of my head. Only time will tell.

Week 2 - Say Cheese!

I have taken photos of my beautiful face now and they are all lined up and ready to be drawn all over! I started by making sure the camera wasn't too low down as this will only create more work for me to do on Photoshop getting the images ready for use.
I was very thorough in making sure the camera was in the right position to start with, this meant there was no lens distortion, and the tweaks I had to make to the images were minimal. All I had to do was tilt the side view slightly to line up my features.

Week 1 - Brief

Today we received the brief for the work that is required to be completed over the next 6 weeks.
After reading through the brief, we are to create a 3d model of our own head and animate it (if we have time). After watching a couple of the video tutorials, I have come to the conclusion that this task is HARD!! Never the less, I shall crack on with the photos and start drawing on my topology next week.