Material Editor

Lesson 3, and i'm slowly loosing the plot. I just can't get my head around the program, i really thought i would pick it up really easy. Any way, learnt material editor, this is very powerful, and if you know how to use it properly you can get some fantastic results.

Here are my attempts;


Above is my name printed on to the building, i used the same material as the building, a concretey material.


This shot shows the interier that is a wooden floor.


Finally an overview of the whole building. Background was a image i got from the material library and the floor was a sand gradient.

A lot more practise needed me thinks.

To finish, here is a great graphic designer i found, sadly the captions are in a different language but i love his/her work.

3D Studio Max Progress..

Made my way to Uni today to use the dreaded PC's. First misstake, using the wrong computer room that didn't have 3D SMax, but then finding some that do with dual screens. Well i just re-did the first lecture material, so started off with making a base for my apartment. Then extruding the walls. Also using the slice tool to create a door way;



Then i went on to slice some windows and cut them out. Once getting the segment heights correct, i could ensure the windows were the same height all the way round the building;


Then i went on to use the second week tutorial to make four corners to the floor and extrude 4 legs from them to make a elevated apartment. Also i added in some simple stairs;


Finally came to making a spiral stair case to the top floor balcony;


Troubles that were had is knowing the sizes of stuff. For example once the apartment was elevated and then coming round to putting the spiral staircase in, i didn't know how high to make it. I wanted it to stretch from the bottom floor to the top floor, but i wasn't sure on this exact height. I think a lot more playing with this program would be helpful, because i don't seem to be getting the hang of it that well.

Type Kit

Ever wanted your most favourite font on your webpage but don't want to use an image ? Ever wanted to view your most favourite font on your webpage from different workstations without using an image ?

Corny i know, well been reading about fonts and typography in the new .net magazine and thought i'd have a try with one of the suggestions. It basically has hundreds and hundreds of fonts on their server and you basically link your site css to that server's fonts.

So no more using image's, just a tiny bit of javascript linking to your account and then add the relevant css to the header/body of text. Then it doesn't matter what machine you use, you will see the font you want.

Check out @fontface or type-kit.

P.S. For those of you who arn't aware of the font, its the title on this blog.

3D Studio Max

Now have started the new module, Virtual Environments. Last week we were taught the basics and made a house/room foundation and then extruded walls from the foundation and cut windows/doors into the walls. I though i would get on very well with 3ds as i have used it before many moons ago. Saying this i didn't pick it up the best. I'm OK following tutorials but when comes to wanting to do something myself, i don't know the best way about it, but i suppose practice makes perfect.

Our second lesson yesterday taught us how to make a walkway, and the use of the symmetry modifier, which is very useful and cuts time tenfold. Also made some snazzy spiral staircases using the array tool. Which is basically a bit of math making a cool feature.


This is what i managed to get for my walkway, i think it looks good and i seeing as i only actually made 1/8 and then used symmetry for the rest.


Above is the render of my walkway.


We also learnt about cloneing an object and then using the 'morpher' modifier to make an object higher or lower. Once i did this i 'bridged' the gap between the two to link them together.


A render of the above.


Finally using an array to make two spiral staircases to link to my walk way.


Final render of this weeks work.

Doing these tutorials i am gradually getting used to the program and i will start doing drawings of my lair, but making sure its not too complex that i won't be able to make it.

Also need to look out on getting 3DS on the mac, would be life so much easier.

Final Film - Moving Image

Well i thought i better wrap up the moving image module before i start blogging about 3DS.

The moving image module went very well to be honest. Better than i expected because you didn't have to worry about anything else but what your role was. And nor did anyone have to worry about your role. I think this works very well and is obviously why they use this structure in industry. I can't say it was very exciting, but the filming days were good and its a good sense of suspense to see the final product.

Above is the final edit by Chris Williams (Lighting), i think has done very well seeing as we had to salvage a lot of the first days filming scenes. It does flow together and i think the use of my sound effects as the crowd work well, although a little too powerful. I also think the background music i found worked well. I found a couple different variations and the one chosen integrates the two scenes seamlessly.

I think we all stuck to our roles correctly and if anyone did need help, there was help at hand. This is why our project worked out. There were a couple of things that could be improved such as taking more multiple shots, just so that when capturing, we had shots to fall back on, even though they felt ok on the day.

Finally the most impressive thing of the task was the location, i don't think we could have had a better location than the cellar, so that was cool.

.Net Literature & Progress

I took the plunge and purchased .net magazine, although expensive it does seem a good read, rather than browsing through hundreds of blogs/websites online its easy reading. May subscribe if i'm feeling rich this month.

Also tried to do a bit of work on my flash game by adding a top scores table at the end, got pretty much all of it done. I added a MYSQL table for the flash game to talk to and store the scores. I was all set and ready to go in flash and i get ONE error, the ONE error i have spent TIME trying to fix to no avail, so i royally give up. Might give another try soon but a fail, at its best.

Also just started on the last module with Andy doing our 'lair'. Can't say i'm a big fan of super hero's and that shiz, but i'm going to have to show some interest to get the work done. Although i like the animation/3DS work i'm going to struggle with this i feel as i have a mac i'm working on now, and i canny run 3DS on it unless i boot in windows, blah, blah, long winded if you ask me. So i will be making several trips to uni to work on the god awful PC's :O