Finally, something going to plan!

Well I managed to get a version of max 9, so I am back on track. I am having a little problem though. Something very weird keeps happening with max with windows turning invisible. I think it may be a problem with my graphics card or something.

But anyway, the reason for this post, I've made a barrel and also had a little play around with some volume lighting and some smokey scenes.

This is a close up of the barrel.

Here is a little scene with barrels with normal lighting.

Then here is the same scene but with volumetric lights turned on with the noise modifier thing in there to make it look a little smokey.

I didn't like how crisp that foreground shadow is behind the first barrel, but I am unsure of how to fix this at the moment. So I will leave it until Friday.

Next up, ammunition, driftwood and gunpowder sacks!

Good site

Just found this site while doing some research. It contains a lot of useful information and many photos of the rooms inside HMS Victory. http://www.daliatrevino.com/Nelson&TheRoyalNavy.htm

Problems with version compatability

I have discovered that if I work on anything in the room we have on a friday on max 9, then I am unable to open this file at home on max 8. Even if the file is originally created in max8, then edited in the newer version.
I'm not sure if it is just a case of me missing something that would make this work with my version, so does anyone know a solution to this problem?

In the meantime, I think I will just, ahem, cough, 'aquire' max version 9. With money, of course. ;)

Boning and skinning

After making a simple body, boning and then skinning it, I have started to have a go at some simple animation. I have realised that the animation takes a lot more work to get some realistic movements than I had first thought. It also takes a lot of tweaking with the envelopes to get the body to move properly and not crease on the joints. A little more work and I might post some test animations.

Progress

After a seriously long and heavy night of working I have managed to made some good progress with the model. I went over the face topology with the line tool until I had the whole face covered and then converted it to an editable polly. I then attached all of the shapes and welded the vertices. I then went about the tricky process of pulling all of the different vertices back to relation to the side on photo to give the mask its depth. After pulling all of the points back from the side view alone, I then went to the perspective view so that I could actually see what the mask looked like. I then went about doing some lengthy tweaking to get everything looking good. I found the cut and the remove tools extremely useful for adding in extra lines and quads once the mask was in its 3d form to make parts of it easier to manipulate. I remember seeing James using soft selection to tweak his mask, but I preferred to just move the vertices one at a time personally.
But anyway, after a good 4 or so hours of work I've come up with this, please let me know what you think.

Face Topologies

My first attempt at the face topologies didn't go too well, as the original lines that I had drawn on my face didn't work out too well when it came to making the mesh in max. So I have gone back and started over. I have taken new photo's and made a new topology. This is what it looks like so far:

So I'm going to put this back into max and hope that it goes a little better this time. ^_^

Face modelling

We did some of the basics of face modelling in the first lesson last week. This is the first time I have done any modelling and mapping of faces in this way. We had to draw lines along the main features of the face, like the cheek bones and the lines around the mouth. We then made up the face into quads so that we could use this as a guideline for when we put the faces into max. I'm looking forward to finishing off the modelling and pulling the mesh into 3d so that we can apply the skin.