EVALUATION OF MY MODEL

For my project this year I had to plan and design a space ship in 3-d max at first I started to design a simple space ship on paper I started by drawing many different ships and just random parts of ships that I thought would look good and tried to compile them all into one idea first it went well the wings were partly inspired by an X-Wing fighter only I added a bit more to make it more my idea than just one I stole from Mr. Lucas I also took inspiration from a Tie Fighter also from star wars but this time I just looked at the front window because I liked the design of it and thought it would work well with my idea and again tried to make it look more of an original idea rather than one I had taken from star wars, more of my original plans were taken from ratchet and clank and more sci-fi franchises like red dwarf although red dwarf isn’t a hugely followed sci-fi like star wars or star trek, I also took inspiration from odd things like scrap metal because I wanted to make my ship seem old or used to add character to the ship so it would look like its seen many battles and survived to tell the tail. in my original designs there are a range of different sized ships because I couldn’t decide what kind of ship I wanted there are some fighters and some flag ships and even a space station because all the ships had advantages and disadvantages the fighters were small and looked cool but them being small meant I couldn’t put a lot of effort into the design because fighters are small and nimble and there wasn’t any room for extra content and adding further parts of the ship like a stair way or some kind of massive generator that would look awesome on a huge space cruiser but was unnecessary, the disadvantages of the huge ships meant that in the final animation I couldn’t do anything interesting because the idea of a space cruiser is limited to only being a stronghold and cant make any complex movements because its basically a big blog in space, you never saw and imperial star destroyer do anything like fly trough an asteroid field dodging all the obstacles because it had enough fire power to clean them out of the way (episode 5). And a space station isn’t really a ship more of a port for other ships and in the final animation I couldn’t do much at all with it, in the end I chose one of my fighters to make in 3-d max because I could make it detailed enough for it to look good and I could also make the animation look good as well, while making my 3-d model I struggled a bit because it was the first 3-d model I made without the assistance of others, the wing was made up of 7 different shapes 4 for the engines and 3 for the wing itself the wing was based on a airplane turbines and they were 2 in total one on each wing and the wing was meant to be able to revolve around them to act as legs when the ship landed, the wing was very simplistic and made out of 3 basic shapes they were 2 cubes and one sphere that was stretched out to match the width of the rest of the wing, the base of my ship was just a cube to start with and I morph it into my idea by stretching deleting and attaching bits of the cube when I had finished the ship was not symmetrical so I deleted one half of the ship cloned the remaining part and flipped it then attached it to the other piece making it perfectly symmetrical, then to make the window of my ship I made and oil drum (one of the pre-made objects) and stretched it to make it look right when it is in place on the model. At this point I had finished the model and went onto texturing I used the UVW unwrap tool because I thought it wasn’t am complicated as I originally thought and I got to grips with using it quite easily and first textured the engines the 3 different parts of the outer part of the engine all had the same texture map only I made it look darker as it went along making it look like it was old but was made consistently the same like you would expect a factory made model to look like. the rest of the wing in just the same basic red metal texture because its just a wing any unnecessary features added to the wing would look stupid because the idea of the craft to sustain fight in the atropine of a planet would be ruined because planes have to be perfectly balanced so the ship would appear to look stupid, the base of the ship had lots of extra things added to make it more interested like the addition of scares and bullet holes to make it look like its been involved and survived many battles in its years in service, I used the colour red simply because its my favourite colour, the window was textured to look like the tie fighters or the jedi fighters from star wars, after finishing this model I was about to start animating it when I came to the realisation that the ship was almost completely off-scale with all of its parts the wings wear to big to match the base, I tried to make them smaller but it still didn’t look right, in the end I started to despise this model and cant stand looking at it because I think it looks terrible and will only remind me of what a failure it turned out to be, everybody else said it was ok but it didn’t believe me I think they were just being patronizing because they too thought it looked crap, so I excepted that it failed, so I started again, I took a brief look at some of my concept art I had done and decided the best thing to do was to test my skills on 3-dmax by trying to make a really complex design, the design I am talking about is the engines for my 2nd model witch is a partly deformed sphere it is quiet good looking up close unfortunately in the final animation you never get close enough to care about the finer details, but the engine turned out really well because instead of basing it on a pre-existing design like the turbine from before I realised that it was all science fiction and I could make whatever I wanted as long as I kept it believable, so the new engine is more of a self sustaining plasma engine that runs on dark matter the more sci-fi the better I thought, so the new engines look really good, as for the base of the ship I thought id make that more interesting, well more interesting than the last one anyway, I wanted the ship to have a darker tone when it came to characterising it so I gave it sharp pointy edges, so it would look like every part of the ship part been designed with hopes of killing something, again I used the same process as before by making one half copying and flipping it so it would be perfectly symmetrical, as for the window I used the same one from before because it was the only good bit of that ship even though it wasn’t all my idea, when texturing the engines things became a nightmare because I hadn’t thought about haw hard it would be to texture it when I originally designed it, again I used UVW unwrap but it was much harder than before because this engine was all one piece (besides the ring at the end) so making a texture map that could fit it all on became difficult not only because it was hard to select the write bit but I was also hard to arrange it on the texture map so it would all fit, while texturing the bubble part of the engine as I like to call it the texture map had a seem that stood out and was very visible so I added a coloured ring around it to make it look like it was meant to look like that because by this time it was to late to remap it, I also added the same texture map from my last model as an exhaust port for the engine because it actually looked really good before so why should I delete it, for the base of the ship I made the overall base more featureless than before because the scars and bullet holes always looked out of place on my old ship, I also added a new feature to this ship witch is the green bit that is supposed to be a generator for the vehicles weapons, but it is actually a picture of a microchip that I only used because it really fits in with my space ship and looks more realistic than what I could make in Photoshop, as for the window I used the same window texture from before it looks a little deformed but I think it adds to the overall sharp and evil shape of the vehicle. Once I was happy with the model I moved on to animating it, compared to my first model this new one looks as though it has been made by someone else because of the large difference in quality, I like to think of the first one as a test one because it did teach me some stuff on 3-dmax and provided as a lesson of what not to do on my second one. For my animation I started by watching some tutorials on YouTube because I thought I’d better get a good idea of what I could do before a started doing it, so by watching countless amounts off videos on YouTube I actually found one that was really helpful, with the help of this tutorial I was able to animate my ship by making it run along a line like a scalextric car, I was able to make it run along the line and I added obstacles for the ship to evade, I added a planet with a moon in its orbit and I also added a tube for the ship to run trough, the tube looked out of place so I stuck a big radiation logo on it to make it look like some kind of discarded cooling mechanism that’s just been dumped in space, I also added some asteroids spinning around each other in an endless cycle, after finishing the animation I watched it over and over again an felt like there was something missing so I added more of the same ship, all I did was clone it a few times and watched them run along the same line and it looked suspicious and gave away the fact that they were all on the exact same route, to get around this I made the line move between frames as the ships were still running along it so it gives the elution of each ship moving along its own independent path dodging between the asteroids, each ship also dose a spin at a different point on the track to make it more interesting and less boring I also added 2 more ships moving alone another track to add variety because although the other ships look cool running along the moving track I thought if I added more ships along a different tack it would show how much better the other one is, it’s like a perspective view it shows a simple track and a more complex track that moves after adding all the tracks I textured all the other models like the asteroids that are all the same texture map that but when applied to different sized asteroids there not that recognisable so using this simple tactic I was able to cheat I a way and add loads of the same object 5 times without making it look crap. Overall I am pleased with the animation and the models I made I’m still glad I made the first model because I learned allot about making models and because of the my second model is much better even tough I hated my first model it just made me appreciate my second model more, after making my animation I rendered it in separate parts and then stuck them together in movie maker to make one seamless animation from separate camera angles, once I had done that I uploaded it to YouTube, compared to professional animations mine is obviously crap in comparison because this is only my second model I ever made so comparing it to a professional 3-D model because they have obviously been making model for years and get paid lots of money because they have been doing it for years and have reached the level were they can make pretty much what ever they want on 3-D max and at this particular moment in time I have only made a low polly simplistic space ship so I couldn’t really do a fare comparison between my model and a model made by a team of over paid star wars nerds not realising that there helping slowly kill off probably the biggest sci-fi series ever because Lucas doesn’t want to stop witch Is why know instead of star wars being fit for everyone its only fit for children who like silly cartoony retelling of unimportant plot devices that happened between episode 2 & 3 so I’m going to compare my model from the Jedi star fighter from episode 3 because out of all the star wars space ship this is my least favourite out of all of the ships because its not very imaginative compared to the rest of the space ships this one is just a big triangle and isn’t very interesting at all witch is probably why they were pushed into the background in episode 3 appearing in the film for about 10 seconds when Plo Koon died, but the overall ship itself is boring its very uninteresting and I think my ship is more interesting, obviously there’s is better made because they have more experience and have an entire team of animators and modellers at there disposal so there model is animated better has lighting affects and has lots of other special effects because that’s what the star wars prequels were about even though the effects in the original deserve the term “special” more than the new ones because every action movie has CGI so its not really a special event to see in movies now, so in terms of quality there are 2 divisions, the first one is how well its made and threes is in a lot higher because mine is a lot lower quality but when it comes to imagination I believe mine is better because mine has a unique weapon design for a fighter and the Jedi fighter because that was a very basic design and it was officially dropped from episode 3 because it wasn’t a well designed ship so it was pushed into the background and changed its name and made a completely new design that was a lot better designed and more suited to being a fighter because its small nimble and has an interesting design, in conclusion I really like my model but at the moment it is limited by my skill at 3-D modelling but it is quite good for being my second model I ever made.