Models
In this part of the blog I will be posting pictures of all the models and scenery, showing how I made them, things I was going to do, the things I did, didn’t do and difficulties I encountered.
The Idea of worms
The Worm
With my worms I used this one mode shown below l and cloned it 5 times, and to differentiate between them all I put on a different texture or set of weapons.
When designing it I started with a cylinder with 9 sides, 1 cap segment 8 height segments and converted it into an editable poly. These exact measurements were used for good reason; I needed 9 sides to make a circular worm base but not too circular so that when a smooth was added it looked as good as possible.


The 8 height segments were enough to form eye sockets and mouth; here I cut out 2 eye sockets and was extruding and welding the edges and vertices to make eye sockets that had an indent in which I could put spheres in.
The eyebrows and eyes and hands were made separate from the model and attached. To make the shape of the worm I moved the vertices downwards and squashed the cap at the bottom to make a tail. At the top of the worm I up-scaled the lower set of vertices from the cap to form a head and de-scaled the cap itself to give the head more of a circular shape to the top. I used the bevel tool on 2 vertices that were located in a suitable position for eyes, and then worked from there to form eye sockets.

Here is the smoothed worm with a mouth that I made by connecting edges to and pulling them back into the model to make a recess, Then extruding vertices outwards to make lips.

This is the lead worm “the ninja” sporting the hands I made for him, pre-smoothing.


Each worm had something that made them different from the rest. One had a set of Berettas, one was dressed up like a ninja and had a katana, one had a gunblade and the other was just a plain old worm! Each weapon took a very long time to make. The shortest time to make one was the gunblade which was about 2 hours, The Beretta took about 3 hours and the katana took 3 or so hours.
Making the Nuke
Believe it or not the nuclear explosion started off as a 1d line.



Then i added the lathe tool modifier and moved it so that it looked like a mushroom cloud

After the lathe was applied i used the edit poly modifier and start the work on my nuke. I started pulling out the polygons at the base and going up. This was to give the cloud at the bottom a ripple effect so that when it was morphing it looked like a cloud was coming out from the bottom

Then I cloned it and started working on the morph. The small one morphs into the big one then I added a smooth to give it the realism. If you delete or unhide the mesh smooth it looks nothing like a mushroom cloud.

Then came the textures. The textures were explosion and fire colours that were made cellular. Like the sun like colour with orange cellular dots. Then orange colour with bright yellow cellular dots, then with the smoke it was a dark grey with orange fire-like cellular mapping dots. I then merged them all into one texture and applied a gradient mask ramp so that it all fit in the right places











Models - Skinning and Rigging

Firstly to get the shape of my worm I used a modifier called pathDeform which gets your model and shapes into whatever object you tell it to shape like. I used a squiggly line to get my worm to look like a worm

Next I made my own skeleton using the bones tool that max has. A lot of people used a biped for their model even though it doesn’t fit whatsoever. I did get some practice on a biped with weighting vertices but I went with the bones as it seemed easier and far more effective than using a biped. The bones going upward are both linked with the dummy but only one bone in the tail is attached.

The inverse kinetic chain is the big blue cross at the bottom of the skin. It is attached to the 3 tailbones and controls them. If you move the IK chain it moves the bones its attached too. See the picture above it’s the IK chain in its normal position. The picture below is the chain being moved backwards; stretching out the bones this sequence being keyed in set keys formed the walking of my worms and give them a realistic movement pattern.



Weapons
1. katana
2. Gunblade
3. Dual Beretta’s (one modelled Beretta cloned into other hand)
4. Hand grenade
5. dynamite
Katana
The reason for the katana was that I had done a tutorial a while back to make this weapon and when it come to this animation project the thought hadn’t crossed my mind to put the katana in. I was fiddling about with Kevlar jpegs to use as texture for one of my worms, and I then noticed that the Kevlar made the worm look like a ninja. Then it clicked! I decided I would dress him up like a ninja and put in the sword to fit! The sword took a lot of time because the katana tutorial takes a long time to give you a high quality finished product, but the katana in my animation is only visible for about 10 seconds and even then it was just at a distance. But I thought I would just add it in so I wouldn’t waste time where I needed it on things like animation, rendering, blog writing.

Firstly I started off by using the image provided in the tutorial to make a blueprint of the guard. Then draw a line around the edge and then round all the other edges and then apply the bevel to make the guard. The material on the guard is just a metallic gold preset in the max library that I applied and added 20 to the glossiness value for shine. Screenshots of the lines I drew before bevel then the effects of bevel + a dark metal gold material applied and the guard blueprint I drew round.

Here are the lines I drew using Bezier style for better curves!

Here are the lines with the bevel modifier applied to make a guard for the sword.
The next bit I modelled for this part was the blade. Firstly I got a rectangle and made it in the top view. Stretching it up and making it thin like a building block for the blade with 2 height segments. I then connected all the edges and made it an editable spline.

I then thinned it out a bit and connected the edges together with about 7 or 8 segments for a nice curve effect.

Then I turned the rectangle on its side and welded the top 2 vertices to make a point, and here with the extra height segment I added earlier I move it down further to the bottom. I then use the edge selection tool in the edit poly mode to connect the highlighted edge to the adjacent edge going down on the Z axis with 14 segments, 7 running along the blade and 7 at the top to give the katana its curve at the top and throughout

Then I used an anisotropic shader with white diffuse and specular, then put the specular level up to 150 and with glossiness 20 to give it a nice looking metal chrome effect

Afterwards I made a little gold base for the blade out of a cube. I made it into an editable poly and welded the 2 end vertices to match the blade.


Afterwards I made the grip. The grip was just a cylinder converted into an editable poly and squashed a little in the centre to give it a flat grip like appearance. The texture for the grip was provided by the tutorial maker and he shows you how to apply it using Cylindrical UVW wrapping like the image shows below. The tutorial also provides a bump map for realistic 3d effect.


The final rendering for the Katana that I modelled











Gunblade

After purchasing Final fantasy 8 a few months back for nostalgia reasons and being able to use 3ds max I wondered if I could model the gunblade that the main character in the game uses. I attempted it and it came out really well. Then when it came to this assignment I thought I would put it in so I did. This is the starting part of the model. It’s just a plane that’s been turned into an editable poly and extruded and connected and extruded over and over

The barrel chamber of the gun was a cylinder with a UVW map on either half of the shape. Making it look like a realistic gun barrel

Here is the uvw unwrap with the barrel put into place and used on either half of the barrel to.


here is the UVW unwrap of the model, the way I unwrapped it was to select half of the polygons on one side and apply the material below over the top. This then put the texture on both sides of the weapon and made it look very realistic. I made the image a little larger than the unwrap so that there was no silver texture from the background coming through.


Berettas
The Beretta was a lot of fun to model because it just got more and more realistic as I was modelling it. This is the start of the modelling I did for the Beretta. I started with the plane in the middle and extruded it left and right then upwards on both sides and across to match the top gun shaft.

then I continued with the top indent and shaped it at the back and the sight at the top

Started extruding downwards to shape some of the intricacies of the side of the gun and some edges for the trigger hole to be shaped from.

The trigger hole and the handle. I started shaping the handle from the trigger so that I could have space to model the circle part of the handle where the screw is inserted at this point. Then I just decided to keep it flat and let the texturing handle some of the small detail


Connecting the handle to the rest of the model and starting modelling the sides and adding more depth to give it that realistic 3d look.

The gun half finished, I used the mirror modifier to take get it to the other half. Then I set all the vertices on the same Y axis so that when they were mirrored I could weld all the vertices.


The mirrored model.
Below is the skin and opacity map used


I used a UVW mapping modifier and put it on planar to get the skin to wrap around the weapon. It took a few minutes to get perfect. Here is the rendered finish Berettas and I was very pleased with the results.


Hand Grenade

The hand grenade I used in the animation. I got a sphere and put a cube on top. Then deleted a polygon and extruded it out and downwards.
Dynamite

The dynamite was a 2 cylinders and a multi-sub object that colours them both red and dark grey for the fuse.
Scenery
The scenery is one big editable patch that has been deformed in various places to form a cliff, with a clearing, and a forest clearing. The forest clearing is used for the team of worms who are taking a break at camp from the war and the clearing on the cliff is used for the worm who is mourning the loss of his team and going to give up to the enemy when he next sees them. The trees are from the standard foliage library that comes with 3ds max. I was going to make my own trees by intersecting 2 planes, putting on a tree on both planes then an opacity texture modifier over the top for quicker renders but the trees that come with 3ds max are a good quality and had time to spare for renders.
My scenery work was split into 5 scenes that I put together in premiere pro. My scenery never stayed the same and I’m about to explain scene by scene why.

Scenery set 1

This is my first scene; the bit in the red box is where all the components for scene 2 are set up but hidden for rendering. When I was moving the scene around to work on it on my laptop it would lag so I would always hide what I wasn’t working on.




Scenery Set 2

This is the set 2 scenery. In this scene I made the tree stump out of a cylinder and pulled the vertices downwards and made the cylinder a multi sub object applying 2 textures one for the cut section one for the wood. Looks very realistic and the bottom was hidden for the rendering of this scene to speed up the render
Scenery Set 3

This scene I used nearly all of it I hid the top half of the scene because is it starts you can only see half of the trees anyway. The trees are from the max library and the tents are planes and cylinders with skins. The tree stump is re-used from scene 2
Scenery Set 4 final scene

With this scene the nuke is actually about 1/10 the size of the scenery itself and I set the camera angle up to look like the whole scene is exploding when it’s just about 3 trees and 1 tent.
Scenery set 5 Morpher talking scene
This was all that was in the scene for the morphing section it took like 14 minutes to render all the talking because there was not much to render i took everything out that wouldn’t be seen in the scene


Animation
The animating was a long and arduous process. I stuck to the storyboards for about 90% of the time but the other 10% was changes that I thought were necessary for reasons I will explain scene by scene.
Scene 1

When I was animating scene 1 It really slowed me down to have all the scenery in view so I set up 4 cylinders where I needed my worms to walk to so that I didn’t have the scenery in the way. Then in the render menu I ticked the box render hidden geometry so the render looks like this


Scene 1 Morpher and morph build

In the morpher scene the way I positioned the camera it looks like there are worms when clearly in the screenshot above there isn’t any worms. The scenery is set keyed as well to move instead of the worm. It moves intermittently as if it was a worm’s crawl/wiggle. It

This is how I set up all my words that were pronounced in the lip sync scene. My lip syncing wasn’t perfect because my recording was quite fast at one point and I morphed an R too strong and quickly. By that I mean I moved the mouth too much when an R was pronounced in a quick sentence so it looks choppy in one part but I’m happy with the rest.


Scene 2

In scene 2 with the animation of the grenade I made the mistake of keeping the render hidden geometry button ticked so the grenade that was cloned then supposed to be hidden and used later in the scene was still there after he supposedly throws it off the cliff.
I then went in Photoshop to shop out the grenade which I successfully do frame by frame but after I did it i didn’t know what to do with the Photoshopped work so I put the Photoshop document in with the electronic submission on disk to view the Photoshop work




This is what the scene looked like when I was working on it. Took the trees at the bottom and hid the bottom half just so my 3ds wouldn’t lag when I was working on it
Scene 3
when I was animating this scene I was wondering what would make it look like they were relaxing so I had them all laying down playing cards and talking about how great their day was




This is the final scene. The nuke is the little thing under the massive scenery. I used a particle system and a particle bomb to spray the particles towards the camera. The worm is there because I assigned it to one of the 2 particle generators, the other was for worms.

Special effects and things i didnt include

This is the curve editor graph for my camera shake. When it hits a time frame the camera shakes violently to simulate what would happen close to a nuclear explosion

In this scene I move the scenery and not the worm to simulate movement




This is my camera glow and the environment and effects tab that shows the figures and stats for the glow that i used. This is to simulate the trees being on fire behind the nuke. I selected the tree and assigned the glow to that object and turned up the glow to maximum

This was an alternate worm model that i was going to use for a stupid moronic worm but decided against it as I didn’t like the look of it


I managed to make a realistic water effect earlier but completely forgot about it. I was trying to make a teardrop from scratch forgetting i had done this water that has great texturing that i picked up from a tutorial. My teardrop was too metallic and the reactor settings were wrong. By the time i realised i had done this water it was too late to incorporate it into a tear drop because my work was already rendered! So i thought i would add this in as ‘if i could do this project again REMEMBER THE SPECIAL EFFECTS’ bit.

This was my intro scene but it completely slipped my mind to put it in as i did make it a while back and as you can see it even has the same sky environment map that my animation has! I basicly modelled one arrow and put it into a particle system to make a rain of arrows. To make the arrow i got a rectangle with 3 high segments. Welded the top 4 vertices that made an edge into an arrow point, then bevelled each side on the top segment and brought it the middle to make
The Nuke Flash
To make the nuke flash I had to make 8 videos of 5 frames each that play at 30 fps of a camera glow effect that was adjusted every 5 frames to make the flash. Each 5 frames the flash gets brighter by turning up the camera glow brightness then I play it backwards, which makes about 1.5 seconds of flash to put into premiere pro then play it before the nuke. So then it looks like a realistic explosion flash.

Tasks

I have Got my storyboards and know now what i need to make.

1.Scenery
2.Worm models
3.nuclear explosion

the scenery is almost finished just needs touching up and trees need more photoshopping.

worm models need skinning and rigging.

the nuclear explosion is done.

animated dodo

i decided to finish the dodo using some quick auto key animation.

i was going to make it jump after it knelt down but when i moved the whole biped in autokey it removed all of the animation.

when i tried using setkey it just wasnt saving any of the movements so i imagine there was a bug in 3ds max

some of my nuke

just a little bit of my nuclear explosion i finally got the morpher tool working so i though i'd upload a bit of what i got so far:

Animated Water

i decided to make a better water effect using a plane with a a few modifiers multiplied like poly select volume select relax and face extrude. then a noise modifier on top of them all

storyboards

this was my first storyboard then it branched i decided to change it because of the government adverts on burglars, "dont invite them in"



but then i decided not too and go with another way of tackling the concept of "we give the enemy the means to our own destruction"

i thought of it as i was playing an old game called worms, the 3d cartoon miniclips that are made inbetween show situations of utter stupidity and always have 1 worm doing something that gives the other worm (enemy) means to their destruction






its basicly one team of worms (team one) beat the other very badly and decide to rest. the last worm of the other team (team two) tries to think of a way to come back and take a win but cannot think of anything. The team two worm then decides to give up after much deliberation throw his munitions away and surrender. In a fit of rage he shouts I SURRENDER and throws a grenade (pin not pulled) into a group of trees. Little does he realise is that behind those trees is a cliff top with team one resting at the bottom with ALL of their munitions. The grenade then knocks a pice of TNT out of one of the barrels that is being stored at the camp and that TNT then rolls into the fire, ignites, explodes and detonates setting off every bit of explosive equipment in the base. If they werent so cocky and rested for the night they might not all have been blown away.

Smaller Explosion

This is an explosion. lol.

basicly im going to make a nuclear explosion in 3ds max but first i thought id take 5 minutes to make a smaller one. this is a tutorial i found on onitz.net and is also on youtube and it takes about 2 minutes to make

you get a sphere, a particle array and an atmosphere effect using a sphereGizmo.

you add the sphere object to the particle array and make the particles come from the object instead of generated by the array.

then add a fire effect using the sphere gizmo, and time the fire effect with the dispersion of particles using auto key on the timeline and voila, basic 2 minute explosion using only 3 tools?

win!