The 2nd scene of my animation is a farm and the outskirts of a forest
the skybox, the floor plane and the trees are taken from the first scene.
Whats been added is a fence, a multi-sub object on the ground quadpatch for the dirt of the farm, a sign that says no stealing the carrots and a load of carrot objects that stick out of the ground
the sign is a box with an ink n paint material applied to the wood that holds it up, then a bitmap image i made in photoshop applied to a box with 6 sides, then i got the edges of each side and just moved them in and outwards to give the jagged wood edge effect
The main carrot that the rabbit picks up is a cylinder thats welded at one end and then the top is 2 planes crossed over with a bitmap and an opacity map put over the top to make the leaves at the top of the carrot
the rest of the carrots are just clones of the original carrot except they arent coming out of the ground so all the bottoms have been cut off
The fuse i made for the carrot is a blizzard particle array system with instantiated objects that i made myself as sparks
First i got a sphere, added a noise modifier, using fractal tickbox with about 4.5 iterations
then moving the noise on the x y and Z axis, and adding a see through goldish yellow material to it
the explosion of the carrot is just a sphere gizmo with a fire effect added and keyed into the timeline to explode and fade out in about 50 frames
In this blog post i am going to go through how i planned out and made my cartoon scenery from start to finish!
First of all i needed to consult with the storyboard to see what i was making and the first scene is my bunny jumping around a forest having some fun!
so i need to make a cartoon forest for my little critter to play in!
so first off i started with a a simple tree!
Obviously i didnt click a button and a tree came out with Good cartoon cell shading and lighting!
The grass and the hopmarkers aren't supposed to be there they came last! i just had this screenshot available of the completed tree and thought i'd use it
I first modelled the tree using a cylinder and a sphere, i gave a cylinder i think 14 sides then I converted the cylinder to an editable poly. I then deleted the polygon cap At the top and then extruded every other edge at the top to make 7 branches, then moving them a long 4 segments, and extruding the edges of each branch upwards then around to make a simple box branch, lift up the sphere from any of the trees in the scene and it will be clear what i did! simple and effective! for the roots of the tree i just pulled out other vertex and put them at varied heights and lengths.
Now for the texturing of the tree(and consequently the texturing of my whole cartoon!), I had a great idea in which i got from The unity engine, i did a little reasearch inside the unity's cartoon shading libraries and found some sphere's which looked like the material map editor spheres in 3ds max. On these spheres were how unity shades its cartoon objects, so i decided to go dive into the max map editor in mental ray mode and see if i can't see something similar!
I had a look in the "standard" click box and found something called composite but it was horrible, so i decided to go into the box next to diffuse instead because it has different options, and i found something that looked near identical to the unity toon shading and it was just simply called "object color" i decided to add it to my tree and test out some lighting on it, as the colors i was using before were having a little too much shine!
this is a lighting and texture test screenshot with my skydrome in the background!
with the tree done i turned to the skydrome which i was working on at the same time (when bored with 1 work on another)
Here is how i made the skydome
The texture for the skydome i made myself using photoshop, here is the jpeg image file used on the skydome
I started off with a straight 5000x1500 canvas and used the pen tool to draw along the bottom of that to seperate the cartoon hills from the sky. I then changed the resolution of the image to 2048x2048 and used the polar co-ordinates distortion setting and made it circular ready for the skydome.
the last thing i did was to make a simple cartoon forest floor
This is a quad patch, set to 6x6, then converted to an editable poly, which then i think turns it into a 24x24 (6x4)
after which i added a noise modifier, putting noise strongly the X and Y axis, factors 8 and 4.5 respectively, then about 1.8-2.1 on the z axis to give it an uneven forest floor effect
The lighting is simply an omni light with a x2 multiplier, as i don't need complicated lighting effects for this piece of work for 2 reasons;
1. As im going for a cartoony look anything photometric will add elements of unecessary realism, rather than the abstract look im going for 2. Render time.
Firstly i started off with concept designs and images that i drew by hand.
this gave me the basic idea of what to i want to achieve
next i got an image of a rabbits nose from http://www.stockphotopro.com/photo_of/rabbit/AW9WDW/rabbit_mouth_and_nose
and used this image to shape my rabbits mouth, then designing myself eye sockets, and welding them together as you can see in this image
the technique i used was simply making a plane into an editable poly and extruding the edges and moving the verts into position.
after which i needed to shape the back of the head and decided upon saving a little time and using some techniques that i picked up last semester which was to cut out what i needed from a sphere and attach it to rest of the mesh.
this is the pre-weld positioning of the sphere
post-welding of the sphere
after the sphere was welded i made the ears, using the same technique of plane to poly then extruding, i started with one plane and went across the ear by 6 segments, 4 segments to give the ear depth and 2 for the front ear, then extruded round to the back to give it 3 dimensions
i then cloned it and welded them to the head! trying to keep the meshflow as smooth as possible
now for the novelties, the teeth eyes and feet!
as posted earlier in this blog i used the cartoon eyes that richard taught us how to do on my rabbit, putting them into the socket and linking it to the mesh, so that its seperate but moves with the mesh when i need it too
with the teeth and feet, i got a 3x3 box, and used the chamfer tool on the edges at the front of the box and deleted the new polys to creat a gap. moved across the segments and made toes. I moved the 2 back edges to shape the heels, all they need is a turbosmooth modifier and they are finished.
With the teeth i did the same thing except the gaps are a lot smaller
I have been thinking about the brief and looking at some potential 3d characters that i would like to animate.
I want my character to be cute, and to achieve a goal, so that when or if the character is trying to achieve something and he fails the audience can feel for the character as its cute and appealing.
My intentions are to animate an inanimate object and give it life and personality, or animate an animal so i can give it expression and emotion.
I have been looking at a few ideas for inanimate objects like mushrooms
i also thought about a 3d octopus, as their mouth's are not really visible and i can make a 3d character and give it personality using just facial expressions
