Week 16

1a. There are many different types of bones that can be used in an armature system, and they are shown below:

- Deform Bones: These types of bones are allowed to affect the mesh of an object, and are the default type of bones used in Blender

- B-Bones: This stands for Bezier bones, which means these types of bones can be bent and twisted, as they can be broken into multiple segments. An example for using this type of bones would be for a spine, or a ball-and-socket joint.

- IK Solvers: Based on Inverse Kinetics, and works on the basis of depending on where the tip of the bone 'chain' is, it will reposition the other bones connected to that chain.

- Stride Bone: In relation to a human skeleton, these types of bones are used to ensure that a foot would be placed relative to the stairs it is walking up, for example.

- Ipo Drivers: stands for InterPOlation driver. By associating a bone's position with an Ipo driver, the bones can now control any animatable property of the object.

1b. An armature constraint is one which would restrict the movement of a bone, to appear realistic (an example in a human skeleton would be not allowing the knee joint to bend forward, so the toes could touch the thigh).

There are many different types of constraints:

- IK Constraint, Copy Location/Rotation/Scale, Track-to Constraint, Floor Constraint, Stretch-to Constraint, Action Constraint.


Building an armature

We started with the below model as our base model:

















Next step to now get a posable model was to begin adding the bones, this was done by adding an 'armature' to the model (using the spacebar menu), as shown below:
















Here you can see a bone is placed in the middle of the chest. Continuing, we then added other bones, relevant to where on a human body they would be. Obviously we did not add as many bones as there are, but the major groups, especially where joints are, once this was done, this is what we ended up with:

















To make these bones affect the mesh they were contined within, we now had to add a modifier, the armature modifier to be precise. This produces tube like structures, with a white shadow around them. These white shadow are the areas affected by that particular bone, and can be enlarged or reduced, by selecting the bone and the holding Alt+S. This is what we did, shown below:
















The final stage was to increase the size of these envelopes, and the 'white shadows' around them so as they enclose the whole body mesh, or else they wont fully affect the body, creating unrealistic looks when posing the body. Once that is complete, we enter Pose Mode, which allows us to create a pose for the model. The first picture shows the whole body mesh enclosed, and the second picture shows the bones as sticks (this makes it easier to pose, as it looks less cluttered than the envelopes.

































This final picture is now posable.

Assignment Update

Storyboard concept has been created, along with basic sketches of what we would like our character to look like. Rough sketches of the storyboard have been made on paper, and final sketches will be made soon.

Week 15

In this week we explored adding colours and textures to our models.

Adding Surface Colours

The second image shows a UV Map applied to a set of cubes.

UV Map Texture

Questions

3a. What is "Toon Shading"? How does it afect the appearance of characters

Answer: Toon Shading is the process of adding colours and bold outlines to the edges of your model to make it appear more cartoon like.

3b. What is UV Mapping? How does UV Mapping help in shading 3D Characters?

Answer: UV Mapping allows you to break down a 3D Mesh and represent it as a 2D image. UV Mapping makes it easier for the artists to add shading to the model if they have a 2D representation of it

Wii-k 14

This is the simple model we made using polygons:

It is just a basic house with a very simple tree outside, but it shows use of polygons.

Even from the above image, we noticed each of the polygons on the cone of the tree, and we wanted to create a more detailed surface - we did this using the subsurfacing modifier in Blender. This is the resulting render:

As you can see there is a lot more detail in the picture on the directly above, as we subsurfaced the whole scene.

Question 1: What is meant by editing a mesh?

Answer: Editing a mesh (which is a series of vertices joined together to create a polygon), is the method of changing faces/vertices/edges by either moving, adding or even removing them from the mesh.

Question 2: What is the advantage of subsurfacing in blender as opposed to adding more real vertices to a mesh?

Answer: The more vertices a mesh has, the longer the computer takes to compute these points. This means if more real vertice are added to the mesh, it takes even longer for the program to compute the scene. The advantage of subsurfacing over this method is that it subdivides the polygon into smaller components, and therefore the program can compute these simpler calculations quicker. Subsurfacing also increases the smoothness of the surfaces.

Next we created an object using a 'mirror' modifier:

Half a body made, before a mirror modifier is applied (above).
The full body is completed once a mirror modifier is applied (below):

Question 3: Give two example where 'mirror' modifier helps in character modelling?

Answer:

(i) Much like the above example half a face of a character can be created, then mirrored along the necessary axis, therefore saving the designer a lot of time from having to draw a whole face.

(ii) Less error prone - a model made using mirror, means it is an exact replica of the first half of the model, and therefore no mistakes are made, unless they were already made before mirroring.

Question 4: What are the other modifiers supported by Blender?

Answer:

Mirroring: Creates a mirror image of the object along a specified axis.

Lattice: Associates a mesh with a lattice, alonging for simple deformations.

Armature: Associates a mesh with an armuture for figure posing.

Question 5: What is the difference between extrusion modelling and box modelling?

Answer:

Extrusion modelling often starts with small portion of the model and extrudes it outward from the starting point. In box modelling you would start with abasic shape such as a cube anduse subdivision and cuts to mold the object into the required shape.

Dear Diary

Team Name: Wii Mate
Team Member Names: James Carson, Adam Bates

Email:
James: jamescarson86@gmail.com
Adam: a.batesuk@gmail.com

During the first week we were introduced to blender, and explored the interface learning things such as:

- the different views that can be enabled (Top-Down, Orthographic, etc)
- creating simple objects (we created a basic snowman using cones and spheres)


( The basic snowman)


- transforming the objects we created. We scaled spheres down, then translated them up to beside the main body to represent arms

- cameras and light were moved about within the scene, and this allowed us to render the scene from different angles.

- along the way we also learned some shortcuts, such as 's' to scale an object, 'g' to grab an object and 'r' to rotate that object.

Problems Encountered

It took us a while to familiarise ourselves with the interface, controls and the different shortcuts available.

Once we became familiar with it, we quickly learnt how to create composite objects (again, in the form of our snowman)