Azerk's unexpected delivery!

[Radscientist]

Project for class. Due March 1 (really, due March 3 but I want to give myself some room for errors)

STORY
This is just a short summary for now as I still have to get back to packing for my trip, heh. Eventually I would like to write a full on script as I flesh out the story.

::STORY STARTS::

Black fade in. Camera flies along in space passing along various objects and then goes around a sun to the tiny planet.

father (named azerk) leaves for work in a ufo. his home is a tiny planet with a house on it. have green grass and a landing pad (similar to driveway). have a pregnant wife.

walks out of home with wife behind. as they arrive at the ufo, the wife give him a peck on the cheek waves goodbye as the father then hops onto the UFO.

UFO lifts off then zooms away, camera panning along his trajectory. then after the ufo have obviously gone a long distance, See father turning on the autopilot then falls asleep to naps.

a straggling ship passes right in front of him. Fortunately, the autopilot alerted him just early enough to swerve out of way (Azerk is jolted awake by this as he is slammed against the side of the ship).

He stops and turns around to yell at the other ship but stifled his curses when he saw that it was in distress.

he floats closer and peers into the cockpit. finding an unconcious alien, he try to signal the other alien thru the ship’s communicator but it didn’t wake up the unconcious alien.

looking over the alien’s ship, he see that the engine had blown out due to leaking fuel. He quickly pulls the alien into Azerk’s ship. he also pulls along some stuffs from the ship to salvage it before the ship blows up.

with his best care, he tried to apply first aid but quickly found himself inadequete to care for the alien. so he zoomed right back to his home for his wife to use the better first aid kit there.

shortly after, the alien wakes up and jump up with a shock. he looks to Azerk and his wife and grabbed Azerk’s shirt, asking where his ship is! Upon the discovery that Azerk rescued him from the ship and the ship had blown up, he freaks out and start talking about the package left on the ship. Lamenting that he will never deliver it on time! begging Azerk to take the alien to the ship (as if it’s a life or death thing but never said to be that way). The alien looks like he is losing strength as his lament continues as if he nears death.

Azerk looks at his wife and then formed his resolve. Azerk tells the alien that Azerk had salvaged some of his stuffs in time so the alien should stay home and recuperate. quickly the alien becomes very articulate and tells him the address that the package is supposed to be sent to ASAP.

He inputted the address onto his SPD (Space Positioning Device ) and after a long zoom away, finds a asteroid field in the way. so he rolls up his sleeves and grab the stick to drive manually. After a few acrobatic moves with some close shaves, he arrives at the destination and goes to the door with the package.

A large joyous alien opens the door and start chatting nonsense (all small talks and some are directed to guests inside the house) without giving Azerk a chance to edge into the conversation. That alien goes ahead and grabs his wallet, pulls out a card and swipes it onto a strip on the box. Pulled, Azerk gives the box to the alien and the alien reaches in and pulls out a Celestal Super Sphere Pizza Special! (a reference to the super bowl).

The alien pulls out a rude-fully small amount of tip and tucks it into the shirt pocket of the stunned Azerk.

From the view toward Azerk (chin dropped) from inside the house, the door closes on him and black horizontal wipe follow the door onto the credits.

::STORY END::

MODEL LIST
----Not started modeling yet
Father
–work boot
–white button up shirt
–blue jean
Wife
–pregnant
–frilly apron
–spatula
deliveryman alien
–thin and lanky
–have skin that sorta resembles a kid with excessive pimples all over the face but alien-ish

----Work in progress
Customer (Mostly done, need to fix head then start rigging)

Base Body model for Azerk, wife, and adjusted for deliveryman

Home Planet (only some texture left)
–crater-like house
–green grass
–landing pad for UFO

Father’s UFO
–glass dome cockpit
–antenna

Deliveryman’s UFO

Customer’s Planet

----Done

[Radscientist]

Been trying to figure out the grasses of the planet. So far, I have a tiny house and a landing pad on the planet. so I’ve decided to focus on the material a little more and I wanted grass. However, because of the way the strands stands, you can see the ground a little too clearly .

Is there any way to ‘bend’ the strands so when there’s enough bent strands, it covers the ground more?

Below is the screenshot of my set up and a rendered image.

the render have ambient occlusion and a sun lamp.

the hump on the left side is a landing pad. once I model an UFO and put it there, it’ll look much better. Not sure how I can fit a kid playground on the planet without it looking funny though. Maybe I’ll just have the son picking on the daughter running around or something? the kid is not really going to impact the story much at all except for giving Azerk one of those competent fatherly type image.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

I’ll be modelling the base model for the family as I wait for the responses.

::EDIT:: Discovered children for particles. now it looks MUCH better. gonna have to search to see how I can make it look less like hair and more like grass. gonna darken the ground’s color a little to blend in better. ::EDIT::

Attachments

[bacon_chaney]

hello,
you should be able to comb the particles or set the bending on it though im not sure how on 2.4x. always consider adding children particles to make it look denser? it will increase the amount of strands but it wont take as much to process. though the downside is that they can look a little repetitive if there are too many as they will copy its parents appearance.

looking good btw i like the style of it

[Radscientist]

heh, thanks @bacon_chaney. I discovered children reading up on a WIP thread where the guy had issues with hairs. It can be a little repetitive but I’m taking advantage of that to maybe give it a little of an unique waviness and whatnot. if you look at the latest pic I posted in the second post, you can see my latest effort

[bacon_chaney]

that looks alot better it looks like its coming on really well sounds like you have put alot of thought into the story to i look forward to seeing how you get on with it all it certainly looks like you have alot of work ahead of you

[Radscientist]

Thanks yeah, I have a lot left. thing is, though, I made a bet with a close friend that I would finish this by this Saturday. So I’ll be posting a lot more often as the week goes on. Gonna be a little single-minded this week on the project.

[bacon_chaney]

haha well the poeple on the forums tend to be really helpful so if you run into any problems dont be afraid to ask

[Radscientist]

yeah, been here for a long around myself. just have never really done any serious project with blender before. this is the second project I’ve made so far. the first one was to integrate some crappy machine I made into a live action clip. Too embarrassed to share that one anyway. this current project, I’m really looking forward to finishing it really good! might have to cut back on the quality of the render to get to the deadline but I can always render it full HD quality down the road when I have time to

I’ve completed most of my base model for the family and is now doing a little research on how to make a cartoonish face onto this head.

I’m also curious to see any crit regarding the wires. I intentionally left the hump on the back of the hand alone but I want to be able to move the arm and leg almost like a rope so I can give it a little of an alien movement characteristic.

[Radscientist]

added texture and basic eye. I’ll adjust the head to conform the eye and make it look much better but what do you thinks of the texture? I’m liking the scaly look I have on it

[bacon_chaney]

yeah looks good almost reptillian am liking the way the scales glisten in the light. the topology is looking good the best advice i can give you (with not having much experience myself) is to try and keep the quads as even as you can so the deform is alot smoother

[Radscientist]

struggling with the face some

The eye seems okay to me except for the iris and the exposed side of the eyeball.
the lip is a little off. not sure how to correct it.

Is there any way to keep the scale of the texture exactly the same no matter how close the camera is? I’m guessing that this is a node thing but I would like it if I could zoom in the face and still have the texture the same size as if I was further away. that way you wouldn’t be able to see the pattern quite as clearly as in the image above.

[bacon_chaney]

umm im not sure i understood what you meant there?
so you want the texture to stay the same size in proportion to hte camera instead of proportional to the model?

im not too sure on that one if it is as i understand it.
i think it would have to be linked in to the camera instead of using the usual uv maps. i think your right about nodes being the best way of going about it?

[Radscientist]

if you look at the face render, you can clearly make out each individual scales. I want the texture to look the same as in the full body render. I’ll hold off on this for now till I’m about ready to make the family members and Azerk.

For now, I’ll work in Azerk’s UFO until I hear some responses on how to tune up the face. here’s the wire of the face plus the reference image I found that I plan to use for the UFO

[3dementia]

@Radscientist

…until I hear some responses on how to tune up the face.

I almost posted this earlier but didn’t, now that I know you really want critique, I’ll let you have it. The topology of your character is terrible, really, it’s awful. When modeling for animation, you have to plan your edge flow for all portions of the body. It is imperative that the polygons follow the contours of the shape, not only to help give it proper form, but also for deformation.

Here is a review of topology of the shoulder from Blender Cookie:
http://www.blendercookie.com/2010/03/31/topology-review-shoulder/
Do you see how the mesh is designed to bend?
Face topology is quite the same, it must be designed to flex where it needs to.
See this pic:

See how many loops I have planned around the eye? When I animate the eyes, whether I use shapekeys or bones, there wll be plenty of vertices ready to stretch into place. Same with the jaw, if the mouth is going to open it needs loops to deform. Learn about edgeloops, and how to plan and control them.

Now how do you accomplish this? There are several ways to achieve good topology.

The “professional” way is to sculpt your model using any method you like, carelessly throwing about vertices or voxels as you see fit. Then you can go back over your model and retopo it, the vetices will snap to the mesh so you don’t have to worry about form at all, just function. http://pilgway.com/~greg/RatAUTOPOFinal/RatFromScratch5.mov

The second way is to plan your loops out first, and then find ways to connect them. Model the individual components, the eye, the mouth, etc. Then connect them up making sure to preserve your carefully created edge-flow. http://www.blendercookie.com/2009/01/26/modeling-a-human-head-part-2/

A third method that I have seen people use, is to lay out the face as if it were 2d, then push and pull the verts into 3d space. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxnSXBW1qwY

And I forgot to say that triangles are very evil monsters that will lurk in your closet and then eat you at night, treat them as such!

HTH, Good Luck.

BTW: I like your concept, and your planning stages. There is often too little of that around here.

[Radscientist]

Thanks, 3dementia! I’m not afraid of any serious criticism so go right on ahead. I was somewhat aware of the bad topology for the head but wasn’t quite sure how to correct it. I have never done retopo before so I wasn’t sure how time consuming it might be. I didn’t know about the face that the shape of the mesh stay while the vertexes get moved in retopo like that so I’ll check it out. thanks!

FYI, that rat from scratch mov clip, any chance of that in avi or somewhere online? I’m having some issue with apple’s software on my fresh winXP 64-bit install.

[3dementia]

I’ll ask the author if I can upload it. I don’t like .mov much myself.

[3dementia]

Got it, started uploading the videos, then found the channel from the suggestions :).

3DCoat

This is the autopo video I linked. http://www.youtube.com/user/PILGWAY3DCoat#p/u/11/SHN5AtDPLb4
Obviously Blender doesn’t yet have such advanced tools. But the concepts are the same.

[Radscientist]

I’ve restructured the head and now it’s completely different from before. However, I’m just completely STUCK on how to make a cartoonish eye for this character. I have a somewhat large eyeball ready but how do I model the eye socket to curves around the eyeball without making it look bugged out?

For now, I’m working on the UFO some so I’m going ahead and post a wire of the head so far. thanks for all of your advices.

Unfortunately, I never did do much until now. and now I only have a single week left to do. So I’m stripping down on the story even more such as the kids are out of the picture now and there’s no lunch, Azerk just simply take a nap. There’s no asteroid storm or anything like that, just a blown out engine.

[Radscientist]

Azerk’s UFO. very simple. I will be adding navigational panel in that large empty space in front of the seat. I am also going to add the door handle, and an antenna on top of the glass dome.

However, I’m about to make a glass done and would like some advices about this. Do I just make a object mostly opaque with strong specularity (quick and dirty?)? Or is it better for me to just use the Ray Transp option?

[bacon_chaney]

depends on how much your computer can handle really, raytracing is going to increase the render time by alot, if your not too worried about reflections and such you can always compromise with the z-alpha option instead and then consider raytracing for the final render. it still gives you an option for fresnel, so you can make transparent glass, it wont look perfect but its a good start.