Evaluation

Overall, I am happy with my trailer and the scenes included in it. I decided against using the parachute model I created, and the scene where the character is paragliding over London. This I felt would have been too time consuming, so I decided to make a couple of new scenes instead. This was a good idea as the final product I feel, works well.

I chose the Madonna track as it is the official movie soundtrack, and I simply put the track in and it was pretty much in the right position from the off. I needed to delay the start, and cut a piece out where the character is walking into the underground station, but it is hardly noticable as in the actual track there is a gap too, but mine is ever so slightly longer. This worked well and where the animation cuts off, I feel the music finishing where it does works well and would interest people to see the movie.

I am very happy with the introduction scene, and feel that I worked around the issue of the character not being able to turn around well, as the effect of the barrel panning round to bring the character into view works effectively. I am happy with the sound effect, but I feel it could be more of a dominant gunshot. If I was to have more time, I would have worked out how to make the character move via footstep mode, this wouldn't work for some reason and everytime I selected it, the program would crash. I'm not too sure why this was.

I feel the car chase scene works well and the camera effects work well. I am happy with the particle effects but I feel that if I was to improve upon it, I would make the particles of ice/snow that kick up from the wheel more realistic instead of using the 'tetra' effect. I also would have made the Jaguar model from scratch and I would have spent more time making both cars look much better and I also would have included the explosion scene which is in the car chase in the actual movie. I am also happy with the scenery, I feel this looks good and doesn't look as flat and as fake as I first thought it would.

 The underground scene is probably the scene I am most proud of and feel that this is purely because of the effect of the car suddenly appearing. This works very well and is pretty much exactly like the in the movie. If I was to make this scene better, I would pan the second camera view a lot slower, and I would probably look into making the car appear by random sets of polys, this would make the scene look a lot better as this is the way it appears in the movie. I would also make another character as 'Q' is in this scene in the movie but I didn't have the time to make another character.

The 'Die Another Day' scene was the most simple scene to produce, the character sitting down was complicated in places, but the biped treated me well and worked well for me. There was a lot of fiddling with the hand over the gun, but in the end I felt the whole scene worked well. If i was to improve this scene, I would have made the character talk and I would have made him a face too. This would have been for all scenes with the character in, he didn't have a face as I couldn't attach a face that could move in the time I had, I just added the materials, unfortunately, the face only had two polys to it so this meant I couldn't even draw in a face using materials on the polys.

The final scenes where the bullet is going through the barrel of the gun, I feel worked ok, it wasn't great, but I felt the lighting was perfect, you only see what you are meant to see. And the final scene where the text appears, I feel worked very well and ended with the music perfectly.

With reference to:

• Richard Barnes - Low poly man
• Madonna - Die Another Day
• Die Another Day trailer (YouTube)
• Movie sound clips from the movie (Die Another Day - Ian Flemming)

Final Render of Trailer

This is my final render of my 007 Die Another Day trailer... Enjoy...

007 Final Scene

zoomed in

moving from horizontal to verticle

For the final scene, I decided to make the 007 logo, and make the numbers move, to allow the first '0' to be used as the 'o' in 'Another' for Die Another Day.





For the final scene, I made the text and made them as single letters as this would make the easier to animate as I wanted them. I made the numbers go from horizontal to verticle, which I felt works well, especially the way the numbers overlap each other. To add effect to the scene, I made the camera slowly zoom out instead of just sitting in one place.

almost there

completed final scene

'Die Another Day' Scene

In the scene in which Bond is sitting down, I made him sit in as close to the actual position he is in for the film as possible. This was quite fiddly and time consuming as, again, the envelopes were not complete. This is very frustrating when you think you have something positioned perfect, but then it isn’t. The character does not move in this scene, but I did give the gun a morpher effect, I made the top of the gun and the trigger pull back and then bullet then flies out of the gun. I know this is not actually in the film, but I wanted to demonstrate the understanding of the morpher technique.

I made the seat by using the tube object and modifying this to give it the effect of a round sofa like it is in the movie, I did not get a chance to give the seat a nice enough texture as this was a rushed scene, should I have had more time, I would have given the chair a leather effect like in the movie, and the table a metallic effect. But I did manage to make a plane and give it a nice scenery material to put behind the glass. This worked well in the scene and looks effective.

Very newsreader like

Introduction Scene & Underground Scene

Bullet through

Camera panning

Walking in

For the introduction scene, I made the barrel of the gun by creating a tube, converting to an editable poly and twisting the vertexes round to make a realistic spiral effect. Once I had the effect, I coloured different parts of the inside to make the barrel look more effective. This I thought worked well and looked just like the classic bond introduction scene.
To animate this scene, I had to make the barrel of the gun pan round 90 degrees on a pivot at the end of the barrel, this was because I was having difficulty turning the character once he had stopped. Also, for the camera in the scene, I made the camera attach to the end of the barrel of the gun and follow the barrel panning around, this again, almost looks like the classic bond introduction scene.

Car appears now (still invisible in render)

Character walking in

Stops walking (car is not visible in render)

Concrete platform arrives (cannot see the car in render)

For the Underground scene, I made the surroundings around the imported walking character, I used the tube tool again to give the effect of the underground tunnel. I imported the Aston Martin model I created and made a concrete platform to rest the car on. Once the tunnels were textured, I made the character walk into view again and brought the concrete block forward revealing the car. I felt this looked ok, but after looking at the trailer again, I decided to make the car appear from nothing, just like it does in the actual film. So I selected the keyframes when the concrete block was in view and then selected the car and changed every other keyframe to make the car’s visibility 0 and 1 repeated. This then gave the car a fantastic flashing effect which looked not too far different to the actual film effect.

Car Chase

Ice particles

Ice kick up

Particles

For the car chase scene in the trailer, I could not afford to use any more time up on starting a new model completely for the Jaguar, so I slightly modified the roof, front grill and added missiles from the Aston Martin model , and changed the colour to green. I wanted the scene to be as much like the movie as possible, but I found that spinning the car and keeping it all in time, and including an explosion was too complicated. So I added a few assets of my own that I thought worked very well in all.

Snow Particle System

To make the scenery though, I made a few planes so that the scene wouldn't look too black and have random spots of darkness on what should be an nice bright scene. So I added a sky to the planes and to one plane I added a scene of some ice from the Antarctic. This worked well alongside the pieces of ice I created and put in front of the image in an attempt to make the image seem more three dimensional. I added an ice texture too and I also added this to the scenery flooring. I also added some snow by using the particle systems, this was very simple to use as it just created a patch of where it would form snow, this was editable and could be changed in aspects of size, shape of snow, amount of snow. I considered using the blizzard instead of the snow as I thought it would look good, but in the end I went with the snow as it looks more subtle, and also there wasn't any snow in this scene in the movie anyway.

To make the cars chase, I made them move by using keyframes, this worked well, until one thing was changed and it either made everything else in the scene work differently, or not work at all. So after a while of discussion with Richard, I decided to make the cars follow paths. This took the mind back to the path tutorial. This made things a lot easier to control, when I wanted the cars to drift and swing out the back of the car, it was easier to do and looked a lot smoother.

So I decided that when the cars swung out, it would look more realistic if the drivers seemed to find it difficult to regain control of the car. This meant all I would have to do was to swing the back of the car back in just slightly too much and then bring them straight again. Also, when the cars swung out, I thought it would look impressive if the car tyres skidding could kick up a fair amount of snow/ice. I did this using the particle system's super spray feature. This was also fairly simple to set up and sustain. The system automatically has a default spray system in place when it is first set up, so the first things to be edited were to direct and position the spray, and where the spray was coming from, once the spray was being generated from the tyre, I needed to find out what keyframe the spray needed to be started, that is also on the default settings, but I set the spray to not start until the car was starting to skid across the ice. When the car seemed to lose control and the back of the car swung out, I set the particles to spray out, and to add effect, I put the camera in a position that the particles would seem like they are going to hit the camera.

The particles I used were the ‘tetra’ particles, this, I felt made them look more realistic than the stars, triangles or mesh.

Moving the character

Rigged with envelopes completed

Unrenderable biped

Walking animation

Once I had finished rigging the biped and editing the envelopes to make sure the skin looked realistic, I made an attempt to clothe the character, but this didn’t work too well and the clothes seemed to go through the skin completely. So in the end I just added materials to the character’s mesh and made it look like he was wearing a suit for the underground scene in the station, and just a sweater for the scene in which he is sitting down holding the gun.
Once this was complete, to save time, I used a preset animation tool on 3ds max, and set the character to walk. I used the ‘walk2loop’ animation and I felt this looked effective. Thanks to the preset animation.
On both the introduction scene and the underground scene, I needed to make the character stand still after walking, this wasn’t too bad, but I noticed that some of the envelopes had not stuck together and some of the vertexes were pulling away from the character, once this problem was resolved, the character was walking and stopping to a standstill successfully.

Alloy Wheels

Final wheel

Selecting the spoke pattern

Creating the spokes

Final Rendered Chrome Alloy

Making the alloy wheels for the Aston Martin was actually a lot easier than I first imagined it would be, firstly all I needed to do was to make a stumpy cylinder and create more sides. I also needed to convert this to an editable poly.

To start editing the cylinder, I had to delete one half of the cylinder. I then selected the outside edge of the face with no cap on it, and set to extruding it to make a tyre like shape. Next was to extrude the edge towards the middle, this made the pattern of an alloy. Then to make the pattern I wished for, I selected the polys that I wouldn't need and extruded them too.

Once the pattern of the spokes was starting to take shape, the next task was to delete the selected polys, and fill the holes they had left, this was done by using the bridge tool. This completed the spokes on the alloy. Towards the centre of the alloy, I had left a circular shape, this was to complete the look of the alloy, and is to look like the central part of the alloy where the wheel is screwed on. To make the design and to make it look like the wheel had sections where it was screwed on, I used the same technique to select the pattern as I had done for the creation of the spokes. These polys were too then extruded, but not deleted on this occasion.

Nearly done now, and the tyre needs to be completed, so I selected it and used a symmetry modifier for it, I needed to fill in a few holes that the spokes had left, but that was done simply but using the create tool under the poly section.

Finally, I selected the spokes and added a turbo smooth modifier to them and also a chrome material foudn on the arc and design tools. This gave the wheels a very good effect and made them look like the belong on an Aston Martin.  The one issue I had was with the tyres, this I found was too difficult and time consuming seeing as I had spent too long focusing on the Aston and needed to make other models. So for the tyre I just added a black material.

these pictures show the envelope tutorial, this was a success personally, I understood how to work around the colours and where these need to be positioned. This tutorial was very helpfull and this model will be the blueprint for my James Bond model, the envelopes were a success and the movements looked very impressive.

Head Animation

In the head animation tutorial, once the objects were made into editable polys they were much easier to modify. The grow tool came in handy too as it seemed to know which polys are necessary to be selected and moved. This helped when moving the mouth of my character, also I used the same tool for moving the tops of the eyes and the cheeks.

My character has a suspicious, thinking expression to him, I thought this would be an interesting expression to try and animate. Pulling the same face yourself helps a lot too!!

In this image I had modified the eyes, I just raised one eyebrow and lowered the other to create a classic 'David Beckham' look.

In this image i have scrunched up his nose and raised one side of his mouth, obviously, if one is changed, the other often works in line with it. So when I moved part of the nose, the corner of the mouth moved up slightly too. This look gives a sort of, nervous expression. Again, using your own face to make the same expression helps.

This is the original model with turbo smooth applied, the next task would be to add hair I guess!

Research Board

Above is my research board for the 30 second trailer I am producing, I have decided to model the Aston Martin Vanquish/DB9 the Jaguar XKR, the parachute for when the character is flying over London, and I will be producing the scene when Bond shatters the glass on the flooring and falls through. I will hope to produce the scene when the Aston Martin is invisible on the ice and suddenly appears once the Jaguar has passed.

Parachute

The next model I have created for the trailer is a parachute, this is going to be used for the air scene hovering over london. The parachute doesn't have much detail at the moment, but this will be done at a later date with the textures and animation.

Aston Martin DB9

The Aston Martin was the most difficult to model by far. I started modelling the car at first by using a box and trying to modify it to become a nice smooth shape, but this I found was too difficult. So I searched for an easier, more efficient way, then I found the most difficult way of all, (although I wouldn't notice this until later). I have started modelling the car on a poly by poly technique, this was very fiddly and time consuming. And I haven't got it completely smooth yet, but that is to come with lots of little tweaking.

The glass for the windows is the same material, I wanted to make the glass so it was just one big poly, but this meant the shape of the frame, once mesh smoothed, would go all jagged. So this was just avoided by putting in more polys. The windows are slighty blacked out for the time being, although I am tempted to keep the effect as I feel it looks good as the light relects off it.

The lights were quite enjoyable to make, I simply made a cone, extruded the end and made it smaller, and then created a bulb which has a chrome material interior and the glass front, this wasn't too difficult to produce but I feel they look very effective, especially in the car. Also something that wasn't too difficult was the front grill, this was just a series of cylinders arranged correctly. I feel these also look very effective.

I have put wheels and tyres on the car, but these do not look very good as they are just make-shift ones for the time being, I will be improving these with proper alloys so I will be uploading them once they look right.

P99 Handgun Model

The P99 handgun was the first model I produced for the final assignment, this was because it was a smaller place to start and was not too difficult to produce using the simple primitive shapes. The most difficult part of the gun was the hand grip, I managed to get around this by using a cylinder, but reducing the amount of sides to 5. This made the hand grip easier to model and manipulate to the shape I required.

The trigger was also a difficult part to create as it is a strange shape, but by giving a rectagle shape enough segments, it then moved in the directions I wanted it to much easier.

Leaf Tutorial

Tutorial three required us to produce lifelike and realistic leaves. This would be using the textures and importing images.
The two tools which were most important in creating the texture were the 'Bump' and 'Speculat Level' tools, these were important to use as they worked together in levels to create the perfect texture of a leaf. Firstly for this tutorial though, I modified an image of a leaf to make it easier to use later in 3D Studio.

Once the texture was imported into 3D studio, the image was too bright towards the centre of the image, this was because of the black and white image I used. To rectify this problem, I modfied the image again and made the leaf grey, this then made the plane easier to modify in 3D studio.

Once the leaf was textured correctly, the next job was to edit the shape by using single vertexes and soft selection. This allowed me to give the leaf a curved shape. 

Once rendered, the leaves looked even more realistic.

Final Project

For my final project, the 30 second trailer I will be producing will be from the film Die Another Day, this is because I enjoyed watching the film very much and there are two cars which will be entertaining to attempt to make, also there are some good action scenes which will be a challenge, but also fun should they turn out the way I hope they will.

The car chase scene was my personal favourite in the movie, but I think the most difficult scene to produce will be the final image of the glass shattering.