Evaluation

I think we all worked together very well as a group as we all had something else to offer.

We met many times, and used drop box a software on the computer to allow us to upload work to it, so others can see it every time we worked on it. By using this we always kept an eye on what each group member was doing as well as contact through phone and e-mail.

As we were a group of 5 we were lucky that we had a good range of skills, and each person did offer a specific skill, whether it was, video editing, modelling, animating or even the skill of being organised.

The project was very enjoyable, compared with the face module I found this one easier and more fun to do as it wasn't as detailed. I was very Happy with my progress, as I thought my part of the engine was quiet hard. I thought that even thought I couldn't see all the sides of my object i got it to look very much like the photos.

I practised doing the camera angles and hoped to do that, but that was already don't by someone else in the group before I got to do it. I was disappointed that I didn't get to do more, however as I practices it I feel like i could easily do it again.

It took a ridiculous time to render over 20 hours, this was without the ray trace effect on the sea. The ray trace effect on the sea, took in the lighting and made the water and wave effect much much better. If the computer wouldn;t have taken so long to render, we would have kept the ray trace effect in.

We noticed a few problems when watching the rendered version, so with more time we would have fixed them.l However despite these glitches, our main model, the engine was a great success, and I thoroughly enjoyed working as a team to create it.

Group work

On the 28th of October Our group

Scott Ayling

Alex Fricker

Jessica Vile

James Youngs

Matt Franklin

We all went to the Museum Of Power in Langford, to decide which engine we would like to model.At the museum we looked at many different pieces including:

Paxman steam engine, Plane Engines, Car Engines

We eventually chose the Paxman Horizontal Steam Engine we decided on this one for the following reasons:

It looked the most interesting engine there

It was one of the largest to model

It had the most visable moving parts
As we had such a large group we though it would be more challenging to model one of the more complicated pieces.

After we decided to model the Paxman Steam Engine we took loads of different photos to get as many angles on all of the different parts as we could,we could also use this at the end to measure our finished model by.We also took videos to show us how the engine moves, this could help us when modelling.

On our first meeting on the 29th of October we reviewed all the images and video we took at the museum.We then divided the engine up into the 6 main components and then decided who could model which part, taking into account every ones skills.

This is what we decided
Scott - Piston and Case

James - Wheel's There were two wheels which meant one could be made and then cloned.

Jessica - Ball

Matt - Crankshaft

Alex - Box

We set a week to complete this first task.

On our Second meeting on the 5th of November we reviewed what each of the group members did.Overall we were all on time and finished modelling all the parts We then chose what jobs were next to do:
Scott - modelling the dredger

James - backgrounds and title text

Jessica - backgrounds

Matt - Engine

Alex - Engine

We set a limit of 4 weeks to achieve these task.

Our third meeting was on the 12 of November we reviewed what everyone had done so far and made sure everyone was OK, we also got together to give advise and any help that was needed.

We struggled with the current method of creating the waves, so had to re think our ideas.

Our fourth meeting was on the 19 of November we reviewed what everyone had done so far and made sure everyone was OK.There were a few problems that we experienced however, Scott had made the water and as it was such a high resolution using ray trace,when rendering it it took a very long time, as it was so detailed.

We had to make it faster so therefore took the effect off the water, so it now doesn't look as good.
Our Fifth meeting was on the 26 of Novermeber we reviewed what everyone had done, and made sure there weren't any things we had missed.

Scott - finished modelling dredger, and water

Matt - finished engine

Alex - finished engine

Jessica - finished background and text

James - finished background

Matt was then given the task to start making textures for all of the models, the rest of us had to start the animation, common textures used were rust, steel and other types of metals.
Our sixth meeting was on the 3rd of December, animation and textures are nearly finished and ready to render, we started to create the title text "Paxman Horizontal Steam Engine".

On the fourth of December we all got together to check the process and review our model, we tried putting it all together, but realised we had to render them all separately otherwise it would take too long.

We now had to create the camera angles using 3DMax, we had to make sure everything we wanted to be seen was seen by the camera.This was done by creating a path constraight following a spline.

The rendering took around 14 hours which wasn't expected. This was a slight problem as once we began to render we knew we were not able to edit it again. Once the rendering had finished, we bound them all together in Premier Pro. This was much easier then rendering it all together as one.

Practicing Camera angles

To practice using cameras along a constrained path, I am going to use the text I have created for the steam engine title. I would like to be able to look with the camera at the title going around in an arc shape.

Firstly i created an arc, in Splines. I chose this just for example, I could have chosen any shape to work with.

I selected a camera, and used target as the property.I put the camera in the middle facing the text.

Making sure the camera is still selected. I clicked on animation from the tool bar at the top then constraints , then path constraints, I then clicked on the path which is the arc and it automatically assigns itself to it, following the path with the camera.

Now that the constraints path has been set, you can click on the camera and it can move along the path smoothly. So all that needs to be done is animation now.

Title Text

We wanted to show what our model was at the end by writing its name and animating it to come onto the screen once the animation of the dredger had finished. I started off by creating some text on the page. This was found in the create toolbar, and then by selecting shapes, the second option the below options will appear. I typed in what i wanted in the text box, and then changed the properties to my liking. I selected arial bold, I wasn't too worried about the size for now as it would have to be scaled to fit the model anyway once all the parts were joined together.

Once the text is on the screen we want to make it more 3d. To do this I selected all the writing and made it into an editable poly. The colour of the text now changed. Now that its an editable poly by selecting all the writing and making sure the it s set to polygon, below in the settings we can select extrude. this enabled me to make the written as wide as I wanted. I also played around with the other settings to see what looked good, and I ended up using the Outline tool, which gave me the effect that i wanted.

Now it was time to put a map on the text. Before I went into the material editor I wanted to look for the type of maps I would like to place over my text. As we are dealing with an old steam engine, I thought that old rusty steel would be a good image for the text. I searched google for some images that would go well and came across quite a few:





I saved around 5 to my computer and thought I would try theses out individually and see what worked best.


I selected M which is a short cut to the material editor. After selecting a round ball, I selected maps on the material editor. I then went to bitmap and uploaded the image, on both Bump and diffuse colour, as shown below. Instead of searching for your bitmap twice, I just dragged my bitmap from diffuse colour straight down to Bump and it copies it for you.




I found that the colour of the material was very dark, maybe a bit too dark. To fix this I simply, changed diffuse from 100 to 85, this made it slightly lighter and I could see this on the ball at the top of the material editor.





At the moment there is no bump ticked, so by ticking the bump box you can notice that a slight texture is now visible. I changed this from 30, which is was pre set to , to 100. This made the texture much more noticeable.





I noticed that there was a problem to do with the UVW map. When i went into the settings I noticed that the tick box for mapping was set to spherical instead of box. By selecting box it enabled the sides to have the texture on also and once I selected it the error message didn't appear any more.

I still thought couldn't make it look realistic, I realised that when I played around with the settings above, the length, Width, Height and U/V/W tiles I could make it more realistic as I was playing around with the map itself.

Creating the Engine

We got together and divided the engine up into 5 parts to give one to each of us.

Many pictures were taken, however in every picture; there is another bit of the engine in the way. This could be a problem for me as I will never see how it’s put together clearly.

To create my object I opened up 3dsMax, brought up a new page and started with the sphere. To do this I focused on the top view port. I created a sphere, turned it into an editable poly, cloned it and by using the scale tool, made the cloned sphere bigger by dragging up on the mouse.

Now that there are two spheres I cut the top and bottom off the second larger sphere, leaving just the centre of the sphere, in the middle and around the first sphere. This looked like the effect of Saturn, a ring around sphere.

Now to join the first sphere to the second. I selected the top window, and selected vertex (after making them both editable polys) I selected the vertex nearest the sphere in the middle and individually using the snap tool attached each vertex to all the centre sphere verticies. Once I had done this it looked like the image below. I then had to change the view point to bottom, so the bottom of the sphere can be joined as well as the top side. Now I had an image which was like the photo of the steam engine part.

After making it, I found a problem. I played around with this a lot as linking the vertices from the outer ring to the centre sphere was not as easy as I first thought. It looked like it was done correctly until it was smoothed at the end. Even when I tried doing this part again, it was smoothing out too much.

To make the tube that went into the green ball it was a simple tube. At the top of the tube there was a bolt inside. This was created by creating a octagon, and extruding it to make it thicker. This then simply slid into the brown tube, which slid into the top of the green ball.

The image has two tube and balls that stick out of it. Like the image below, These were made by creating one of them, by attaching another tube to a sphere again, I stuck the tube in the centre of the ball , by doing it this way I didn’t have to attach the vertex. I made sure it was exactly in the centre by looking at it from the Top view.

Once one of them was created it could be cloned for the second. The two objects are inside the big ball so I deleted some polygons at both sides of the sphere so they could fit in.

I applied a mesh smooth to the ball.

As well as the ball there needed to be a smooth bottom like a neck. This was very difficult as I couldn't get tit to look smooth for a while. I created a tube, and made it thicker at the top by using the scale tool, and I made it go thinner in the middle then got it to get slighter bigger as the base. This was fiddly, yet when I got it in the right position, using the snap to and attach tool I made it look like the tube was attached to the sphere, and I was rather pleased with it.

This is what it looked like when I put the right colours on the objects and put the tubes through the gaps in the big ball.

For the next part I had to create the bit that join together. This was done by many tubes and rectangles. The rectangle below when smoothed using nurms, and mesh smooth, made the exact look ~I was going for. This took a lot of time to realise, and was after alot of playing about, with iterations etc. This is the before:

and this is the after:

As you can see this technique makes the shape look much better and exactly what I was going for.

I struggled with creating this part :

For the next shape, I created a large square, and cut it up into many sections. This allowed me to cut parts of it out and re attach the vertex of needed parts together. This object was very hard to see as compared with the other parts this is the smallest part to create, so being amongst all the bigger part, when moving , the pictures we took weren't getting it all as good as if it was stopped, and we could have got much nearer to it.

The last piece of my object was more simple objects, there was a box below which was made by creating a place, and rounding of the corners. I then cloned it so there were two faces, and joined the two faces together by creating the two sides. I found the attach and snap tool very useful when doing this.

For the bottom legs, I did the same as earlier, I needed rounded corners to a L shaped object.I created a L shape using A Place and Extruding it. I made it into many segments so I could play around with it. I then added a Mesh Shooth and gave it 5 iterations, this is what gave it its smoothness, in the image below you can see the difference between both the smoothed, and normal .

I used more tubes which go into my L shapes these in the pictures were like poles.

Tools I used the most

I used the attach tool alot when editing images and puttign them together. I made every object I created in to an editable poly, and mesh smoothed every object apart from the tubes (used as poles)

Paxman Engine

After visiting the Museum, and looking at all of the things they offered, the group and I decided that the Paxman engine was the best choice for us all as there is 5 in our group which means we should have more to do.

We looked at the " Paxman Horizontal Compound Steam Engine" and this looked perfect for us. However there wasn't too much information about it, but this would work to our advantage as we could help this by showing it with our animation in its own environment.

The engine was supplied to King and company and was despatched to Zurich on the 7th of July 1892 where it was fitted to a floating dredger, on one of the Swiss lakes and used to drive the dredging gear.