Ok this week i have created some mood boards to help with my animation ideas. Just by searching google i was able to find many images of example idents. Idents usualy are seen between shows and many broadcast stations go to great lengths to produce them, remember this is the world of advertisement. A way for the station or network to identify themselves.

For this assignment i want to be as creative as possible and delve furthr into the world of 3ds max. So therefore have decided to create a television broadcasting network called "Smash TV" and somehow represent this in 3 different animations. for some extra ideas i searched smash up in a thesaurus and found some more examples of the word smash.

Perheaps one animation could show a car hitting a wall, that would link the smash part, another idea was a TV being smashed or thrown from a window then smash on the floor or show my logo when the TV hits the ground. For the third animation i want to try my hand at character studio in 3ds max, i would like to try to create a low polygon character and then have him move around the stage kicking and punching and maybe at the end smash the camera filming him,

here are some mood boards to help me be more creative:

MoodBoard 1

MoodBoard 2

MoodBoard 3

Week 2 Semester 2

This was the week we learned about constraint paths and a lesson in which i learned a great deal. Constraint paths let you move an object or camera along a path you have already created and it can follow that path in a realistic way. Or it lets an object like an airplane, follow this path banking every turn it must make, which is great for those realistic animations one wants to make.

In the following lesson we made a simple house with various rooms, built a constraint path from a line spline and got a camera to move along it weaving its way through the rooms of the house.

The house was built from walls all the same size, I converted some of the walls into sub object mode and then selected some polygons and just deleted them for the doors and windows.

Lit the areas with a few Omni lights drew a line through the house and lowered that into position.

Created a camera and with that selected went to: Animation, -> constraints, -> constraint path.

You know when you have done it right because the camera suddenly has an attachable line to it just select the line and the camera and line become one. Then we can just set up the timeline and we’re off, my animation was complete.

Here it is below Please take a look and maybe comment?

Week 1, Semester 2 2009

This week we were introduced into the wonderful world of animation, I have been really looking forward to this part. There are various ways to animate in 3ds max and we were shown a few of them in this week’s lesson.

The simplest way is by adding key frames to the timeline at the bottom of the screen and moving your object, this was by far the simplest way to animate but it does have its limitations.

Next we were shown the curve editor, and this part started to get really confusing. Moving your objects along one of the x, y, and z axis is straightforward and simple but ass soon as another axis was added, navigating the curve editor got really hard. And when the last axis was added it took me a while to understand anything that was going on. More tutorials are needed for this part!

The dope sheet is another tool for making alterations in your animation but as my animation was just a ball bouncing around the screen nothing had to be changed here.

Finally we were shown some of the uses of the dummy tool, and how it can be linked to an object so one can move them about. For example if you had many objects together and rotating one of them without clicking on something near by was getting to be a problem, you could just link the object in question with a dummy object, so you can make those final adjustments unhindered. I do think one might be able to move, rotate scale etc multiple objects too so quite a useful tool.