Particles

After all my modelling was done, my next task was to make a wave of dust blow across the wasteland.
I didnt know anything about this kind of things so I had to lookup many tutorials on the following topics

• Particle emmiters
• Gravity fields
• Air fields
• Collisions
• texturing

This is a VERY basic first try.

To  make it look like dust I had to play around with the gravity turbulence and air fields, they are like controllers you use to move the particles around, first thing I did is to make an air field to blow the sand across the field, I animated it going back and forth to duplicate the wave motion, I also made another one at the middle to make it look even more like a wave, next I added a gravity field, but this just made it bounce around and look silly , so I had to turn it down but now some of the particles where flying off, so I added another gravity field just above the wave to bring down any unruly particles.

Last thing I did was to add a turbulence field to give some nice randomness to it.

unfortunately once the particles where imported it added 15minutes to each frame!! so there was no way it could be used.

Modelling

First thing I had to model was a farm house, for the first (happy) video I blocked it out using planes, used extruded cubes for the beams, and deleted faces for the windows, the roof I made by making a polygon plane, with arround 50 lines through it, then selcted every other one, and using the move tool moved it up a bit. nice and simple.

I just kept adding little details, although I kind of had to stop myself after a while as most of the work would be done by texturing , as the house wasnt the focus of the film, it probably wouldnt even have much screen time.

The next thing I had to model was a tree for the first scene, I made it look a bit cartoony as it couldnt be too ralistic,for the first models leaves, I used polygon planes and added a texture of a leaf, which I got from google, then took into photoshop, and added transparency , then I duplicated it various times all arround the branches.

My main task for this project was the rose, The rose had to be ultra realistic , and it was the centre piece of the film, so before I even attempt to model it I spent about 2 or 3 days just looking at pictures of roses  and real roses (luckily it was rose season because they where everywhere and I could get them for free :D). 

The hardest thing was figuring out a pattern in which to place the petals, and after looking I sort of got a feeling that they grew from opposite ends of the flower in a sort of rotary fashion, and they grew in sort of rings, from the inside, they also overlap the one before and are below the one after, it got really complicated when I got into the inner petals so I just left it and made a bud.

Once I was happy with the arrangements I made the petals curved so they were not just flat plains.

Next step was to make the petals 3D, so I simply selected all the faces, and extruded, then I scaled the new faces outwards a bit, giving them depth, I also added a simple red shader to help me visualise the whole thing.

Now I had all the petals sorted, I could concentrate on making it look withered and aged. I combined all the petals into one mesh, and using the soft select tool I first scaled in the top of all the petals, and scaled out the bottom to make it look like a bud, after this I started to 'peel it' and take the outer petals and pull them outwards.

After I started to curl the tips of the petals, this gave the impression they had lost some moisture and where curling as they dried out, I also started working on the inner petals to make them more compact.

Last detail I added was various holes in the petals, either made by insects or by the petal simply falling off, it added to the decaying look.

Story boards

After deciding on the main idea, we each decied to make a story board of how it would basically go, as the actualy story was pretty much decided, I focused more on camera andgles and lighting.

Ideas

First tak was to find a Suitable competition or client to enter/work for, after some searching I found two decent ones, the first was a competition that Virgin was doing, and the other one was by a website called Quiet man. The virgin competition was to make a 40s-2min film, the only restrictions beign that it had to be suitable for children (no killing drugs sex). The quiet man competition was to make a 20 second animation in response to this poem "Does the sun miss the flower, as much as the flower misses the sun?".

In the end my group decided to go for the flower project I had found, we decided to each come up with our own different ideas on how we would interpret the poem.

I came up with this story-board.


1.The sun is taking a break from all its hard work, it goes to the pool and is chilling out having a drink. he lifts up his eyebrow in shock, then lifts up his sunglasses to get a better view of something we cant see yet, as he does this the song "Peaches" by the Stranglers starts playing.

We see his eyes, they look a bit hurt from what they are seeing, we see a quick flash on the screen, of a metallic hand, resting on a green bum with a bikini on. we hear the music again, the camera zooms out to show us an heat lamp man , with two flower girls on either side (he's pimpin' ) we see the full body shot of the three of them walking down by the side of the pool having a laugh , while the sun is left hurt and looking like a mug because the lamp took his girls away from him, he's not needed anymore.


Also with this one:

2. Darkness, we hear a switch being flipped, and row upon row of fluorescent   lights come on, the camera is looking at the ceiling and slowly pans down. and we see shelves with flowers on them. with grow lights above them, the shelves stretch on into the horizon, you are in a massive warehouse.

you hear the sound of an electric engine coming from far off, its getting closer. the camera jumps to where the sound is and it is a sort of robotic arm on wheels. it is inspecting the flowers, everytime it looks at a beautyfull flower, is shows a green light and moved on, but then it comes across a slightly ugly flowr, and a red light comes on, and a laser incinerates the flower, it is then picked  up and thrown away




Seeing as the limit for the competition was 20 seconds of footage, and our uni brief said minimum of 40 seconds, we decided to make 2 20 second videos. In the end we chose Doms ideas which where:

1) Happy story.

Cartoony style- A sun flower seed starts to grow, we see it become a bud then the flower...flowers :D
this will require the use of blend shapes and a lot of work in the modelling side.


2)Sad story.

Realistic style- In a sun blasted wasteland a Single rose is trying to grow, the but the sun is so intense it simply sets it alight and the flower disintegrates. this one will require a LOT of work on the modelling, as its meant to look as life like as possible, also a lot of work must go into the texturing and especially the lighting, I think the lighting is what will make this work succed if done properly.