Real Media Version 15mb. (low quality)
Download the Real Media Player here. DivX Version 21mb. (medium quality)
Download the DivX codec here.
If you are having difficulties with the DivX codec, goto divx.com.
NOTE: All terms used for this project is with 3D Studio MAX. Some things, such as the "Loft" would be called a "Extrude" in Softimage and Maya, while an Extrude in MAX is giving thickness to a shape or spline.
Welcome to my Mage Warrior Project page. The project was started from scratch, on August 1st, and ended on September 12th. It's 5:11 minutes long, including credits. The movie and sound files took up 1.2 gigs of hard drive space, uncompressed at 320x240 resolution, which isn't production quality. The MAX files including textures, in total took up 650 megs of space. This includes though, multiple versions of the same model animated to do various things (such as walking, running, or jumping). The model, Sakura, took up the most amount of space due to the complexity of her animations. The clothing that she wears is animated on the vertex level. Every single vertex of her clothes are animated and are made sure they don't pass through the body using Dynamics calculations. A real pain in the butt!
Currently, I'm working on porting the entire project's avi files to video. To do that, I need a PVR which I luckily have access to at school. But to do that, I have to up the resolution of the avi files to more than twice the size. This means a lot of pixillation. Of course, that's only if the player stretches it out in realtime. So I've decided to take the sequence and basically resize it with some resampling happening to "fuzz it out" so it's not pixillated. I did a test and it looks pretty good! I've also re-done the credits, and am working on adding modelling images and still images to the end of my demo-reel. At the end of May, I should also have a Maya/Soft|Image demo to go with it.
The city scene took 6 days to construct, and was also the very first thing that I decided to make. All the buildings are done using polygons. I took a simple polygon shape and cloned them many times upwards to make each floor, and then I extruded a shape all the way to the top for the windows of each floor. I also did straight texture mapping for some of them. All the buildings were then grouped and cloned to make the city bigger. Then they were rendered on the side view, and extra "panels" were added to the edges of the city with the rendered city textures on them to make the city look even bigger than it really is. The Crystler building was constructed using mulitple boxes, booleans, extruded splines and cylinders, and then grouped all together. Little did I know, there was already a pre-constructed Crystler building online! If I had known that, it would have saved me so much time!
After constructing the city, I built a Hind helicoptor, missiles and all, and did a nice optimization on the poly-count. The chain gun is actually made out of extruded triangles instead of cylinders or boxes to save geometry and rendering time. The animation was simple. I put a box on a path, and made the box bank so it would follow almost like a roller-coaster. I then parented the the Hind to the box, and animated the propeller spinning and cycled the animation. The camera followed on a separate path, while the camera interest was parented to the box.
I next built the river and waterfall scene. The waterfall is a simple particle system, using Super Spray. I put up 3 Super Sprays and bound them to a gravity space warp. I stretched the particles and used motion blur to make it look less stringy. The water was made using a patch grid, and deformed to a path. A noise modifier was applied to it to make the water as well as a displacement modifier. The ground is a displacement map, as well as the mountains. It took me quite some time to figure it all out. Especially making the water look right. The Sakura blossoms are just instanced geometry on a particle system (mainly a Particle Emitter) that followed the same path as the camera, just situated slightly above it. That way I wouldn't have to span a huge particle emitter across the entire scene.
Somewhere along the way, I built my main character model whom I decided to call "Sakura" probably because of the intro environment she was in. The head was the hardest to model, because at that time, I had only modelled one head, and this head was supposed to look more "anime". I didn't know the proper techniques to make an anime head. I tried sourcing online, using my own painted figurines as reference, and after trashing about 6 heads, I finally got the hang of it. Now making heads is a snap for me. The body was simply an extruded shape, with segments, and deformed using multiple layers of lattices. The arms were simple stretched spheres which was used to hold the attached cloth in place. The cloth is made using a simple patch, and "sewn on" and animated using deformation and dynamics. The character is segmented, and forward animated. No bones or anything. You can't notice the seams because I tried by best to hid them. The only thing I had most problems with were the kneecaps, but I flexed them and straightened them while modelling so that it won't show too much seams. I also made the material on it self-illuminating so that it wouldn't receive too much shadows, which is a telltale sign of seams. Her hair is a sphere plopped on her head, with a lofted ponytail. The bangs are also lofted. Later, the hair was animated using a deformation space warp with noise to simulate wind. The hands were constructed from polygons and attached via a "wristband" to hide the seam connecting it to the arm. The wristband was deformed vertex by vertex in the animation so that it would not go through the hand.
At this point, I started to model the lobby that the action was going to take place in. I wanted it to look as much as the Matrix as I could remember (I only watched the movie in the theatres, so I couldn't recall exactly how the building was designed. But it was probably better that I made it look a little original anyway). I planned in advance of exactly what was going to take place in the lobby. For each of the pillars, I left one panel loose so that I could blow it up. I also made the floor tiles in a particular manner so certain panels would be able to explode.
I set up spacewarps literally everywhere so the exploding chips wouldn't fly through the walls and pillars. The explosion itself took a bit to set up. I had to tweak the camera lens in order to get the whole thing to fit. Once I did, I added a second panel underneath to explode as well. Sort of a "dirt" effect". I made an extra large piece intentionally fly through the camera for that WOW effect. The hardest part of the explosion was the smoke and dust coming up, and flying towards the camera. Tweaking that was INSANE! At first, I thought that using the post effect "fog" would work, but it took way too long to render. I decided to use particles, and map a noise map on each particle panel. But tweaking the noise map to look right, and finally animating the noise map took more effort than I needed. The problem was rendertime versus being able to see the smoke. I had to find that small margin of tolerance where the viewer can see the smoke, but not bring the computer to its knees. The less particles, the faster it will render, but will be harder to see. Turning the opacity way up only made the smoke look unrealistic. Back