Building CGU - Counter Gnome Unit

I had done some sketches for the basic layout of CGU and went with a simple one, which also had areas that fans of 24 would recognise. Using the basic shapes in 3D Max, I created a rough guide for how I wanted CGU to look. I then added more detail by editing the polygons to create objects such as keyboards or moniters. Here is the untextured scene:

After gathering the textures from the 3D Max library and free images of the internet, I began texturing the scene. After adding some specular and bump effects, I added some advanced lighting and the scene was ready to animate in:

Title Sequence

To get a break from 3D Studio Max, I decided to have a stab at creating the title sequence for my project. I had not had much experience with Adobe After Effects, but knew that it was used in industry and is a very powerful tool. I was told by a tutor that After Effects would be the best program to create my title sequence. In 24, the style of the title font is in digit form (like on a clock).



I played with the software for a bit trying to discover what did what and eventually started piecing together the sequence. First of all, I got hold of the sound clip that went with the sequence. I then added this to the timeline ready to start animating to. I found that I could randomly generate flickers on the bars using some simple code. I then set the random flickers to keyframes so I could manually edit them to make the bars gradually get brighter.

Spade Run Test

Rigging

I had attempted to rig models in the past, but found it very difficult and often, the joints didn’t work like I wanted them to.

Through Google searches I found a lot of rigging tutorials but unfortunately, they all seem to do use different methods. It got suggested to me that I should try rigging with a biped so I found a decent tutorial to righ with that method and tried it on my spade.

First, I had to remove all mesh smoothes and attach all of the parts of my spade together to form one object (not to group them as I had done in the past). The tutorial also said to leave out the eyes, as they can be attached later.

Next, I had to use the biped tool to draw a skeleton over the top of it. I then removed the arms (as my spade has none) and resized the different bones so that they fit around the spade.

I then added a physique modifier to the spade and attached the biped. Amazingly, it only needed a small amount of adjusting and the spade was able to be fully animated. What once would have taken me several hours only took several minutes!

I also found that by using a biped bone structure within my models, I could use pre-animated walk, run and jump cycles. (See ‘Spade Run Test' video).

I used exactly the same process on all the other tools and the gnomes so they were fully set up and ready to animate.

Creating the Gnomes

I concentrated on creating the gnomes next. They are to be the equivalent of the terrorists in 24. I decided to create one model and duplicate it, making minor adjustments and changing the colour of their clothes to make them differ.

I decided to build the gnome from the boots up. Usually when you model a character you would start with the head, but I wanted to keep the model simple and therefore the head would just be a sphere. I chose to start with the boots, as they would be slightly more complicated than the rest of him.

Here are the seperate stages:

Creating The Tools

Over the weekend, I modeled the rest of the tools. In the same way that I modelled the spade, I created a trowel, fork, hoe and rake. To keep them looking the same I gave them all eyes in the same way as I did with the spade. I also experimented with positioning the eyes in different positions but they ended up looking odd.

My Garden at This Point

Implementation - Creating the Rest of the Garden

Starting with the shed (which is going to be the garden equivalent of CTU from 24), I decided to complete the rest of the environment ready to animate in. Using the shed in my own garden as a guideline, I built the 3D shed similar to how it would be built in real life; the seperate side panels, roof then extra features such as the doors and windows.

Next, I added two strips of soil down the sides of the garden, ready to put flowerbeds in. I cut out a square in a corner of the lawn and added a patio texture onto a box that I put into the space. I then modelled two benches with box modelling and extrusion and put them on the newly created patio.

Again using my own garden as a reference point, I created two differing fence panels and duplicated them around three of the garden edges between fence posts.

I had to create a house front for the edge left over, so I created a box and extruded out holes for the windows and patio doors. I then created the window and door frames separately and slot them in the gaps. I then textured the walls with a brick texture and created tiles for the roof. Unfortunately, I had to create a false reflection in the windows of the garden, as adding a reflection map made the render times per frame ridiculous. I did this by creating a snapshot of the garden from the point of view from the windows. I then took this into photoshop, added a sky background and a gaussian blur. I turned up the brightness slightly then added the finished texture onto the windows with some specular and gloss added. Wa la, a garden window reflection.

All that was missing from the garden now was plants, bushes and trees. I attempted create some flowers for the flowerbeds, but they looked too stiff and lego-like and were obviously duplicated. I know that in industry, trees and plants would usually be generated with a plugin.

One example of this is the scene in The Incredibles (on the making of it) where Mr Increbible tries to get a cat out of a tree. For that scene all the trees in the background were generated to save time.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the facilities to do this, so I thought it was justifiable to download freely available plants from http://www.turbosquid.com to fill out the rest of garden.

Implemetation - Creating Grass

I needed to create a realistic looking garden for my animation. The only way I could think of doing this was to create the strands of grass in 3D, as opposed to using a texture on a flat or even bumpy plane.

After a lot of searching, I found a tutorial that suggested creating four blades of grass and randomly duplicating them across a surface. Unfortunately, to make the grass look realistic, I found a needed a lot of it. I had to make a compromise here with quality vs. render times. I found 100,000 blades seemed to give the best result, especially where the grass was being viewed close up.

Implementation - Attaching Eyes

I realised whilst doing the lip syncing that the eyes needed to move up and down with the top lip (shown in the image above) as the spade spoke. The problem I had achieving this was that when I linked the eyes to lips, they would stay in the same position, even though the lips would move.

The only way I could think of to get around this problem was to attach the eyes so that they were part of the same object as the handle. This had a major drawback in that I couldn’t texture the eyes after they had been attached with a UV map. This meant I could not make the eyes move or blink at all.

What I needed was a way of linking an object (the eyes) to a polygon on top of the lips, so that if the polygon moved the eyes would follow. After explaining my problem to one if my past 3D tutors, he got back to me the next day with the solution. Buried away under animation constraints in 3D Studio Max was a tool to do exactly what I needed.

This allowed me to select an exact polygon and attach the eyes to it. I then rotated and moved them to make them central by moving pivot point. I repeated the process with every tool that had a mouth.

Implementation - Spade Creation and Mouth Movement

I had already created the spade which was going to be my main character, Jack Trowel using the software 3D Studio Max. I used box modelling and shape deforming to make all of the sections then grouped them all to make one object.

To create the mouth movement I used morph targets from four other models with different mouth shapes. Once I had set them up, I could use sliders to move the mouth using any combination of the four shapes.