Camera Techniques

Before I continue with this post, I will be referring to my 'Storyboard' post a fair amount, so here is a direct link to this page: http://tomswonderfulassignmentblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/storyboard.html

In the first lecture after the completion of our 3D models, we studied how camera techniques are used in media to portray and display different things. A large majority of these could potentially come in use for the creation of my Animation.

Camera techniques can be split into 3 main areas: Angles, Shot sizes and Movement

Angles: A cameras angle is used to give a different feeling to a scene, a birds-eye view can be used to display a location to the viewer quickly and establish the feeling quickly, while an over-the-shoulder view is used to make the viewer see a scene from a certain characters perspective.
Another interesting angle that you can use is called the high-angle shot. While this is ultimately similar to the birds-eye view, it look down into the scene at a slight angle rather than directly from the top. This allows the viewer to see everything thats happening in a scene. I use this angle in frame 6 of my storyboard to easily display the acrobatic movement from the two smaller spaceships.

Shot Sizes: This is what most people would refer to as 'zoom'. A shot size simply refers to how close or far away the camera is from the main focal object. The names of a shot size is very much self-explanatory. A close-up is a really close to the object, probably even taking up the whole shot and is commonly used for showing emotion or other small details. A long shot is when the camera is a long way from the focal point, and is often used to show the scale of an object. I used a mix of both close up and long shot sizes in panel 1 of my storyboard in order to try and convey the imperial destroyer as being an enormous spaceship. I don't yet know if that will translate into the actual animation that well.

Movement: This is what a lot of my shots relied on. Movement is also self-explanatory in that is covers all forms of displacement, rotation and zooming. These can be used to create almost any desired effect, but movement is most effective when used for high-speed sequences or generally any sort of action-based media. I plan on using a lot of movement with my cameras in my animation, Panel 5 of my storyboard is probably the most notable example of this, as the plan is for the camera to start at the front of the imperial destroyer, and then quickly crab/pan towards and beyond the back of it as the other ships fly over/under it. Hopefully, speedy camera movement will create the effect of fast-moving spaceships, or at least appear to move faster than they actually are.

Storyboard

Now that I've finished making my textures models, I now need to move on to the final section: The storyboards!

The storyboarding is necessary for a later part of this module, in which I will be doing a short animation featuring my models.

Text if you cant read my writing:
1: Imperial flies past, camera pans to follow
2: X-wing and headhunter swoop down and toward camera, camera remains static
3: Sprays lasers. pewpewpew
4: Lasers hit imperial. no damage
5: Xwing and headhunter loop over/under imperial
6: Xwing and headhunter loop around and fire more lasers
7: lasers hit booster, it explodes
8: Imperial falls out of sky, Xwing and headhunter fly off into distance, come in from off camera

Model Texturing

Now that we have made our three models, we need to texture them. Texturing is the necessary 'cheery of top' of the modelling that turns a lifeless, but accurate grey-scale model into a fully fledged model of a ship.

There are multiple different ways of texturing the ship, but we're going to be using a mix to get an accurate texture. For this Blog, I will be using my X-wing model to display the methods I'm going to use.

To get the first initial step done, we want to use 'block texturing' first to turn the entire ship into the most accurate 'general' colour. to do this, we need to select the entire ship and select 'Assign New Material'

This sets a new material on the entire ship, it then gives you a whole bunch of texturing options, which I can then edit as necessary. In this case, the most common colour of the ship is a cream/white colour, So we'll change the texture colour to fit that.

Now that the ship as a whole is close to the colour that we want, we just need to add some of the larger colour changes, like the silver nose/cockpit and the Black sections on the turbines. This is done by selecting the desired faces and doing the same 'Assign new material option we used for the whole ship earlier

Just like earlier, we can now change the colour of the texture to suit what we need it to be. in the case of the turbines, we want to change it fully to black. We do the same things with other parts of the ship, and we will end up with something like this

Now that we've got most of the basic colouring done, we can begin to go into detail. To do with, we need to select the faces that we wish to work on. First, I will be choosing the front of the ship, in order to add the red/yellow accents.

To do this, we first must select the faces we want to work on (These being the 3 long, thing faces that make up the front of the ship, the top half only) and selecting 'UV texture editor' and re-arranging the layout so only the 3 necessary faces are on the beige square.

Once we do this, we need to take a 'UV Snapshot' and save the image as a .jpeg file, so we can freely edit it. It was suggested to save it as a .tif file, and then edit it in Photoshop. However, I have absolutely no idea how to utilise photoshop effectively, and therefore decided to edit in paint, sacrificing detail in exchange of easy use.

Once you upload the picture to paint, you should see something similar to what we have in the above screenshot. all you need to do then is edit the picture (without deleted the pre-made border) in order to look similar to the ships original design. for my design it ended up looking like this

Once again, save the image. and we need to import back onto the faces of the model. If Everything has been done properly, the crudely done paint image should map itself perfectly to the model, and it did.

This is everything to the UV mapping. from here all I need to do is repeat this process a few times and then we're all finished!

Using the UV mapping seems convuluted for someone who are largely unused to it, and trying to use photoshop was almost impossible. However, theres always a workaround and workaround I did.

Final designs: