United3dArtists Archive

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 24 Jan 2011, 03:39

The past few weeks I've been using the 3DBuzz Max Fundamentals course videos to learn GMax. GMax is a free limited version of 3DSMax version 4 that was made for game content creation. It has no renderer and I was thinking of using the Open Arena game as a renderer. GMax has a gamepak that lets it write to the Quake III format and Open Arena is like an open source version of Quake III.

The first project is an animated bouncing ball. This is done except for the rendering.

The second project is much bigger. A pair of F-14 jets take off from a carrier and blow up a target on the high seas. I've modeled the animatics for the aircraft carrier and the jet. The image above is the completed jet model that will be animated in the final scene. The next lesson is modeling the aircraft carrier.

Tiles · Post by **Tiles** » 24 Jan 2011, 07:37

Nice one. But isn`t GMax a bit too outdated to toy around with it nowadays?

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 24 Jan 2011, 15:41

Tiles wrote:Nice one. But isn`t GMax a bit too outdated to toy around with it nowadays?

You would think so, but surprisingly it's not too bad. I had to change several keyboard shortcuts to match 3DSMax and it's definitely lacking some tools, but I can follow almost all of the steps in the tutorial. The most noticeable things missing are no loop selection, no ring selection, no insert ring loop function and no bridge tool. The snapping modes don't work as well as 3DSMax and the object move widget is not as good. Overall it is not as good as 3DSMax but it works the same way. I'll be ready for the next 30 trial from autodesk.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 31 Jan 2011, 03:07

Started the aircraft carrier. At the moment it doesn't look much different than the animatic version and in fact it is being made using the animatic model as a starting point.

Also shown is the animatic F14 jet made prior to the regular F14 model.The jet and it's animatic were 2 distinct models. The animatic was a polygon model and the F14 started as a collection of curves that were skinned and then refined with polygon modeling techniques.

I've given up on the idea of using Open Arena as a rendering engine for the first project, the talented ball. The Quake III engine doesn't seem to have an easy way to just play a vertex animation. It might still work out for the second project since there is no vertex animations in it.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 05 Feb 2011, 19:47

Working on the tower and just finished the guard rails. I can't get a better image because the wireframe display is chunky and there is no renderer for GMax.

I was able to compile the OpenArena source and I found some work by someone who makes it possible to do cut scenes with the quake code. So I might still be able to use it as a kind of render engine.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 07 Feb 2011, 06:13

Still moving forward. Did a little bit of modeling and started copying the text for the Quake 3 single person game for cut scene creation. I like that GMax/3DSMax has the ability to render a curve with thickness and then convert that thickness to a mesh.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 12 Feb 2011, 03:48

That's it for the carrier. Next model is the target that gets blown up.

v3rd3 · Post by **v3rd3** » 12 Feb 2011, 12:52

Really nice work clintonman... please keep adding the wire screens it helps us noobs better understand good modelling practice.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 13 Feb 2011, 00:17

v3rd3 wrote:Really nice work clintonman... please keep adding the wire screens it helps us noobs better understand good modelling practice.

Here is what the wireframe looks like in GMax. GMax wireframe has a lot of dashed lines and chunkiness so there is no way to get a good looking image, even close up like this.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 14 Feb 2011, 03:19

Started target model which will be some kind of ocean or oil platform. Mostly a bunch of cylinders all stuck together.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 14 Feb 2011, 19:03

Oil rig target model is done. In the tutorial they used a couple of tools found in the extended tools section of Max, but GMax only has the basic tools. They used a tool called L-ext which makes "L" shaped beams and they used a stair making tool. I just had to do it the old fashioned way.

Next step is to UV and texture everything.

spacekdet · Post by **spacekdet** » 14 Feb 2011, 20:21

Drill, Baby, Drill!

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 22 Feb 2011, 01:23

I started the UV mapping for the F14 jet.

The first step was to assign colored materials to the jet to pre-plan the UV mapping and make it easier to select regions for uv mapping.

The second step was to apply a checker texture so the stretching and compression of the uv mapping could be seen while the individual parts were mapped and many of the pieces stitched together. It was mostly planer maps with some cylinder maps used in sections that were cylindrical in shape.

The basic unwrap of the body is done and the number of materials was reduced to 2 to correspond to the 2 texture materials that will be applied. At this point the uv sets are split with one set on the left and the other on the right.

The next step is the organize, resize and tweak the UV's and do a screen capture of the final UV set then finish unwrapping the other pieces of the jet.

v3rd3 · Post by **v3rd3** » 22 Feb 2011, 04:04

Thanks Clinton. This will be a great workflow walkthrough when you are done....

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 23 Feb 2011, 01:32

I just finished laying out the UV's for the F14 jet. Ended up with 2 UV's for the main body, 1 for the wings, 2 for the missile, 1 for the stabilizer, 1 for the fuel tank and 1 for the engine nozzles. GMax makes it difficult to see the direction a UV is facing so I'll be adding left and right versions of the wings UV's and a few other items later.

next up is texturing the missiles.

tahnoak · Post by **tahnoak** » 01 Mar 2011, 11:13

Thanks for sharing all this detail Clintonman. Great stuff and I am following with keen interest to see how the UVMapping comes out.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 05 Mar 2011, 07:27

Started texturing the missile body. The fins have a temporary material used to identify them inside the image editor. I think the next lesson is adding grunge to the texture.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 06 Mar 2011, 22:47

Finished texturing the missile. It has diffuse, bump and specular maps, but only diffuse shows in the GMax viewport.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 08 Mar 2011, 05:47

Jet main body texture. It has bump and specular but they do not show.

froo · Post by **froo** » 08 Mar 2011, 18:49

Wow you've really got the hang of this don't you?

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 10 Mar 2011, 03:12

froo wrote:Wow you've really got the hang of this don't you?

Thanks, Jason. I'm just following along with the lessons.

The body texture is done and I added a cockpit and crew. GMax doesn't do transparency in the viewport so I can't follow with the part where the cockpit glass is made transparent.

This shows the cockpit via GMax transparency display.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 10 Mar 2011, 23:40

F14 texture complete.
next up the aircraft carrier texture.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 11 Mar 2011, 03:44

Aircraft carrier textured. Last object to texture is the target oil rig.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 31 Mar 2011, 23:45

: Scene_7__0177.jpg (8.36 KiB) Viewed 6184 times

Finished the first animatic attached below. wmv format, 320x240, 45 seconds long.

GMax has no renderer so I did a screen capture using a script that controls the GMax timeline and a program called MWSnap.
Here is the vbscript code. It makes GMax the active window then sends a period key to it to advance the time and then sends the MWSnap command for capturing.

Code: Select all

'playblast 
'script for creating a playblast of the gmax window
'requires gmax
'requires MWSnap for capture(only full screen capture works)
'CHANGE OF PLAN: use mwsnap to save images directly to disk
'set options so mwsnap doesn't popup after capture
'gmax must not be minimized

'Setup MWSnap for capture.

'    * Tools - Settings - Snapping   set to not restore MWSnap after snapping
'    * Tools - Settings - Auto saving   activate, set folder, filename and numerical suffix

'march 15 2011
'Clinton Reese
'www.clintons3d.com
'
' use:
' set time in gmax to the first frame
' if this text is open close it to avoid confusion with gnax application
'


Dim Input
Input = InputBox("How many frames ?") 

set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.AppActivate "gmax"
WScript.Sleep 1000
For frame = 0 to Input-1
   'take an mwsnap shot of the entire screen (ctrl+shift+d)- allow 4 sec to save the file
   'WshShell.Sendkeys "^+d"
   'WScript.Sleep 4000
   'move to next keyframe - baking required and keys must be visible by eye
   WshShell.Sendkeys "."
   WScript.Sleep 1000
   
Next
MsgBox ("Playblast completed.")

I created a new Crop Image node along with image saver and image loaders to crop all the captured frames to the camera view and sequenced them using Sony Vegas. I could have done the crop in Vegas, but I wanted to try out a new node and it showed me a bug to fix in the image saver node.

There are 2 sections where nothing is moving. There will be ocean motion and text "typed" out onto the screen. The part with the missile firing got cut short and the 2 sections with quick zooms are meant to have a BattleStar Galactica style camera man can't focus properly or hold the camera steady look to it. The 3rd section with the jet flying by the camera after takeoff is way to slow and needs to be sped up.

MikomDude · Post by **MikomDude** » 01 Apr 2011, 02:50

Nice! I have been following this a bit and your progress is amazing. Just a pity there weren't any textures in the animation. I also think the two fighters took of from the wrong runway, the sideways runway is only for landings I think... either way, good job!

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 01 Apr 2011, 04:55

MikomDude wrote:Nice! I have been following this a bit and your progress is amazing. Just a pity there weren't any textures in the animation. I also think the two fighters took of from the wrong runway, the sideways runway is only for landings I think... either way, good job!

Thanks for the feedback. The jets can take off from 4 locations and land in the rear portion: http://science.howstuffworks.com/aircraft-carrier1.htm"
I suspect that the instructor chose the side runway just because it looked better taking off near the bridge. There's no textures in it because it's the animatic. You use the animatic to rough test the animation for general timing then go back, replace the animatic models with the real ones and fine tune the final animation. Using animatics isn't really necessary in this project, but would be useful if the jets were super detailed to the point that it slows down your computer making it difficult to animate. The other reason is so if you're working with a group of people the animators can start right away with the simple animatic models until the real models are complete. They don't have to wait for the modeler to finish modeling or the texture guy to finish texturing.

v3rd3 · Post by **v3rd3** » 02 Apr 2011, 04:59

Clinton that is awesome work.... Your creativity is inspiring.

Are there any old tools you will not bring back to life somehow? Other than windows ME

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 02 Apr 2011, 14:57

v3rd3 wrote:Clinton that is awesome work.... Your creativity is inspiring.

Are there any old tools you will not bring back to life somehow? Other than windows ME

That made me laugh.

I feel like Frankenstein bringing the monster to life. but as far as creativity I didn't create this. I'm following a tutorial so nothing original here. My goal when I started was to learn 3DSMax modeling and mission accomplished

. I'm confident I could model in Max despite having learned on GMax since all the techniques are almost identical between the 2 applications. The secondary goal is to bring what I learn into truespace in the form of modeling scripts.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 05 Apr 2011, 01:02

Project 2: when F14's Attack is done. Attached is the final video made from screen captures. It's 46 seconds long, 1616x900, wmv, 3.6Mb
There was no way top control the viewport size so I captured at full screen to get consistent size and position for the screen capture software. That's also the reason for the odd 1616x900 resolution.

v3rd3 · Post by **v3rd3** » 05 Apr 2011, 05:52

It's the ka-blam that gets m

e.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 06 Apr 2011, 16:38

v3rd3 wrote:It's the ka-blam that gets m e.

Yeah, It's the awesome special effects that put it over the edge.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 06 Apr 2011, 16:43

Started the final project in the tutorial series. This one has a dragon on his first birthday. The model is about 3/4 done. The real challenge will be trying to UV map it. The tutorial uses pelt mapping, which GMax does not have by a long shot. The eyes and eyelids are made of spheres and half spheres with a FFD lattice applied to shape them into the dragons eye sockets. The dragon is just box modeling with smoothing applied.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 06 Apr 2011, 23:03

Dragon modeling is all but done. Just need to do a little cleanup and merge the 2 halves together. UV mapping is next.

v3rd3 · Post by **v3rd3** » 06 Apr 2011, 23:24

Just a small point but your dragon sketch could be misinterpreted... perhaps a tad more detail would help.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 07 Apr 2011, 02:13

v3rd3 wrote:Just a small point but your dragon sketch could be misinterpreted... perhaps a tad more detail would help.

It's not my sketch. I'm following the 3DBuzz "Mastering 3DSMax: The Fundamentals" tutorial series. They supplied all the images for the model planes. Just curious, but what do you mean by misinterpreted? I didn't draw it so no need to worry about hurting my feelings. Even if I did draw it I would like to know what you think.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 07 Apr 2011, 04:00

UV mapping is not a good thing in GMax, but I found a workaround based on a Lightwave UV technique. The trick is to cut the model along the desired seams and then make a morph for it. The morph is the model layed flat in 3d space. Apply a planar map, morph it back to the original shape and weld the vertices back together. That's the plan I have to UV map the dragon. The image shows my proof of concept test with a simple rectangular mesh.
I tried the same technique in truespace but the uv mapper only see's the un-morphed mesh.

Edit: I was wrong.

The technique does work in truespace. The trick is to apply the planer uv with the morph selected in the list, not the default pose. After the uv is applied switch back to default pose and morph back to the original shape(set the morph value to zero). Flatten history and Heal the vertices to weld them back.

v3rd3 · Post by **v3rd3** » 07 Apr 2011, 06:05

A cheezy joke based on a youth misspent reading playboy cartoons.....

3dfrog · Post by **3dfrog** » 08 Apr 2011, 07:43

Wow great work here Clintonman. The dragon is my favorite one, very nice.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 20 Apr 2011, 14:43

Still going...
I finished the dragon geometry and fixed an oversight on my part. I forgot to give him some toes. Image shows the start of the manual morph based uv process. I just need to slice the pieces so I can lay them flat. I figure I'll select the edges with a soft selection and scale it out as the first step.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 24 Apr 2011, 07:45

Started the morph based UV unwrap. The soft selection hasn't worked as well as I hoped, but the technique still beats trying to use the GMax UV tools. Green is the mesh and white is the morph target of the mesh modeled to look like UV space. The head, shirt and horn on top of the head have been "unwrapped". Still several pieces to go.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 25 Apr 2011, 00:23

The basic UV unwrap is done. Image shows the mesh and the morph that will be uv mapped. I've also attached a short movie showing the morph from regular mesh to the pre-UV planar map mesh. There will be 4 materials. That's why there are 4 sections in the flat morph. I'll have to try this technique in Truespace. It should be easier, because Truespace has much better selection tools than GMax and the sculpting tool might help too.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 26 Apr 2011, 05:20

Final UV maps. It did end up better than I expected without too much distortion. Next is to create the textures. I'll only make diffuse maps this time, since GMax doesn't display specular or bump maps.

DanX · Post by **DanX** » 27 Apr 2011, 21:55

Wow!

Nice work. Are you thinking of going for the big one and buying Max ? Its good to see the WIP thanks for sharing.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 28 Apr 2011, 02:57

DanX wrote:.... Are you thinking of going for the big one and buying Max ? ....

Not a chance. Well, maybe if I win the lottery and become a millionaire overnight.

Max is way outside my means, but if I did have the money I think would be more likely to get Maya.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 05 Jul 2011, 06:06

About 2 months away and back on target. Started the dragon textures today

.

jamesmc · Post by **jamesmc** » 05 Jul 2011, 15:53

Very clean and glad you took the time to show the steps you took.

Job very well done.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 27 Jul 2011, 04:41

I'm finished with texturing the dragon. It turned out ok, especially considering the crazy uv map technique used. There is some stretching here and there but not too bad.

I've been skipping around the lessons and it's been so long I'm not sure what the next step is. I'll have to back track and review what I've done to figure out where I am.

Steinie · Post by **Steinie** » 27 Jul 2011, 10:52

Clinton your dragon turned out great! I like the Firefox logo too.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 27 Jul 2011, 14:51

Steinie wrote:Clinton your dragon turned out great! I like the Firefox logo too.

Thanks, I got the Firefox by taking a picture of my T-shirt.

v3rd3 · Post by **v3rd3** » 27 Jul 2011, 22:54

clintonman wrote:
Steinie wrote:Clinton your dragon turned out great! I like the Firefox logo too.
Thanks, I got the Firefox by taking a picture of my T-shirt.

Wow never seen anyone spill pizza quite like that ...

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 28 Sep 2011, 18:55

Wow, 2 months of no updates. Time to get back on it. I just finished the skinning of the dragon. Image shows a test pose. The lessons had the bones shaped to fit the mesh, but I think for GMax that made skinning more difficult since it spread the influences to far requiring an excessive amount of cleanup.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 29 Sep 2011, 02:23

Created some morphs and started the UI. GMax does morphs a little differently than Truespace. You create the morphs as separate meshes then add them to the original model. The dragon has morphs for 2 mouth shapes and morphs for moving the eye brows up and down. Image shows un-morphed and eyebrows up and down.

Finished the first part of the UI for the dragon. GMax has it's own tool for creating UI's and uses Max script to run it. I had to have 3 buttons for selecting the tail because I couldn't follow the 3DSMax lesson for creating a single controller for the whole tail. Max has spline IK, GMax doesn't.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 29 Sep 2011, 17:59

Finished the dragon character assistant UI. Most of the hand controls don't do anything because it would use techniques that only work in 3DSMax. The foot controls all work, but I did find that there is no way to edit custom attributes in GMax. For instance the foot control's roll custom attribute uses script to automatically roll the foot. The UI feeds that custom attribute directly. In the lesson they adjust the range of the spinner in the attribute and in the UI. I could only change the UI.

Image also shows some of the morph targets that were created.

Next is to model and texture the scene.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 30 Sep 2011, 01:14

Scene modeled. The banner and table cloth were created with cloth simulations in the lessons. GMax has no cloth so I just roughly modeled out some wrinkles and folds. Everything else went smoothly.

Next step is to texture the scene.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 30 Sep 2011, 05:08

Finished texturing the scene and removed some of the stretching in the table cloth.

Next lesson is the animatic scene.

froo · Post by **froo** » 30 Sep 2011, 14:23

Looking really good there Clinton.
A birthday party! That looks like fun!

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 11 Oct 2011, 04:58

Thanks, Froo.

Started the animation of the dragon. The smoothing on the dragon was turned off and all the unnecessary elements were hidden to speed up drawing rate. The first part was blocking out the walk cycle then adding hip and arm motion. The second part was copying the walk cycle for the total length of the walk and using a control that positions the whole system so the dragon is standing in front of the table with his hands resting on the edge. The next set of instruction videos was for the 3 attempts of the dragon to blow out the candle. I'm in the middle of the lessons where more detail is added to the animation.

I was having problems with the animation process because smooth, the default GMax keyframe interpolation, gives some pretty wild overshoots in the motion. I was making all the keys linear just to get predictable behavior, but the story has a happy ending. I finally found the settings to control the default interpolation, changed it to the bezier setting and now it works well.

Steinie · Post by **Steinie** » 11 Oct 2011, 18:39

I am enjoying this thread!

p.s. You know a Dragon cannot blow out a candle, he can only light it...

froo · Post by **froo** » 11 Oct 2011, 20:29

Now **There's** a really great idea for an animation!
He tries to blow out the candles but torches the cake instead.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 12 Oct 2011, 02:29

I think you guys must be psychic. Here's a quote from the product page for the lessons I'm following:

http://www.3dbuzz.com/xcart/product.php ... =10&page=1"

"The animation for the dragon will consist of a simple walk cycle, a couple of hop sequences where he tries to blow out a candle on his cake, and then a short sequence where in the excitement, he accidentally takes flight and incinerates the entire cake. You'll see how to create animation using rotoscoping, and how to add facial expressions using Morph Targets."

I'm not sure what I'm going to do about the fire yet. The lessons are for 3dsmax and use it's particle system for the fire. GMax has no particle system.

BNG · Post by **BNG** » 13 Oct 2011, 19:15

What GMAX really needs is more model exporters in general. I used it back a few years with the MDL/X and MD3 exporters. It really is an excellent modeling software except for the pitiful lack of popular modeling formats. The modeling controls are quite a bit easier to fathom then those used by Blender. Where GMAX excels is in it's customizable user interface and icon like Truespace feel. Nice models Clinton. BNG.

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 16 Apr 2012, 21:10

And it's done! The last time I touched this was October so there were a few things to remember about the setup. After the first pass of animation I made a preview and discovered that the timing was off all over the place. I forgot to set realtime playback in GMax. It was a bit of a struggle fixing it all up. The fixing process tended to break other things. Later when adding the eye animations I found that the blink controls weren't working so had to do those over. The video lessons used dynamics for the candles flame and particle system for the fire breathing flame. GMax can't do that so I used noise applied to bones skinned to the flame and an animated noise modifier on extruded geometry to represent the dragons flame. The video used animated materials to turn the cake black, I just replaced the cake with a burnt version.

The final dragons birthday video is attached.

bitkar · Post by **bitkar** » 16 Apr 2012, 21:52

haha, thats not bad :D

BNG · Post by **BNG** » 18 Apr 2012, 19:35

Has anyone ever used a max script to export model geometry? I've been told that GMAX is a sub set of 3D Max. I may take a closer look at it again though. Seems like when one learns to use other software like Truespace the other modeling software begins to make more sense then when one first tried using the other software.

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