3P98 Computer Graphics Animation
The Haunted Gym
Bryan Wilsack
Rumors say that this gym was built on an Indian burial site. The town elders will tell you its haunted by a young male who was died there at the hands of his fiance. You took a job as the night watchmen for this school knowing but not believing any of the rumors. Until that day. You look away from the monitor bank and see there is a full moon outside. Then a flickering screen grabs your attention. The hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and you drop the drink in your hand onto the floor. You start to wonder why you took this job as you start running for you life from the security room, vowing to never to return to this forsaken place.
For my 3P98 project, I did an animation of a singular male in a large gym. He walks over and grabs a basketball from a rack of balls. Then moves to the center of the room and throws it. He lands it in the hoop and stop the ball when it rolls by. He then focuses on the ball and uses the force to levitate it into the hoop. The light start to flicker and the camera loses sync on the picture. The audio also has interference/static. The scene ends as the last two lights flicker out and the basketball rolls past the camera. I was trying to think of something one day for this project and this popped into my head.
Models:
The skeleton model is just the model used for positioning the body. I meant to make a skin for it but did not get the time. The benches on the side are fairly simple models, 3 cylinders and a box. The ball rack was made with 4 boxes, 2 of which were edited to be bowed to hold the balls in place. The balls are just simple spheres. The backboard and the hoop are just a box and a torus union-ed together. The floor was supposed to be a textured hardwood floor but does not look like it. I believe it would look better if the texture was applied to boards separately rather than one large board.
3DSMax:
3DSMax has a very nice interface for controlling camera. You make a camera and to point it you move a box which determines where it is looking, the eye vector. The animation system in this piece of software is very feature rich.
The autokey feature is both helpful and a pain to use at the same time. When you change you keyframe and then move a model or change an attribute, it automatically records that change to that frame and object. It can be a pain to use if you are not extremely careful with your current keyframe. If you make a movement that you do not want or you wanted it to be spaced to a more distant keyfame, you have to undo the movement. The undo buffer is extremely small by default and there is no way to quickly delete movement that are recorded for that object/keyframe pair.
The interface that autokey hides is the curves editor. This holds all the objects attributes as curves and allows you to freely edit them and their tangents at any point. You can also drop a point anywhere on the curve and use that to edit it as well. The interpolation on movement is very smooth given enough frames between keyframes and can also easily be changed. This made animating the skeleton quite painless, although tedious. There is a somewhat hidden menu with special keyframe controls for skeletons that lets you stick their feet in one place, if possible.
The skeleton posing tool is very easy to use. It relies on the a hidden object in the pelvis to determine the position of the model and everything else is connected to that. The feet automatically notice when there is ground and then bend. The one thing that was painful with the posing was the arms. The forearms are tightly coupled to the elbow like in a person but the rotation tool still lets you try to move it in that axis, thought it doesn't move.
The rendering of the scene did not take very long (1H) with 6 lights and ray tracing each of the 701 frames. The setup for the rendering was very straightforward until I noticed that it can't directly export HD video. You must output every frame as a picture and then use another program like mencoder or Movie Studio Platinum to put the video together. There is even a radiosity output for your scene rendering. It unfortunately did not like my scene.
Movie Studio Platinum:
I used this to apply the video and audio effects to the pictures. It was very easy to put the picture together into a video track and then line up the sound effects with their corresponding events. It only took a couple clicks to add the TV simulator filter and make a couple keyframes for it. The rendering of the video was done via CUDA on the GPU and took 2 mins.
Software Used:
Movie Studio Platinum
Autodesk 3dsMax
Audacity
References:
Biped Walking 3dsMax:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxKg0zoIvEc
Some textures used from 3dsMax, came pre-installed with software
TV static Sound Effect from:
http://www.soundjay.com/tv-static-sound-effect.html
Pictures of scene and models:
Backboard:
Ball Rack:
Skeleton:
Bleachers: