Scene 3 – Finding The Golden Egg

This is the scene where the farmer finds his golden egg that has come from one of his geese. The scene starts off with a camera shot to the side of the farmer as he walks towards the goose. This works well with the end of the previous scene where we saw the farmer walking away from his house. It works well because it is as if the camera has just changed and the farmer did not stop walking.

The Walk Cycle of the farmer creates a turn for the Farmer towards the goose. The camera then is behind the farmer but zooms in and focuses on the goose that is now in front of the farmer. The Goose has some animation, which involves him standing up and laying a Golden Egg.

I was very happy with how the cameras came out in this Scene. I wanted to make sure the walk cycle was captured as it was a good way of showing off what I’ve learnt this semester. The turn in the direction of the walking shows that I was able to edit the basic cycle to make it work better for my animation.

Scene 2 – House Scene

In Scene 2 we see the farmer walking outside of his house. It was key to make the house look “cartoony” to fit in with the overall carton theme. As the man is coming out of his house, I used the walking motion to have the farmer walk towards the camera.

As the farmer is walking towards the screen, I made it so that the camera was also moving back. This enabled me to show the audience the majority of the house in the background but taking the focus off the farmer. The length of time it takes the farmer to walk towards the camera allowed me to do a lot more with the camera and decide how much of each part in the scene I wanted to show.

This scene is rather plain and boring but unfortunately there was no realistic way of making it interesting. I wanted to use the Walk Cycle that we had been taught by Richard during the year and thought that editing the camera angles could make this more interesting.

Scene 1 – Window Scene

The opening scene of my animations tarts with a black screen for a second before having 2 sections in the middle split apart. This is to give them impression of opening a window as I wanted to make this scene as if it was from the Farmer’s eyes. This is why when he looks through the window he sees his flock of geese on the farm.

The camera then moves forward out of the window to give the view from the farmer’s perspective. The camera travels forward out of the windows and then pans around the sky. Here the camera sees a set of clouds and the sunshine in a bright blue sky. This is to show that it is a nice day and sunny/blue skis usually implies happiness. The camera then focuses back to the geese. It then zooms in on one goose. This is the main Goose in my animation who eventually produces a golden Egg. The scene ends when the camera has zoomed in on the animal.

I originally had only the main goose in the scene but it looked too bland and it needed something else so I thought about adding more Geese. These geese have pre-set animations made for the biped in a separate file so I was able to simply merge them in and just edit the timelines accordingly.

I feel that one of the strongest parts of this scene is the lighting. As the farmer opens up the windows an “omnilight” rises as if it is the sun rising. This gives a great affect of the scenery being very dark as the window as opening but by the time it has fully opened the scene is light and the sun has risen.

Scene 1 – Window Scene

The opening scene of my animations tarts with a black screen for a second before having 2 sections in the middle split apart. This is to give them impression of opening a window as I wanted to make this scene as if it was from the Farmer’s eyes. This is why when he looks through the window he sees his flock of geese on the farm.

The camera then moves forward out of the window to give the view from the farmer’s perspective. The camera travels forward out of the windows and then pans around the sky. Here the camera sees a set of clouds and the sunshine in a bright blue sky. This is to show that it is a nice day and sunny/blue skis usually implies happiness. The camera then focuses back to the geese. It then zooms in on one goose. This is the main Goose in my animation who eventually produces a golden Egg. The scene ends when the camera has zoomed in on the animal.

I originally had only the main goose in the scene but it looked too bland and it needed something else so I thought about adding more Geese. These geese have pre-set animations made for the biped in a separate file so I was able to simply merge them in and just edit the timelines accordingly.

I feel that one of the strongest parts of this scene is the lighting. As the farmer opens up the windows an “omnilight” rises as if it is the sun rising. This gives a great affect of the scenery being very dark as the window as opening but by the time it has fully opened the scene is light and the sun has risen.

Modelling The Thought Bubble

The final model to be created was the thought bubble that was going to be used to show what the Farmer was thinking about. This would be used in 2 of my scenes but the look of the bubble was going to remain the same.

This was a very simple and easy model to create and I did not want to waste too much time on it. I simply started with a box, which I converted to an editable Poly. I then moved the vertices around to create more of a rounded affect. I also moved the vertices to create the sharp triangle like shape that would be used to show that the thought is coming from the Farmer.

Thought and Speech bubbles are used very frequently in cartoon animations and they are always white so I thought I would continue with this trend. I created a simple white material and added it to the though bubble.

The Final Thought Bubble

Modelling The Axe

The next model for me t create was the axe. This was going to be used to kill the goose in a scene quite late on in the animation. It would be involved in actual animation during the project however no biped was required due to the shape and demands of the model and animation.

I started off by creating the handle using a simple box standing on its smaller end. I split the box into 3 segments so that I would be able to work on the top part to create the blade.

After converting this to an editable poly, i extruded out from the top segment 3 times to create the actual metal part of the axe. i extruded 3 times so that i could change the angle and sharpness of the blade.

I also then played about with some of the vertices at the bottom of the handle. This was because most axe's in real life do not just have a straight part of wood, they have a groove in them for where you hold it. This creates better grip and I wanted to add this to the model.

I then added a Turbosmooth modifier to the axe.

After applying the Turbosmooth, I noticed that the blade was looking very fat at the end. This was because of how I had extruded it out from the box. The blade on an Axe is very sharp so I was going to need to create the same effect for realism.

To do this i moved the 2 sets of vertices on either side towards each other. With the Turbosmooth on it created an effect of going from thick metal to a thin edge, which was perfect for what I wanted.

The final step was to colour the axe to make it realistic. I selected polygons and used the "Set ID" to give me different sections to apply materials to. I then created 2 materials, 1 for the wood and 1 for the metal. I then applied these to my model.

The Finished Axe

Modelling The Egg

I was now ready to make some of the extra models that would be needed to complete the animation. These were models that would not need animation but were going to be created in 3d because it made them look realistic and fit in well.

The first model to create was "The Golden Egg". Seeing as the whole fable is based around this Golden Egg, it was obviously pretty important. I started off by creating a "Sphere". I then made this an Editable Poly so that I could play around wit the vertices. I now selected the very top vertex of the Sphere and used the "Soft Selection" tool to gradually start affecting a larger area of the sphere. I then used the move tool and raise the height of the egg. This created the shape of the top of the egg.

As you can tell, this is a very simple model to create but it was very important to the fable so needed to be created.




I now had my Egg model created however one of the key parts of the Fable is the fact that it is golden. This meant that I was going to have to change the colour of the Egg. I thought I would look around on the Internet to find a good gold texture but instead found a tutorial of how to make one.

http://www.3dvalley.com/tutorials/creating-gold-silver-and-copper-materials << The link for the tutorial I used.

This tutorial showed me how to create the gold texture and add different lighting to it to give it a good shine.




I liked the final product however during the animation I did come across a big problem whilst using this egg model. With the gold texture that I had created attached to it, adding lighting to the scenes made it very hard because of the reflection that was set up. In most of my scenes I ended up having to just add a gold colour created from the colour swatches in 3ds max.