I have always been a fan of stop-motion animation and physical modelling, i.e. characters and sets, and while everyone who's a fan of this style will agree that it has a 'Magical' quality, there's no escaping the fact that opportunities for employment are limited. Realistically I think, as animators, we need to be versatile, and that means being capable of creating digital work also. So during the holidays I started learning 3ds Max as a digital modelling tool. I have dabbled in Cinema 4D last year and while it is very user friendly and probably more up-to-date, it seems that the majority of animation companies are using 3ds Max or Maya in their workflow. So I figured that It might be more advantageous to learn 3ds at the moment. It turns out that a lot of the procedures and commands are similar anyway so I think that a lot of what I learn will transfer to Cinema 4D also. As you can imagine there's a lot to take in so I'm mostly following internet tutorials at the moment. I've finally worked out how to save a rendered still image of the items I've been working on so I'm going to post them hear to show how it's going.

 

This is my first animation using 3ds. I know it's very simple, the teapot is an existing primitive shape designed for judging scale, lighting, etc. in your scene. All I had to do was assign it to a path, though I had to follow a tutorial to learn how. This gave me the idea to build a bi-plane and have it fly through a landscape that I will also create.

 

 

Above is an alarm clock that I'm working on from a tutorial. There's a separate tutorial for each of the different parts and it took ages to get this far, but I did learn a lot of modelling techniques which I can apply to my own creations.

 

 

A matchbox and matches. Again created by following a tutorial. It just needs a bitmap image for the graphics, and maybe change the blue on the sides to brown.

 

 

I followed another tutorial for this glass. It's amazing the realism that can be achieved with digital modelling. The cube and cylinder where added to give the glass reflected light - otherwise it wouldn't show up at all in the renderer.

 

 

A simple car shape using a tutorial. I'll continue this at a later stage.

 

 

So here's the bi-plane I started for the flight animation I will make (as in the flying teapot). I decided to do this without following a tutorial to test what I've learned so far. Apparently it's more practical to work from reference drawings when modelling, i.e. top, side, front and or back views. I didn't have any reference drawings when I started this model but I've downloaded some since and I think I'll start again from scratch.

 

 

A fishing boat that I'm modelling myself. I did use a tutorial to build the hull and I'm kind of making up the rest as I go along. Again no reference drawings - I think I'll have to make some as this is going to get complicated.

 

 

My rat rod truck. No reference drawings used, just creating as I worked. I did need to watch a tutorial for the tyre treads though, and the exhausts.

 

I built a simple environment for the rat rod. Obviously this could be more detailed but I just wanted to find out how to do it at this stage.

 

So what's next? I think I'll try a building. Nothing too complicated. Maybe I can animate a walk-through of it when it's finished. The beauty of it is that whatever I build can be re-used. I might have to modify it slightly, or re-scale it, but neither would take long to do. That will certainly be useful when I start modelling characters. I'm toying with the notion of a hybrid animation that combines physical 3d (stop-motion) and digital 3d (3ds Max). Nothing new there I know, but for me it will be. I really want something that will showcase my ability in both forms of animation.