Monday, 4 May 2009

Testing Camera Settings

Heres a test of following camera paths in an animation, from this I learnt to direct a camera's movement and field of vision which will prove usefull when creating the final idents.

Ident 1 - Cricket

The finished ident shows the Sky sports logo on the bails as the camera pans out the ball comes into view hitting the stumps and knocking off the bails shortly followed by the Sky Sports logo.

5. The final part of the animation was the addition of the Sky Sports logo which appears at the end of the scene. It comes through the plane and rests in the centre of the animation as a focal point. To create the transparent effect, I applied a Raytrace aspect to the material and increased the specular and glossiness level.
4. Next, using Reactor, three seperate animations were created which were the movement of the cricket ball, the movement of the stumps and the movement of the bails. After being created, all three were correctly aligned to make the scene look as authentic as possible in the aspect of real life.
3. The next step was the creation on the background. The sky is an applied bitmap in the environments settings of 3D Max and the grass is a bitmap applied to a plane.
2. The stumps in the cricket scene were created by stretching a sphere, with the top of the stump shaped using a boolean effect which I then copied. The bails were created using simple cylinders which were manipulated to give their shape
1. Firstly I created the ball to be used in the animation which in this case was a cricket ball. To create the leathery effect on the surface a bump map was used using a bitmap, after also applying diffused colour for added effect.

Initial Ideas

After creating the mood boards I started to look into the range of sports displayed on the Sky Sports network in more depth, not just as an activity, but in the aspect of animation.

I decided the most acurate animation available in sport is the moving of a ball, which is use in more sports advertised. To do this I would have to use Reactor in 3D Max to achieve a realistic object motion.

I also decided to look at the existing idents of the Sky Sports channels which consisted primarily of bold, clear images presented well with a range of camera movements. To honour this I decided to include the use of cameras in each animation to create a sense of motion and movement throughout each scene.

The final aspect of the ident ideas was individuality. I didn't want my idents to be just a plain animation showing a movement related to sport. To provide a personal touch to the idents, each design is set up to be a sectioned area of each sport, which meant there was no need for a background on any of the idents, keeping the focus on the animation rather than its surroundings.

I feel that all three of these aspects combined (spherical animation, moving scene cameras and diagnosed section of area) combined with the display of the recognised Sky Sports logo in each ident, would make a successfull combination in creating idents which would work should they be developed into an advertising campaign in the future.

Tuesday, 14 April 2009

Mood Boards

Here are some examples of existing ident material used by the Sky Sports network. The all posses similarities in their layout and have a ditinguished sense of clarity and contrast with a bold use of colour. I have decided to base my 3D idents on the Sky Sports Channels due to the active nature of thier programming content which should make for an interesting design when creating 3D elements.
After deciding on Sky Sports as a channel, I further researched their existing content which as the name gives away is solely sport related. This moodboard gives an idea of some of the sports featured on the Sky Sports network. The sports featured on Sky Sports are golf, football, tennis, rugby, cricket, boxing and other related sports which do not occur all year round such as the olympics and other sporting events.

Tuesday, 3 February 2009

Ident Research

For research into existing idents I searched YouTube.com for videos and found an abundance of videos. For example idents have existed on channel 2 since 1964 which can be seen in the following video.
Channel 4 have recently made a number of idents where everyday scenes and objects are arranged so that when the camera pans, the channel 4 logo can be seen from a certain angle which adds a subliminal factor to the design. The following video is an example of just one ident.
Here are some screen shots of the channel 4 idents where the camera views the logo through its panning.




Tuesday, 27 January 2009


In our first lecture we were shown how to create and munipulate object to make them appear to bounce in an animation. First we created the shape, in this case a sphere, and created a motion tween using the auto key function. Then by using the track view curve editor we changed the parameters of the ball's travelling speed. The we created two other balls and followed the same process and by using the dope sheet changed the timings of the ball bouncing.

3D Modelling and Animation - Semester 2

After reading the brief for this semester I will first research the existing idents to find out what makes them succesfull in their purpose. From this research I will choose a company and create 3 idents to represent their corporate image either literally or subliminary.