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2006: This year our animation is "Creativity Over Time," a brief journey through history showing how mankind has always used his ability to create and realize new ideas. It starts from in a cave and the invention of the wheel and finishes with FIRST inspiring students' interests in technology. The animation was created with 3D Studio Max, and each student was in charge of different scenes, though everyone's input was used throughout the whole animation. The music was written by Jody Nagel and incorporates music styles and sound effects from each time period. The students can't thank Kent and Steve enough for their help...so thanks again!!! Our animation is divided into ten parts: Prehistoric: Cave Ancient Egypt: Pyramid Classical Greece: Parthenon Viking Era: Viking Long Boat Medieval Period: Catapult Renaissance: Da Vinci Glider Baroque Era: Bach Manuscript Early Modern History: Lightbulb Modern History: Movie Projector Current: FIRST Robotics Animation Team: Ashley Nagel, Morgan Moncada, Alejandra Fernandez, Jackson Eflin, Alex Clendening, Taylor Yim, Mica Newman, Zach Krizo Mentors: Steve Bardonner, Kent Baumgardt Music: Jody Nagel
Creativity Over Time: Download movie, coming soon! Creativity Over Time Storyboard: View as HTML Download PDF (4.1 MB)
The cave scene starts the animation with a warmly-lit cave. This image was the first completed scene of the animation, though the cave-paintings were added later. The wheel is a torus with a bump map and free-form displacement modifier modifier applied to it. The rolling animation is created by rotating and moving the wheel forwards simultaneously. The cave scene is the first scene. The invention of the wheel is often though of as the first of man's creations, so we thought it would be a good opener to the animation. The control and use of fire as a creative force rather than a destructive force also is thought of as an early achievement, and of course cave-paintings are recognized to be one of the earliest forms of art in mankind's history. The cave itself is semi-sphere and a plane, both with rock textures. The floor has a mix (created by adding a noise map) of both a rock and a grass texture, causing the appearance of patches of grass. The fire is centered in the scene, and the cave-paintings hang in the background. The wheel rolls past and out of the scene, transistioning into the next scene. Originally, a caveman model was to be used for this scene, but we realized that there wasn't enough time to make one. We were too busy working on the other parts of the animation, not to mention our awesome robot! Cave paintings were created by adding a diffuse and opacity map onto a second diffuse map (the rock texture). Most of the paintings were drawn and scanned, but the above was created in Photoshop and represents the artist creating the cavepaintings on the computer. A Fire was created by adding a fire effect just overlapping the logs (cylinders with a free-form displacement modifier) and placing an omni-light with shadows turned on in the center of the fire.
The beginning of the scene shows the wheel still rolling from the cave. The wheel falls by having itself move along a spiral path while rotating on its X-axis. The Pyramid springs up from the sand and the side entrance fades into view. The Pyramids are one of the, and the only remaining, Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The Eqyptians built the great pyramid under the pharoah Khufu around 2560 BCE and it was the tallest structure in the world for then 40 centuries after that. Transitioning from the last scene, the wheel (now giant) rolls out on the sandy desert, falls, and becomes the Great Pyramid. This represents the continuation and advance of ideas throughout history until eventually the first great monument is created. The pyramid springs up in a sandstorm, and the side entrance fades into view. The pyramid, as one might imagine, is pyramid with a limestone texture with a brick bump map applied to it. The side entrance was more complicated to make (in the animation at least) and consists of many blocks and two cylindrical columns. The light source is strong, resulting in the sharp shadows on the ground. The sky is a Photoshop-edited photo applied on to an outer sphere. Orignally, the tranisition into the parthenon scene was to be a fly-through the side-entrance but was decided against because it took too much time and also detracted attention from the main Pyramid. Also, the pyramid was going to pop out of the ground, but this made it seem as though the Pyramid was a natural occurrence and we wanted to emphasize the fact that all these scenes were creations by man. The Pyramid shoots up by applying a movie to the opacity map of the object. The sandstorm is a particle system attached to moving dummy object. A lot of textures were used for the Pyramid scene. The sand texture was created by using the above image as a diffuse map, and the black and white version of it as a bump map and a free-form displacement map as well. The side entrance was added later to the scene as a transition for the Pyramid scene into the Parthenon scene.
The parthenon builds itself from the ground. This animiation was created by animating one column, creating an array of columns, and offseting the animation of each column using the dope sheet. The Parthenon sits on top a hill. This scene took the most time to finish because of all the attention to detail in it, and all the different parts that had to come together. The camera zooms to the model. A zoom effect was added to the inside structure and the roof, but not to the columns. A worshipper of Athena stands on the front steps of the Parthenon. Human figures are incredibly difficult to model, but Morgan did it! Good job. The Parthenon was a step forward in the architecture world. It's building applied everything from the engineers' knowledge and use of the golden ratio to the amazing artistic skills of Pheidias and his monumental gold and ivory statue of Athena. (Unfortunately we didn't have time to create the statue.) This scene took the longest to animate, not only because there were so many parts to keep track of, but also because it slowed the computer processor way, way down. The beginning of the scene consists of a hill (a plane with it's end vertices moved down with soft-selection) and the base of the parthenon. The dimensions of the parthenon were all drawn to scale. (Kent made sure of that!)There is an outer 8 x 17 array of columns and another two rows of 6 on the inside. Each column is devided into 5 sections. (That adds up to 300 column parts, in case you really wanted to know.) A column was created by creating a 20-gon, dividing each vertex with only the original ones selected, pulling the selection in torwards the center of the circle, then extruding. The top part of each column was made by lofting a circle into square. Meanwhile, the roof comes crashing down the same time that the columns finish assembling, and voila! A Parthenon. Don't the Greeks wish it had been that easy? After it's finished, the camera zooms in on the Athenian standing on the steps of the Parthenon. Though she only stands in scene for 2 seconds at the most, she took all of Morgan's month to polish up. The model's body is basically an edited box. He created half a model by extruding regions and editing all the vertices until it looked right, then mirrored it to the other side. The face, as one might imagine, contains an enormous number of vertices that all have to be perfected to at least make it look human-like. Make-up was created for the model on Photoshop and Illustrator and added to the face as a mapped texture. The hair was then added, swept to the side to look as though wind was blowing through it. This scene was pretty much completed the way we had designed it, so we're pretty pleased with it. (Although there had been talk of flying through the Parthenon, until we realized there was a wall half way through it... splat!!!) The animation of the parthenon starts out in it's unfinished state and becomes completed. This was accomplished by dividing a column into 5 seperate pieces and auto-keying it at the end put together. The movement curves of each piece had to be adjusted, or else they all appeared to crash together. An early animation of the Parthenon with the black background shows the shadows of the moving objects more clearly. Unfortunately we had to mostly give this cool effect off in order to place the Parthenon in it's surroundings. This image was two separate images and took a super long time to edit together in Photoshop (I would know, I did it) It was used as the front of the Parthenon roof. Talk about attention to detail! The wireframe of the model shows how crazy it is to make a human; each vertex must be placed until it looks right. Afterwards, a mesh-smooth is applied to remove any sharp edges. The hair is a separate effect that was edited with to look as though wind is blowing through it. The eye and make-up were drawn on Illustrator and Photoshop and applied to the model's eye on a mapped texture.
The viking boat passes through water lit by the moon. The camera shifts to the back view and shows an island, a plane with vertices pulled up. The Moon is a photo taken by our awesome mentor, Kent, through his awesome telescope. We inserted it on the sky plane and added a target light to it to cause the reflection on the water. The water effects were created by using a reactor, which caused the moonlight to refect on the waves, and also produced a wake behind the boat.
We put all the scenes togther by rendering each scene as a movie and applying them as texture maps to planes on the master-movie. Different kind of transitions were created by adding different kind of movies to the opacity map as well. The catapult get's ready to launch a ball through the air. The camera positioning was tricky because the camera zooms around the catapult, then pulls up and follows the projectile. The catapult arm is linked to the axle, so that they rotate together. The ball moves seperately, accelerating out first and then down. The Da Vinci Glider overtakes the projectile and the focus switches to the glider.
The glider flies off to the horizon. The sun is a light with a lens flare effect. The sky and the earth are intersecting spheres (with textures, of course.) The camera makes a quick camera flip from behind the glider to the top of the glider. This image was used as a guide for making the bone-stucture of the wings. They were created by lofting a big circle to a small circle on a path, creating a tapering effect. A NURBS surface was added to the bones to create the canvas. This was made semi-transparent so that you could see the stucture underneath. This wooden model was used as a reference to help see how the human fit into the glider. We used a simple biped to help fit everything together.
The scene transitions from the glider by having the manuscript unroll over the previous scene. To create this effect, a gradient movie is applied to the opacity map of the Bach scene movie. The left-to-right transition occurs while the while the scroll unwinds itself. The scene is simple but elegant. It consists of a the Bach manuscript, a peacock feather quill, an inkwell, and a candle. The feather is a plane with both a diffuse map and an opacity map on it. Ray-traced shadows turned on create the cool shadows on the wood surface. The Peacock feather is Photoshop-edited picture of--guess what--an actual peacock feather. The feather was made denser so that it would show up better in the animation. This image of an actual J.S. Bach manuscript was used as the texture of the scroll. The scroll unwinds itself by carefully rotating a set of vertices until they all lie flat on the ground. The inkwell is a lathe surrounding a dark blue cylinder. The texture is a highly glossy, transparent, reflective and refractive chrome material. The candle stand is another lathe. The candle stick is a self-luminous cylinder, and the flame is a fire effect. An omni-light is contained within the flame and has a glow lens-effect added to it.
The lightbulb is a lathe around a glowing filament, thought the filament is hard to see. A lot of other light sources had to be put around for the lightbulb to look right. The lightbulb flies out of the candle as the other parts fade to the background. The camera movement on the lightbulb was fun to create, because it flies around so fast. The lightbulb "inserts" itself in the movie-projector by fading on top of the projector light.
This old-style movie projector is the second-to-last scene. It's plays the movie in which our robot makes it's debut appearance to the world. The robot scene actually starts on the screen. After the camera zooms into the screen, the robot movie takes place over the projector movie. It was difficult to coordinate the two scenes so that they fit together without any overlap or skip. The projector is mostly made of seperate boxs and two spinning wheels at the top. The material is metallic with a touch of blue. The camera starts at a side angle from the projector, pulls back to view the screen, and then zooms into the screen.