Mosquitro Redesign: The Needle

  I spent some time today modifying the head of my mosquito model. After adjusting the lenses so the pole would be pointing outward, the whole shape appeared to nestle more smoothly into the gap designed for it.There was some adjustment needed but these were only a few tweaks. There does appear to be a fair amount more flow, however as the geometry for the eyes runs more in line with the cavity for the head..

  The next big challenge was the port for the mosquito's proboscis, which in the mechanical model would function like a powerful injector. I had a stroke of inspiration that the port would open up like a flower. The mechanisms for this however, might require some thinking as the needle would either push these petals out or they'd open out in preparation for the needle extending..

  The model is quite detailed, so I am planning to look into making a normal map for a simplified model for more full-body shots of the vehicle.

Mosquito Redesign: Working Legs

  I didn't have much success implementing an IK nor getting it to compress, but they say the simplest solution is often the most effective. In the case of my piston the simple solution was to parent each of the pistons with each other, tie them to 'aim' themselves at the opposing hinge and create a few driven keys to mimic the pistons extending and compressing.

  After that it was a simple matter of constraining each of the hinges. and the pistons so they stop at a fixed instance into and out of their sockets. By adding a fifth segment to the leg I am able to extend its reach to a motion window of between 92 and 168 degrees (any more open and the piston will collide with the knee hinge). Which might be one of them ore complicated elements of the model out of the way.

From what has been assembled so far, I think I can easily fit six of the legs into the main body with plenty of room to spare.

Mosquito Redesign: Leg Hydraulics and Industrial Fun

  Much of this afternoon has been spent reworking the leg to make it something more industrial. I've looked into completely redesigning the limb using the hydraulic system idea to give the legs weight and balance. What I've got so far appears to work to a decent degree, even if the geometry might be a little heavy. I'll look into fixing the UVs before the leg is repeated.

  The piston that would appear to keep the leg unbent will use some manner of spline to adjust itself. I'll need to perform some experiments to get a system that can extend the segments - what is on display is the furthest the leg can bend with this but with some clever re-positioning I might be able to extend the leg further. I can also use the freedoms presented by the digital medium to make it easier for the base to compress into the pivot it's connected to, allowing the sections to fold in and extend automatically and the pivots to rotate appropriately. This further tweaking might also allow the lower leg to more easily fold in.

  That still leaves how to fit six of these inside the body. The folding in isn't the most efficient use of space, it could be the legs are arranged diagonally and drop through hatches in the mosquito's underside (which will be fun to build and set up). Only one leg will be worked on until the UVs, bones and controls are set up, which will be reproduced five times.

  Overall, it appears to be quite a flexible setup. The leg bends in the right place, the lower joint provides most of the positional mobility and the foot has full free rotation so it can plant itself flat in a large variety of poses. An IK/FK system could be used for deployment, positioning and resting as one thing that could be implemented are shock-absorbers at the ankle - a simple tube that compresses into the body to give the feeling the machine is bearing weight when its turns its engines off.

It's about ready for the UVs

Mosquito Redesign: Early Stages and Legs

  I'be been thinking for a couple of days now about going back and redesigning one of my old projects. Namely the mosquito craft from one of my first year university projects. This design was ambitious, even back then and the video it came with was somewhat popular so I thought why not go back and rebuild the thing with better creative knowledge, problem solving skills etc.?

   One thing I really wanted to try out in the old design was some form of foot. In the original model I believe they were just spikes due to time pressures. With a better grasp of Maya's rigging and component system I feel confident I can do a proper foot as well as better joints. For fun I could design all kinds of bells and whistles: Brake flaps, redesigned landing gear bays, ailerons, a probe bay, maybe even rotary blades in the wings and a segmented design to allow for full-wing tilting and proper VTOL.

   I've mostly been inspired by the ship designs made by Cloud Imperium for Star Citizen. I tried the game out once during a free weekend and was amazed at all the little animated components the one-man ships had whether it was for doors, maintenance hatches, thrusters, airlocks, you'd think they brought in mechanical engineers to work out all the components. I might not go that far, the mosquito in the sequence primarily concerns landing and takeoff but no lie, it would be fun to try and build some sort of open folding mechanism for the front probe or the landing gear.

   I might keep the hydraulic system. It was quite useful for compacting the legs into the body (all six of them) and this time around I could go an extra step, maybe include the tubes for the hydraulic fluid that could be linked to the model via a spline curve.

  I am definitely going to need some kind of control rig to sort out all the moving parts I already have. It would definitely make accessing the components for animation a lot easier, too.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread Final: Now on YouTube

     As a failsafe I decided to upload the animation to YouTube as well as Vimeo in case there were any viewing, quality or graphical complications with the Vimeo video. You never know.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Complete Composition

     I think it might be safe to say this animation is finished. Its been a lot of work but I am rather happy with what came out i nthe end. This is now a work I feel I can be confident displaying. It has been a very long and tough road but it was also an interesting road.

Completing this however has gotten me exited for the upcoming year.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Generating the Information

    Working on the first title card I realised that the process of creating text I was using was a rather arduous and time-consuming process. Rather than constructing in photoshop and composing in Adobe Flash like before, I looked into the text generation features in Adobe After Effects to see if I could more efficiently produce the effect of text being generated onscreen.

    First I needed a script, which I wrote up on Photoshop so I could also get an idea of what the text could look like when it's displayed on the side of the animation.

    Text appears using a wipe. Like with the title and exit cards, I aimed for a speed of two letters per frame in order to simulate the camera's computer generating the text. I did have to make a choice between two generation ideas: The first idea was line-by-line, where ext would appear in lines, which a lot of modern computers do. Older computers however (and the sort where green text was common) did letter-by-letter generation. Because of the Alien influences and the fact that computers at the time Alien was made generated statistics via the second method, I stuck with that.

    Working on the text bodies I had the idea of keeping the majority lowercase instead of all-capitals, save for perhaps a "critical error" message, which by that point everything in the scene would be malfuctioning.

    When it came to superimposing in After-Effects however, I discovered that the black background accompanies the text when it was exported.to be inserted into premiere pro, this felt solved when I used a screen filter for the text layer however in light backgrounds the text proved difficult to see.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Title Card Proprosal.

    An afternoon of working and I have a first version of my proprosed title card. The timings are not perfect, in the middle it feels a little sloppy but this can be tweaked to be more evenly paced when the title is sequenced into the rest of the animation.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Return to Refinement

     After a long time procrastinating I decided I needed to crack on and load up what I have done so far with my refinement. Currently in the pipeline is the title card as seen below. My current idea is that this scrolling text will appear (A sequence to last 5 seconds), with the grinding industrial sound of the mosquito's interior in the background. Once the text is completely unveiled, the  bulk of it will fade to leave the title words "Infiltrate Exploit Spread" before moving on to the sequence itself.

 

     This sequence is also helping me re-familiarise myself with Adobe Flash. At the time of this post, most of the sequence is compiled. But there remains all the other text to appear - which thankfully will not be as dense as this. Just some brief information to help viewers understand what is going on.

   

Infilatrate Exploit Spread: Initial Refined Sequences

These have been sitting on my hard drive for a couple of days now, as the summer break has not entirely left me with nothing to do; with this, the painting ideas, Maya tutorials and development of personal concepts. As of right now, three months feels like it might not be long enough for everything I want to do.

Infilatrate Exploit Spread: Cover Art

In preparation for Tuesday I have created a disk cover for my work. Not the best I admit and again it seems more like plaster than brushed steel (perhaps if I tone down the contrast). Practice makes perfect though I suppose.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Art Of Document

Art Of Infiltrate Exploit Spread

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Final Video

Animation is completed and uploaded.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Inside the Mosquito

     Now on the final week of the Infiltrate Exploit Spread project, I felt a pressing need to construct all scenes - an ambitious thing considering everything I have spent the last nine weeks devleoping. It's slowly coming together and there are now only two major scenes that need constructing - the merozoites leaving the hepatocyte and the merozoites bursting out a of a red blood cell to spread.

     I do sort of like the greenish light that the environment has - it makes the whole place feels errie and sickly, which suits the malicious nature of malaria and its rather insidious nature as a parasite.

    

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Merozoite Reproduction phase

    I decided the next phase was the reproduction of the merozoites inside the red blood cell. Normally they produce insite a schizont that bursts (along with the red blood cell) once it is swollen enough with merozoites, but to simplify things the merozoites reproduce within the material of the red blood cell. But the essential information is there - merozoites enter the red blood cell and reproduce until the cell swells and bursts from overcapacity.

    First pass felt a little too artificial so I decided to step it up by giving the merozoites some motion, in this video they move in a circuit path inside the red blood cell.

    I considered the idea that to best display the reproduction the cross section could be via an x-ray scan, which would also allow me to render it in a separate scene file. It's likely that when it comes to bursting, not all of these merozoites will be seen coming out at once.

    This is what the interior will look like when it is close to bursting. In the playblast I used a basic transparency shader in order ot show what was going on inside during the pre-vis stages, as the x-ray shader is opaque in the workspace due to using a ramp shader to define the opacity.

     Then I thought "I'm making a science fiction piece, I don't have to stick to hospital scrub green", so I looked into using two shaders - one for the red blood cell and one for the "hostile identified" merozoites. Render times for these frames (at 50% resolution) appear to hover around the 1:14 mark. So despite all the geometry render times don't seem too bad compared to everything else I have made so far.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Mosquito Motion Refinement.

    I did some editing on the Mosquito's animations. I'm not sure what happened during encoding to compress the video at the sides the video like this but I suppose it's not too bad as the essentials of what I want ot convey in the video remain in there. The 1920x1080 resolution is still on my computer so at least I have the undistorted version on record.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: The Mosquito's Arrival

     This animation was rather fun to do, especially the initial approach there the mosquito adjusts itself as it prepares for landing, something helicopters and VTOL jets to to align themselves ready for landing. It took a little tweaking to make sure the corrections didn't look like the pilot was having trouble keeping the craft steady.

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    The model's textures are still, unfortunately a work in progress, but after liking the results of the chromed blood vessel tunnel I decided ot investigate doing similar with the legs of the mosquito to reinforce a metallic look. I was also drawn to the idea of a reflective cockpit window though with that oen I am considering toning down the reflectivity to keep the window dark. One advantage though is that I have less that needs being given a texture map

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    I also tried tweaking the direction of the light, although I do feel that the initial angle allowed the viewer to see more.

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Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Lighting Tests

    I added a narea light to hover over the red blood cell. Each shaft (left-to-right) is done with the following parameters:

1. gamma = 0.2    intensity = 0.1
2. gamma = 0.2    intensity = 0.15
3. gamma = 0.2    intensity = 0.2
4. gamma = 0.05  intensity = 0.2
5. gamma = 0.1    intensity = 0.2

I have a personal preference for 3. Lowering the gamma appears to  make the shadows less definitive, so I'll keep the gamma relitively reasonable.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: The Merozoite's insertion

     It took longer than I thought it would to construct this stage, largely because of my attempts to perfect the workings of the light that would come out of the hole that would open up to let the merozoite inside. My mai nconcern so far is that due to the present tunnel setup, it is somewhat dark in the renders that include the environment. To alleviate it I could add a light that focuses on this one object pairing, a dim one, so as not to interfere too much with the present highlights. The source of it is likely because the red blood cell is facing the wrong way to the spotlight that illuminates the far side of the tunnel (which this thing is approaching)

1: That's not really supposed to happen, but easily fixed by keyframing the light.

2: Lighting with nothing really inside save for a spotlight or an area light doesn't appear to work very well.

2: Added a surface shader to a flat square underneath the opening but this is far too bright.

3: By lowering the out colour and out glow colour I can have much more control over the light's intensity

4: By changing the out glow colour to 100% red I get a very creepy red glow from it.

5: The slight downside is that the surface shader doesn't appear to render the light that may come from regions invisible to the camera

6: Restored the area light underneath to answer my issue but the stoppage point is too sudden.

7: Like with the surface shader, by altering the intensity integer and the light colour I can get a more gradual light.

8: Still got the issue with "light bleeding though the hole" but this was fixed by turning it off.

9: Sinister light, which would be white at this stage in the final render.

10: A nice creepy red light as the merozoite prepares to settle in

11: The initial light would be white, but would change after the Merozoite goes some way inside.

12: I think this might be a fair balance.