Setting the scene and Storyboarding

As I work in a phone shop I am planning to use this as the location for my animation. This may change as I will need to get permission to film in the store.

I will take the required pictures for the HDR lighting this week when there are no customers or staff in the shop.

I will show the phone at the main bar or counter at the front of the shop. I will then zoom into it. more details to follow on storyboard

here is a reference picture from inside one of the O2 shops


reference picture of rotating screen


Storyboard

running into problems

I have been modelling the phone using a relatively low poly-count. As a result of this I started running into problems when applying smoothing groups particularly on the back of the phone where I have some detail to model.

here are my results.




I was not happy with this so I deleted the current back of the phone and spent quite a bit of time, a few hrs in fact, re-modelling the back from scratch. This time I used a very high poly count. This gave me a lot more control and freedom for desing and makes the end result look a lot more realistic. as you can see there are no issues with stretching or with smooting groups.

Starting to take shape

Breaking model up into parts for animation

Few hrs into modelling

Ok so here's progress so far. Its been a while since I've done any modelling so it has taken be longer than usual to get this far. About 3 or 4 hours work in this in total



I have made a few common modelling mistakes which I will fix as I progress. For example there are vertices and edges where there doesn't need to be any. If this was in game environment in would make sense to fix this but for now I am not going to worry about it.

Preparation for Modelling

I am now ready to model. In order to model I need to collect reference pictures of what I need to build so that I have something to work from. I will be using my own phone as reference for textures etc.. I searched the internet and luckily enough I found schematic drawings done in auto cad of the exact phone I am using as a reference. I opened this image in photoshop and separated the parts into separate images. These will then be used in 3DS Max and applied to planes. See below for the images.

Ready to model

My designs are based around my current phone HTC HD7. I will be using the original dimensions of this phone and modifying the original design. see below



Height - 122mm
Width - 11.2mm
Length - 68mm



Screen size -109 mm

Thin Speakers

Within my design i will have two speakers slide of from the side of the phone. I may not have much room in the design so I need to think about making them as thin as possible. take a look at this video where speakers are made from cloth only 1mm thick.

Moving Parts in Model

Here are the number of moving parts in the overall design

1. Phone screen frame opening like a door
2. Rotating phone screen/solar panel within the frame
3. flip out stand at back of phone
4. Speakers that slide out from the phone
5. projector that first moves down to click to release the catch, then slowly extrudes from the top of the phone.
6. The projectors focus mechanism. Two cylinders extruding in sequence. Similar to a digital camera focus.

Concept sketches and design ideas

LG_GD900

Very smooth! keypad emerging from within the body of the phone

Sony ericsson Xperia Play

HTC Desire z

I was particularly interested in the close up of the screen animation here

Dell Inspiron Duo

I like the idea of the new Dell laptop. The rotating screen turning the laptop into a tablet pc and back again was a very interesting feature and i like the animation of this in the video.

Product Simulation

For this brief I had to think of a product that lends itself to a product animation sequence. I was given a list to choose from or I could have come up with my own idea. On the list I notice in the current tech section a link to Dells new laptop. I very much like this animation sequence so I decided to use this idea.

I currently work fulltime in the mobile phone industry. I am constantly criticising current tech and looking for ways to improve mobile technology.

I will base my designs and final product animation on a new mobile phone with new features. These are fully described as the blog progresses.

I have decided to loosely base my designs around the phone I currently use which is the HTC HD7. Windows phone 7