In conclusion…….My animation is done. As a group we performed extremely well to produce a 5 minute long animation. At the beginning of the semester when given the brief we all sat and had lengthy discussions about how to proceed and then properly planned a course of action with deadlines and everything. Problem is that as a group we were all a bit too determined to do well. While no one pushed another person all of us wanted to do the very best possible and this ended up with us all constantly adding bits and perfecting bits right up to the deadline, and believe me we cut it fine. This made for an enormous learning curve for all of us and I think we all learned how to work separately as part of a team (if you know what I mean). Everyone has their separate jobs to do whilst maintaining a specific style and keeping in mind what every one else is doing.

As a group, at the final stage of putting the animations together in to one cumulative scene is when it really began to unfold for us. As mentioned loads of times before we all began our animations by looking at our door and ended looking at it ready to animate from one room to another. When we merged all the rooms together all the lighting from the halls and other people’s rooms began affecting each others rooms and the clips could no longer be simply snapped together in Premier Pro as the difference in lighting caused a jump. We spent a good 2 days (full days, lunchtime to midnight and then on it at home until at uni the next day) working on this issue. We had to keyframe different lights up and down in intensity at lots of different points to try and maintain the consistency. The next problem was that as we all rendered our individual scene’s on our own, and we passed start and finish camera positions to one another, something always went wrong with the camera alignment. The solution to this presented itself in the form of rendering what was dubbed as ‘correction frames’, ever adding to the time wasted in correcting errors. It is only now after all this stress that I see the solution to the problem. We should have added all the rooms into one scene then created the halls and lighting for all the scenes, animated just one camera round the whole scene in one mass render session. The time added in rendering off just one file would have been saved in there being no need to correct all those errors.

On an individual note I have managed to learn a lot (aside the issues mentioned above). My main objectives were to learn how to control lighting to create a realistic scene (within the boundaries of the brief and animation style). In this animation I have managed to learn the various different ways of creating lights, from actually adding lights with constrained beams and volume fog to simulating lights using material glows. Learning such skills with lights has given me a great understanding of how lighting and the inevitable shadows help affect, define and shape the environment around them. Another great skill I think I am taking away with me from this module is the character rigging. When modelling and rigging the character that we all used for this animation I encountered a lot of problems. As it turns out I rigged the characters arms in slightly the wrong direction and this can be seen in the arms in everyone’s animation, the shoulders distort a lot at they don’t quite bend like a humans would. Unfortunately this problem was identified too late in the semester for it to be rectified but I think the whole group adapted to it very well, especially as they and no experience animating a character rigged in that particular way. I will be carrying a lot of character knowledge over to the character animation module next semester thanks to this module.

Over all I have really enjoyed completing this module, the chance to work toward a real project for real clients has been a great inspiration to me. It has given me the chance to prove to myself that I have the confidence and ability to do well in this competitive industry and the reassurance that animation is the industry I want to be in. Moving forward from here, not only am I am taking with me a lot of further advanced skills in modelling, texturing, animation and lighting but two other important skills. The first is the ability to work closely with a design team all of whom may have different ideas and visions to me toward a single goal. The second is the ability to guide others in to use things I have created (such as the character and the method for piecing this big jigsaw together was devised by myself). A useful talent as I am very keen on creating a series of video tutorials to help other learn new skills in 3D max.

So enough waffle, here is what you have all been waiting for, the final animations. First up is my part of the animation leading in to my room:



Second up it the whole groups animation at 5 mins long. Enjoy.

its all comming together

The other day I was in uni with my group and we began making the halls and outer building for the scene. Over that evening followed I put the finishing touches to it. Because the scene has to be imported in to everyone else’s scene so that they can render form the outside the majority of the materials are all internal to Max (Max’s own material library) or they might get lost during the merge. There are a few external images but nothing that could be seen at the start of one of our animations so it would not matter should it disappear for that.

On Thursday we were in uni until 10pm trying to solve issues with merging the hall scene with the individual scenes. This was mainly due to lighting problem (surprisingly all the doors and windows lined up straight away, I suspected a few issues there), when the hall lights were introduced to the scene the person room got a lot lighter as did their door that the camera began looking at, this meant the scenes would not line just snap together in premier pro. The solution we devised to solve this was to animate from the hall in to the persons room for a few frames and keyframe down the hall lights as the door opened, this meant the lighting would then be the same and we were again at a point where we could get them put together in Premier Pro easier (he says with a great deal of hope).

We are all going back in on Monday when hopefully everyone will have their scene fully rendered and we can put the whole animation together. I think its going to be quite a long animation (and probably a long Monday), probably close to 5 minutes as we have all ended up creating a longer animation than we had planned to.

time is up!

I have run out of time purely and simply. I wanted to add a lot more characters and make the scene look busy and lively but that would take a lot of time to animate and increase my render time. Craig will be in to see the work on Tuesday. I still have to render out the scene, edit it together and help create the internal halls of the building, leaving no more time for animationg. I have managed to get the main characters in and animated so you get the idea. Given more time I could finish the project off if need be.

The video below is a preview of the final animation so you can see the lights movement but not the colour changes that really help to make the scene, patience and soon you will have all. There is a small part where you can’t see what is going on, just some light targets moving, I believe the camera goes inside a wall I forgot to un-hide during the entire animation process. Also we are not ending on the AVP poster, I am just waiting for the final YMCA poster to add to the scene.

In the mean time we did some work as a group today. Because we are all working on different rooms and animating between them we began creation of the building and inner halls. Every ones scene begins looking at the door of their room so we have to create the halls and lighting before anyone can begin the final render or when we merge them together there will be an obvious difference in the lighting.

camera animation........done!

I have finished the camera animation. As you can see from the video below there are only 4 characters in it and they are not doing much, they are just to help with camera alignment. You will also notice other than the guy jumping (that was purely to see if the explosion part was going to have the desired effect, I think it works) and the doors opening nothing else is animated. I have already begun with the lights but that’s for another post, once I have ironed out all the problems I will no doubt come across.

During the process of the animation I was rendering out small parts of the scene to see how they look, as a result below you can see the actual quality for the first half and a wireframe preview for the second half.

The animation begins

I have begun the animation process. I have opted for a fairly unusual approach to it however, I am animating the camera around the scene before adding and animating the characters. Why? I hear you ask, well my scene is not completely devoid of characters, I have 4 in there at various points to allow me to position the camera at the correct height. The main motivation behind this decision was that I intend on having a very busy scene with lots of characters, as I already have the storyboard in my head I can animate the camera where I want, then I can see which characters need animated at which time, potentially saving me hours on animating people that are not even in shot.

I have been working in dual screen with the curve editor permanently open on one screen, I can almost read it like a book now. Below is a screen dump of my extended workflow,

The reason I need the curve editor so much because I am making my animation quite quick and all the keframes flow smoothly in to one another, as if the keyframe was not there. Max has a habbit of adding a slowing curve to the animation on either side of the keyframes. When I am animating around something I add the first and last keyframes then add the ones in the middle to curve the arc a bit, Max would then slow the animation down when coming in to the middle keyframe and speed up on exit, this makes for a very ‘stop start’ feel to the animation, not very smooth flowing.

Another problem that has arisen because of this is that, on the odd occasion, Max can not handle the curves without being told how to do it, what do I mean? In the picture below I was animating around the 2 characters whilst looking at their face, when adding additional keys to curve the motion Max added a massive Bezier curve causing the camera to look at the floor, by using the curve editor you can easily see where the problem lies and quickly correct it.

Because I am animating around a lot of things in smooth circles I have adopted the technique of animating the camera along a spline to keep things smooth. I have previously found manually trying to animate a camera in a smooth circle is both time consuming and tricky, it often ends in a very jerky camera motion. Because I am using the same camera for the whole scene I don’t want to constrain the camera to a single spline, instead I have been using the method of converting motion paths from splines for a pre defined part of the animation. Below is the before shot with the cameras trajectory.

Here is how to achieve this.

1. Draw your spline and adjust it in to the shape and position you want your animation to take.

2. Select the camera (or any other object you want to follow the path), open the motion tab and select trajectories.


3. Under sample range set the start time and end time and decide how many you want it to have. Samples means keyframes, if you select a start time of 0 and of 100 with end time 20 samples you will end up with 20 keyframes evenly spaced along your spline. Its important to realise here that of you do not have enough samples on a curve your animation will not be able to follow the path exactly, like below.

4. Now turn on AutoKey and hit the convert from button and select the path, your camera is now constrained to the path but only for the time that you selected and is free to go anywhere else for the rest of the animation. Yo may find that if you can not get the rotation to match as you had wanted you will have to alter the rotation values yourself. With AutoKey still on go to the first keyframe and rotate the camera how you want, then do the same for the middle and last keyframe. Because the constraint did not set any rotation values for the rest of the keys you should find that thoose are the only keys you need to edit, the rest of the keys should inherit the correct values.

I hate sound (check out the video montage though)

But sadly it must be done. I have final completed the sound file for my animation, I can now begin to time my animation to the 1 min 7 seconds it lasts (my animation is going to be 1675 frames long!). There are three songs

1. Shoot the runner by Kasabian
2. Gothic Anthem by Gothminister (thank you Martin)
3. Elements of life by Tiesto

In between the tracks is an explosion followed by a rewind sound effect, here is where I plan for the camera to spin around the dance floor and add lots of motion blur. The reason that I added an explosion was that when I was trying to mix the sounds all together, keeping the animation in mind, it was not working with just the rewind sound effect. It was actually whilst listening to radio 1 that I heard an advert for Tim Westwood that used an explosion cover up a mix between two different genres it worked really well. To mix all the sounds together I used Adobe Audition. In this programme, after mixing all the sounds together I normalised all the tracks so that they were all playing at the same volume.

You may remember me mentioning a log time ago that as a group we are all beginning our animations on the outside of our room’s door, having the door open and entering the room to begin and finishing on looking at the inside of our door. We will then, as a group, animate from the end of each others animation to the start of the next persons animation via the building halls. (Trust me, this will be important info in a bit).

After I had finished making my mix track it came out a bit too long so I began the process of trimming it down to length (1 min, agreed by the group). I eventually had the idea to cut a large chunk off the beginning as it would save me 15(ish) seconds. The problem was that now the music seemed to start a bit sudden and didn’t sound right. The solution I came up with is that it can begin whilst the camera approaches my room through the hall. Now I had more work to do, I had the break point in the track but I needed to decide on the speed that the volume would increase and the start part would need to be muffled until the door opens. After much messing about I have the volume continually and steadily increasing over the course of the first part from 0 to 50% then the second part of the audio, which is where my personal animation will start, there is a sharp jump from 50% to 100% which is where the doors will open. I managed to get a muffled effect in Audition using the Graphic EQ and removing the treble but as it turns out the effect can not be gradually reduced (as the doors open) so its an ‘all or nothing’ effect. To solve this issue I decide that I knew how to do it in Premier Pro, so that’s what I did. I exported the two separate sounds from Audition with the changing volumes and then in Premier Pro I keyframed in and out the treble to simulate the muffled effect then exported the audio again as separate tracks. The result of all this work is that I now have two separate tracks, one flows seamlessly in to the other and the volume increases as you approach and finally when the doors open the muffled effect disappears.

Below is a video montage of the creation of the sound (sped up obviously) with the completed track as backing music, it shold be a delight for the eyes and the ears. Since making it I have moved the break slightly and the bass and treble transition now runs over the break but you get the idea. The break is at 12 seconds. Enjoy.

The decks are finised

I have finished my decks. The final method that I was going on about in the last post where I was going to make an animated material worked. While the material and the glow works the timing still need a lot of work, I think the first 4 or so beats work really well then the rest all fall out of sequence. For the sake of testing if this is going to work I am happy with the results. Unfortunately the video here has lost quite a bit of quality so some of the detail ahs been lost, things like the detail on the record and the detail on the side of the turn table that the strobe is flashing at.

To create the new material I opened a new flash document and made the stage are 15 pixels by 132. I got this size from the opacity map I made for my earlier experiments as when I was cutting the holes in the mixer that is what I used as a guide. I then added the colour and some black bars which would mask out the pars of the colour I did not want showing at the various key frames. I should probably mention that I did not actual mask the colour as in max black will not glow and there for will not show up as a light. Last thing before beginning the animation was add the sound track, this was not going to be in the final animation sequence but it enabled me to see where the music peaks were making the whole process go a lot quicker. On the animation I simply added one key frame at every peak and one in between for the lows then animated the black bars to cover what ever I desired at each frame. For the final animation I plan to actually work out how it should look a lot better.

I decided to use flash to create the material for a few reasons. Firstly I could add the music to a layer and see the peaks in the music helping me to decipher where the key frames need to go. Secondly it is capable of producing an AVI file at any size (15 x 132 in this case), if I had done it in premier pro and asked for an output that size all I would have got would of been a 720x576 file squashed to fit. Lastly because flash is easy to use for this sort of thing.

For the decks I wanted to simulate the strobe on the side. On a DJ’s turntable there are a series of small, differently sized rings of circles circulating around the edge (I know that doesn’t make much sense so here is a picture),

the strobe flashes at a constant speed and as the DJ speeds up the record a different ring can be seen to help you work out how fast it is going. Normally the strobe flashes so fast you can’t actually see the flash but unfortunately with max I was limited to one flash per 2 frames. However I still caught the essence of its purpose here but that is part of the detail that was lost when blogger compressed my video, sorry. One thing I am really please with on the record though is the specular map working well to simulate a shiny record and a not so shiny label.

I have also been working on a lot of my scene, it now has windows (although the blinds are closed) which even have the blind pull chord things, tables and chairs, photo boards for the walls and even and exit sign above the door. I realise that some of the photos are a bit dark but this is going to be a dark scene so I have been creating everything in the dark to make sure that it all looks ok when the lights finally go out.

I think I am nearly ready to begin the animation phase. Wish me luck, I will keep you posted.