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.