Thursday 26 January 2012

Update

This blog was created for the virtual environments module and so this blog is no longer updated.

A new 3D character animation can be found here: http://abonnington-3dcharacter.blogspot.com

3d blogs:

3D Modelling and animation: http://abonnington-3d.blogspot.com

Other blogs:
My blog here: http://andrewbonnington.blogspot.com
Learning and skills development for HE and work: http://andrew-bonnington.blogspot.com/

Thursday 8 December 2011

Evaluation

I think that as a group we worked well and we are pleased with the result.

I think that the idea turned out well as it was a bit more interesting than just a standard walk-through. The walk-through section that we created for the second part of the animation was also a bit different as it has the character walking through the scene with the camera rather than just having the camera moving through the building on its own.

I think that the cuts between the separate cameras on the walk through section of the animation turned out well as it seemed to work well changing the camera when the character walked through the doors.

The items that were modeled for the interior of the building look good in the scene and as they are growing in the model.

The animation in the project turned out well. Lots of animation techniques were used in the animation and this allowed new skills to be learnt. Some of the animation sections could have been a little slower as they seem to finish a little to fast, especially the section where the camera zooms out for the final section of the model on the table.

The rendering took a long time and with hindsight maybe we should have started animating earlier so that we had longer to render the animation and fix any issues that arose.

The final animation turned out well and the music that we used in the final video worked well with the animation. There were are couple of problems with continuity in the animation but these are not that noticeable as you concentrate on the main part of the animation.

There are a couple of problems in the animation, the books on the table section are slightly raised above the surface, when the building grows there are slight errors on the models where the faces overlap as it is animating and there are some problems with the guildhall model in some places, this is especially noticeable near the stairs. As the building was modeled in two halves (the top half and the bottom) this areas was overlooked and so it is not consistent between the two floors. Texturing on some of the beams in the guildhall could also be improved.

Time management could have been a little better as it was quite a rush to get the animation rendered and finished on time.

Improvements that could be made to the animation are some of the problems could be fixed and some of the animation sections could be improved.

I think that in creating the animation we achieved a lot in the time that we had and the results have turned out good.

Tuesday 6 December 2011

Finishing the project

The video files were brought into Premiere Pro to join all the separate scenes together and to add the soundtrack.

The uncompressed footage took up a lot of space and made it difficult to work with the files. After putting the video together we thought that the first 1 minute section worked well just by itself so we tried a version with only this section as well as creating one with the final animation.

Both of the versions of the animation will be handed in but we are still deciding what one to use for the presentation.

Rendering the animation

We started to render the animation to see what it looked like and what we still had to do while we were still working on the last part of the animation.

Before rendering at the final high quality resolution we first rendered a low quality test animation to check what it looked like.

For the building growing scene we adjusted the length of time that it took for the next blueprint to slide into shot and made sure that none of the objects from the ground floor were sticking through the blueprint. We also increased the length of time that it took for the ground to move into shot as this was a little too fast, and fixed some other small problems.

We adjusted the lighting so that the scene was brighter but then had to adjust the other scenes for continuity.

When the scenes were ready we rendered them as an uncompressed avi at 720p. When we rendered the first section we did not select uncompressed and the file was shrunk to the wrong size.

Selecting the uncompressed option created larger files but they were greater quality. They will be compressed when brought into Premier Pro and exported.

The rendering took a long time so it was important that we were happy with the animation before we started the rendering.

Another problem with lighting occurred when unit less not ticked when standard lights were used with the daylight system and the scene was darker and the colours did not match up. We had to re render this section once we found the cause for the problem.

Working in different scene files made the animation more manageable but also made it difficult to ensure continuity between the scenes.

Finishing the animation

Once the animation was finished some problems were spotted so they were fixed and re rendered.

The section where the camera zooms out from the guildhall model was redone as the lights were not the same in the file that was being used. We thought that it would be easier to reanimate this section than to try to fix the lighting in the other file.

The  part where with the blueprints didn't line up correctly between scenes as they had accidentally been moved in the different files. The blueprint were lined back up and the a short section was re rendered.

Multiple scenes had to be re rendered due to problems of 3ds max crashing when rendering and the loss of files.

Guildhall walkthrough

The biped that had been created and used earlier in the animation was used during the walkthrough section of the animation. Footsteps were used to move the character through the guildhall and the camera was animated to follow the character.

The biped walks through the rooms in the guildhall to show what the renovated guildhall will look like.

Finally the camera takes a look around the outside of the guildhall to show the complete outside of the building.