Group Evaluation

Tony Cole

Term 1

Evaluation: Group Reflection

Originally we was in a much bigger group of six people, unfortunately due to some set backs and problems we encountered, we did not want to waste time waiting around, we were getting Impatient and Simone and I discussed this issue and we wanted to get into production phase straight away so we decided to go our own way and split from the rest of the group to work on our own animation.

For our final piece, as it is a group project, my colleague Simone and I planned the story’s visual first then where it can lead, and what kind of music can represent the overall style and background of the piece. We looked at many contemporary pieces of music and went into thought process on a few of the options we chose and which one had the best effect and would go well sound wise. we came to a decision with one and the rest of the animation visually came to us through listening to the music. We gained a new perspective of how we could animate and finish each scene. Drawing our ideas down we planned out sketching the storyboards of the scenes and drew the key moments the animation may change for certain desire effects. We realised that being just two of us working on a production we couldn’t do anything too advanced as we already had current 3-D training in college together. so we used our current strengths in Maya to develop a concept for the animation that we could use later on in personal projects and still tells a story itself, so this way it can become useful as well as effective.

As I had limited knowledge of after effects as this is still new to me and I’m learning as I progress at this current stage in my education, my part was going to be 3-D in Maya and the opening sequence will be a preset animation around 5 seconds long, nothing too fancy to avoid getting ahead of ourselves after all this is only a student project, however the animation was going to remain professional standard. I looked at some tutorials for Maya on using the camera and how to set a motion path and using the information I was learned, I created my scene in Maya using the most simplistic form of modelling, image planes because in the space of time I had to complete the animation I wanted to keep to the idea of nothing too advanced in order to spend more time on the quality of the production than the level of environment detail. So I created my scene using image planes and used Photoshop to edit the level of detail on the texture to make it the right size to avoid stretching ruining the quality, then I used hyper shade in rendering editor to apply the textures to the object. I learned to create curtains using a tutorial on Google which came in handy to do this phase. I used the cv curve tool switching to the top view to make a swirling line to define the shape of creased curtains, switching back to perspective view, I duplicated this line another 3 times and shift selecting all lines I converted them to a curtain using the loft or planar tool. I pushed the side vertex points around and turned into a drawn curtain effect adding a curtain holder aka a cylinder cutting the top and bottom surfaces out and rotating the object resizing it to make a curtain holder. The rail was easy just used a cylinder, stretching and resizing it to shape I wanted adding spheres to create that look. I used to cubes using the same technique as the rail to create a window and window seal using another cube for the glass turning it flat and adjusting the opacity and colour. The moon was a sphere using a light source to create that glow in front of it. I repeated the process for these objects in order to design the table and book where the pages were done with the bend tool and applying a texture to the first page, duplicated many times to create that initial book style saving myself time. I cut into the book using Booleans to create that ripped and old ancient worn out look applying the finishing textures, however I did attempt to make the animation for the book but having no luck finding a tutorial on this subject I decided to Photoshop design the top pages manually and have the camera move around whilst looking down instead. The stars were designed the same way as the room with images planes applying textures. the lighting was made using an spotlight for the room and an ambient light for the moon. Furthermore outside the classroom via discussing animation techniques within each other’s production, I learned about how to integrate shadows into my scene and how I can switch to the light view just like the camera to edit the direction of where the source of light is aimed at. So by switching to the side panels for lighting I saw that shadows can be added as well and that I can control how much light and darkness is shown. This helped me tremendously as it created that effect and atmosphere my scene needed to appeal to the viewer and also give the scene depth in visual. At this point it was mainly a point of editing the finishing touches and checks my settings to make sure the rendering would come out correctly in the finalised version. Furthermore making sure the scene was in mental ray as this produces a more professional animation movie quality I wanted to show. The final outcome was more effective than I thought with both mine and Simone’s animations put together and really had an interesting feel to it. It made me think about what was going on and helped me learn that the most simple of ideas can still be just as effective as something complex.

I did come across problems as I said, one major one was rendering as I kept hearing rumours of other students laptops burning up due to high quality rendering and that the rendering farm in university takes too long so it made me hesitant and put me behind in certain deadlines I set myself and with some advice from Alex I was able to render on my laptop in the end and it took a while as the render quality was in mental ray because I wanted it to be professional. If I’d known sooner about how to render and whether it was safe for my laptop then I would have done it faster but without positive confirmation it set me back time wise. Furthermore I wish I’d known the settings sooner but next time I will be more direct than this time in order to speed things up, and the other problem was compressing the file, it was very big and I was a little confused as to how I would make it smaller but in the end I re-compressed and resized the file down to a much smaller output using H.264 going below medium to a lower quality in order for it to work and fit into A drive and load up for Simone to edit.