FINAL ANIMATION

The quality that this has being on youtube is quite poor and you cant change the pixel aspect ratio but it is a preview at least:

THE FINAL WEEKS....

Well i finally got my scene modelled and textured by my date i set myself which made me very HAPPY, although there were a few things that needed changing. For example the texture that i had assigned for my main room wall was very poor quality and kept pixellating when i rendered so i went on the search to find a better texture. Id already decided that the wallpaper design was the one i wanted i just needed to find a bigger image and export my texture map to a greater size also. I evetually did find a better image and in maya it looked 100% better.. BUT.. because both the image and the texture map were now bigger maya was no longer my friend and would not let me preview it. How frustrating. It even found the need to assign it the moons texture, if this was a joke it wasn't funny! Luckily, when i rendered the scene the texture was there - thank goodness!

www.oldhousejournal.com/producst2/wall/2701

Here are the differneces in quality:

BEFORE:


AFTER:


I also cmpleted the television section of my animation. I had originally wanted the televisions to have static on the screens throughout the whole animation but was unable to do this in time so i came up with an alternative. I rendered out the final scene before i wanted in incorperate my video sequences and edited the frame so that there were transparent windows in each of the televisions screens. I then layered my videos behind these window so it seemed as if the televisions were playing them. I had help from Tom Foreman, who was my 'actor' for this. Im quite happy with the final thing although i would still like to have had static throughout.

Below is my basic sequence beofre i edited it further for my final animation.





When animating my moving machines i forgetfully animated them almost for the whole thing forgetting that you dont see them continuously - oops. It wasnt too difficut to animate the spinning wheels as onece i had organised the pegs to be in the right place as long as i key framed the first peg to hit and the last peg to hit at the correct times then the rest were on time. This was something i hadnt realised, which was quite a nice suprise!

Below is the preview i made of my spinning pegs before i went on to create my final animation:




Overall im quite happy with the final thing although looking at it now i can see what i would change and improve. It feels to me as if its still an idea rather than the final thing and i can be devloped further. I would definately render using mental ray, the second time round, i was just running late with render time and wanted to get the fastest render possible done so that i knew i would be ready in time. This project out of all the projects opened my eyes to the reality behind rendering time and that it needs to be seriously thought about in the time scale of every project with allowances for things to go wrong.

I thought id be prepared and get it rendered the weekend before hand in but all the computers i had logged on to only reached about 80 frames before stopping, all of which had been set to do 1,000. If i had left this until the last minute then i would have had big problems with the hand in date. Even so it did slow everything down quite a bit, because even when i did manage to get them rendering again they all stopped at different times after about 20/40/100 frames continuously so i had to babysit 6 rendering computers for a day.

The only ANNOYING thing is that before i had set them to render i had forgotten to smooth my robot in the scene ad so he is now left un smoothed. Its so frustrating as he looked so much better smoothed and its such an obvious thing i had forgotten to do - and something i will enver forget again!

UNSMOOTHED:


SMOOTHED:


Although i did remember to smooth the smaller robot! phew!

WEEK 10 - 13 (after easter)

I have created the intro objects for my scene and been working on animating them seperatly although for some reason my computer is rendering so slowly so its taking a while to make alterations to my scene. I have put a link to my short animation i uploaded into youtube. Its extreemly basic but i just wanted to see if my idea would work.

Video of quick demonstration of the sun and moon and cloud
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8jem5hgjMs

From here i have been working on getting my scene modelled and textured properly and in the right era. For all aspects of the scene i have been keeping updated images of my progress up until now my almost finished scene.

I know i am behind schedule and i have been trying so hard to get back on top of everything and not get behind.

I have given myself to the end of this week to get everything in my scene completey finished and as my robot is only requiring joints to get those done as well. Then this leaves me the whole of the following week to animate my camera and small time that my robot is on screen for, and then three days to edit everything.

My only conern is the render time as with my last project i had to leave it unfinished because it only rendered 3,000 frames in two days and all through the night at home, so to be safe if i can have everything animated by next friday i can leave it all to render over the weekend at uni on several computers - this is my plan.

Below is my progress, i have put it all together in a very quick slideshow, just to give an idea of where i am at at the moment, but any more progress that i make i will post,a dn at the end of the week i am going to upload the images of my individual machines and my final room scene before i start to animate them.