What went right/what didn't and what I shall change

All in all I am very happy with the project and the finalised piece. If I had to choose something I would do differently, it would be that I would take my role as the Director/Producer more seriously at the beginning of the project. The reason for this is that I feel I wasn't as focused at the beginning as I was towards to end of the assignment.

Also I wouldn't have spent so much time on concept art as I now understand that ideas can change throughout the project. I don't believe spending half the time we had on the project doing concept art was effective, but again this was my fault as I should have mentioned this as I was the Producer.

I believe our team worked very well together, unlike some other groups where they had individual talents however, they didn't work well as a team.

Overall there isn't much I would change because I believe we produced a strong animation in the end.

Final Day!

D DAY!!

All the animation is completed as is the sound. All we now need to do is set the format to view the film from. All in all, a very stress free final day. I am proud of my team, and the animation we have managed to produce. I am glad we have got all completed in time.

Sound & Dominos

Chris and I were working on the sound which would finalise the scene and meant we could finish the project on schedule without the stress of late minute rushing.

We decided as it was the last week, we would stay late again until 9: p.m. We ordered Domino's yet again, in order for us to keep our energy levels up for the sound editing.

I am extremely proud of how the sound turned out. Without the sound, the animation itself wouldn't work, as sound ties everything together and is a very important element in the production of an animated piece.

Sound

This screen shot is to show what we are currently doing within the scene. We showed Jerard our scene and he was very pleased with what we had produced. The only criticism he had was the white noise of the radio in the vehicle as the volume should be slightly lower. The reason for this being is that naturally when people hear white noise or static, they immediately want to turn it off. I believed this was a fair point, and we corrected this.

Final Cut Pro Time

All the shots are rendered and edited in After Effects. It's now time to put this all together in Final Cut Pro, which is a programme that I am comfortable with and am able to use well. We changed length of shots, fades and made sure the scene flowed in a sequence. All of these were done before adding sound.

1 Week Left

I designed another image schedule to represent the stages each of the shots we're at.

'M' represents scene produced in Maya

'R' represents rendered shot

'A' represents shot has been edited in After Effects

'F' represents shot in the Final Cut Pro file, to be edited

the last of the rendering

Rendering the scenes has been a lengthy process. However, the shots that are being created, I feel are up to standard, and I am very pleased with.

We just have a few more shots to render out and then we can begin the process of editing. To speed up the process of rendering I decided that anything that wasn't in the shot, could be taken away in Maya. An example of this is the sand and rock layers of the environment itself, which the image below displays.

keep ya up to date!

I was eager to get all the rendering completed by today so all the team stayed late last night. The reason for this was because we wanted to make sure the majority of the rendering was done and to begin the after effects. Therefore next week we could begin starting the editing and sound design early, to be ahead of schedule. We stayed so late so we decided to order Domino's to keep out strength up!

reading shoot have affter effects and Domino

keeping ever scene in check!

I decided to produce shot by shot schedule that I would mark off once the shot had been rendered out. The images below are what happened over the course of just one days worth of rendering. You can see from these images how much effort the has team put in over these past few days, and it's because of this hard work and effort that I am very proud that I am a member of this team.

2 weeks to go!

animating & environment

After managing the fix the problems we faced, it was now time to begin animating the scenes. Each member of the team then began to start setting up the scenes required using the environment plane produced by Alex and models produced by the team.

Rendering!!

Rendering was a challenge in itself as we tried to test render on Qube however that failed. The reason for this was due to us using Maya software instead of Mental Ray. We went back to the shots and saw what Mental Ray would look like. However, as a group we decided that the look Mental Ray gave the shots was not what we were looking for and also not as good as the look using Maya gave.

Therefore, this meant we had to render from our laptops which can take a little more time and can be inconvenient as you cannot do other activities whilst it's rendering. Thankfully, we started rendering early enough for this not to be an issue.

problems

It's now three weeks before all needs to be handed in. With myself being the Director, I decided this would be the perfect time to begin animating and rendering each of the shots.

I didn't want to leave this process until the last minute as I know errors can occur. However, even though we began animating and rendering within good time, the problems still occurred. To start with, we failed to use the Maya file directory as it should be used. As a result of this, when moving files from laptop to laptop, textures of the mind and vehicle were missing. We then had to relocate them, and unfortunately this took up a fair bit of time and effort within the team.

3 weeks left!

Qube

For this project we were advised to use the Render Farm Qube. I took it upon myself to find out how to do this. I enquired into this and asked for help from Alex so I had the knowledge to use this programme. There's many little things that you need to know in order to be able to use the programme correctly. I have found that the system itself is quite temperamental, however I now feel I am confident in using this programme effectively.

Finished Warning signs

The finished designs for the warning signs that will go into the scene took a few hours to finish all the design. maybe to finish off will add a rust effect to the images.

pipe Stack

After designing the posters, I decided I wanted to showcase them in the scene. I quickly designed some pipe stacks that the posters could be displayed on. I am very pleased with the way they turned out as they have elements of the propaganda posters I had previously researched, however they also had a hint of my personal design.

my whole team is hard at work so i wanted to help so i asked if there was anything i could help model so less for Andy to worry about so we discussed and decided i would model pipeline and a crane arm to go in the scene just basic model then Andy or Alex could add the extra part to make it go with the scene more so i got a busy weekend ahead.

Meeting 2

Team Havoc's second meeting about the mine and after talking we decided against the mine rock idea and went for a more building out of the rock look after one of Alex drawing that is truly brilliant i will try to put it up on my blog to saw, IL ask him first of course, so i put the job of the mine to Andy to work on, Alex was modeling the air craft that will be in the scene Chris was working on storyboards and the mining vehicle and tom is working very hard on the lighting of the scene itself.

im using photoshop to produce the warning signs for are environment. i will save the images as PNGs then there no background colour. so when i upload them into the scene using image planes it wont have a white boarder around them.

Textured 3D model

Texturing another area of Maya i'm not the best at. but i give it a go and learned alot. uving in Maya is a very complicit area with may different way to texture models i used planar mapping to texture my crane as well selecting single faces so the texture don't stretch. now im comfortable on working on uv mapping but i need to learn the different techniques.

occlusion Render

Occlusion renders of the crane arm. something again i had to learn but thanks to Alex from my group i know how occlusion renders are done. it shows of the detail of the model so much better and you can see all the work i put into making this crane arm. from now on i will use occlusion to show off my future models.

the crane

this is the crane that i model for the project it took a bit more time then i wanted it to but the end result i'm proud of. i wasn't confident on modelling to start but now i have a better understanding of modelling.

warning signs

propagander posters Reaseache

Today I was given a few books by my tutor Jerard on propaganda and posters that would be useful research for our environment project. I was looking at war posters from Russian propaganda and was intrigued by the use of colour, font and simple shapes to put the message across.

The main colours that stuck out to me were red, black and white as these were the predominant colours used. I decided this would be the colour pallet I would use when designing my own posters.