Critical Analysis

As this project comes to a close its time to look back on the last six weeks and what ive produced and learnt.

Over the last 12 weeks I wished that i had much more time and experience with the software to produce the anumation that I would have liked, as it was I had only a pasing experience with the software and as such I had really no clue as to how to animate a human body using the bones and rigging. The island in the first scene was one that i was never truly happy with, more time and experience would have allowed me to create a more realistic looking island or maybe looking at other software suited to landscaping such as Bryce and importing that into the 3DS Max scene. Having a computer that could handle the software would have helped aswell.

There are some areas in the first scene which could have been done better such as the very stupid mistake of getting the Lava level wrong in the second part of the scene and adding a smoke trail to the missile. The main think I didnt like about the island scene was the actual island and the water, they didnt look very realistic, more reseach into landscaping and water effects would have been beneficial but due to lack of time this part had to be animated as quickly as possible considering I still had an entire scene to model.

The second scene was more to my liking apart from the aforementioned lack of knowledge about rigging and animating characters. Lighting is the main area that really let this part of the animation down, cant get the daylight system to work the way i had wanted it to, either it whites out the entire scene due to being too bright or its completely black, managed to get a sort of dusk out of the system but it was still way too dark for my liking.

The other areas i did not really like would have been the sound, I have had little or no experience with Adobe Premier Pro and it shows with the audio, i really need far more work with this software system to get proficient with it.

Below is the trailer linked from youtube.

Post Production and the Spectre Falls Trailer

Once all of the scenes had been rendered, the footage and the audio files i wanted to use were inported into Adobe Premier to be edited together. The audio clips were all found at the following site: Absolute Sound affects Archive, the bond theme was one that i have had in my personal collection.

I used a fade to black transition to go between the two scenes and the audio clips were put into the animation where nedded, the sounds arent spectacular to be honest and im not yet that proficient with Premier to cut the audio properly and to my satisfaction. For the splash screen i grabbed some bond images and created a simple coming soon screen which is shown below:

The two images for this part came from the following sites:
007 Logo
Back spiral image

Once this sequence was all added together and set to render the trailer was essentially finished. i had wanted to include the finished video on here but it fails to upload. its on the dsc anyway.

For some reason some of the audio did not seem to work as well as i hoped and it may require a revisit to get the audio to much higher standards. I would have also liked to have animated the characters whch i think i will revisit once i am more proficient witht he software. The trailer is i think quite effective, showing something happening but not giving too much away until the recognisable theme in the last scene which does cut very nicely with the end of the trailer. Im pretty happy with the trailer at the moment, with more practice i hope to become far more proficient with the software.

Hotels

I spent about two weeks following this tutorial and getting the basics of the room correct, this meant that the room, windows and bed with lamps and bedside tables had to be created, the tutorial was very useful in helping me create the scene and before long i had the bed in the room with two lamps, pillows and bedside tables:

I then added two human figures, again curtesy of the 3DS Max Bible, a cloth sheet to drape over them and a picture frame above the bed. The picture frame was a very easy peice of box modelling and took about 5 minutes to inset, extrude and detach the front polygon and then create a glass surface over the top of the picture. The final room looks a little like this:

Final Scene render

Once i had the hotel room modelled, it was pretty easy to duplicate the scene to create a hotel building from which to start the camera pan into the hotel room.

For this sequence, i needed to animate a camera moving through the window, into the room to focus on the mobile phone on the bedside table, which then rings.

This is a slight change from the original idea as i have no idea yet on how to rig a human and to animate the bones to be able to have Bond reach over and pick up the phone. Instead i decided to cut the conversation altogether and just have the ring tone feed into the final splash screen.

animating the camera was pretty straight forward using the movement andi rotation tools to get the camera into the desired position. I prefer to animate usong the manual set key process instead of the auto key as this gives me much more control over the movements inbetween keyframes. Once the camera had been animated  i then turned my attention to the phone, for this i was going to use a simple trick of creating a black screen just in front of the display screen on the phone and then animating the transparency of the texture when i wanted it to be completely see through when the phone rings. With all this done it was then just to set the scene to render. Below is the finished animation.

Missile Launch, a hotel room to put my phone in....

For the second part of the scene i was able to remove all of the trees and focus on the top of the volcano, this removed a large amount of the memory usage and allowed me to render this scene much faster than normal.

This is the island with trees as used in the first animation sequence:

And this is the island without them as used in the second part of the sequence:

Once all of the trees had been removed and the system then had some speed to it, i could bring in the missile and create the animation. I created a lava layer out of a cylinider cut in half and then mirrored, i had placed this slightly higher than the lava in the first sequence, but of a rookie mistake that one. A black tube was then affixed under the lava to give a black inner for the base and a guide for the rocket to be sized to a nd then animated launching out of it. Below is the final rendered sequence before any after effects have been added.

On a search through the 3DS Max tutorials i happened upon a very handy tutorial for a hotel room which is included here: Hotel Room. More on that next week.

Animating and trees, lots of trees

Weeks 7 and 8 were focusing on learning some animation techniques and setting up the first section of the animation.

During the lecture we went through some basic animation techniques to make a box move, which was pretty simple as the animating tools are incredibly intuitive to use. I then went a little further and used the box to tip over and squash an unsuspecting ball that just happened to be in its way, here is the result:

A little rought but still pretty cool, was also my first attempt at using lighting.

When creating the island scene with the missile firing from the centre of the volcano, i decided to cut the scene in two, first doing the camera fly by across the water to the island and then to its summit and then to do the lava opening up and the rocket firing as a second animated section. This proved a little bit of a boon as i had just then decided to add a forest layer onto the island using some plam tree models that came from the disc included with my copy of the 3DS Max Bible. I got a little over enthusiastic and before i knew it i had well over 300 of these trees on the island. As you can expect this caused a rather large strain on the computer and stopped me being able to render the scene. A quick fix of deleting all of the tree trunks meant that the scene would render but it would take a very long time. 24 hours on a pretty powerful home computer to render out 25 seconds of footage was quite a test. Below is the final render of that part of the scene.

Camera panning

With all the assets in place i could relax for the last lecture befor the hand in dat and thats what i did, i decided to use the lecture tutorial to make a simple panning shot of the island. I placed a camera in the scene where i wanted it to start then used the auto key animation tool to slowly rotate the camera giving a nice view of the island: