Conclusion

I've learnt a lot this project, and feel i have to remind myself in future projects to:

Get your plans sorted before you do anything else. Dont take too much time. Decide on one idea and stick to it completely. Make sure everyone knows whats going on and what they have to do.

I'm not too happy with the overall project. I was excited by the idea at first, but then as we changed bits and worked on camera angles it lost its possibilities. At the end of this project I feel dissapointed because we could have made it so much more. But having learnt my lessons hopefully it wont happen again. All in all I think I've only contributed to the final composition by animating! I know this isnt good and I am quite dissapointed, but ultimatly its my fault.

Rendering

haha as the file I am rendering is 200 mb! When I try to render even a single frame the Ram usage jumps up to about 2gb.. which of course crashes maya. We desperatly need more computers dedicated for rendering in ravensbourne as its nearly impossible to find one (that people wont turn off.)

Saying that though, its all done now. Finally rendered.


woo.

I seriously cant wait to hand this project in as I desperatly need sleep.

Animating

We had another sdit down and decided what camera angles to use. again this should have already been done with our story boards but as they were so rough we had to do them again. After deciding on the ones to we seperated the scenes up and passed them out to each of us. Chris would animate the start, then Jake, Me and then end with Charlie.

A few shots of the scene im animating:





Some shots of the second scene im animating:






Im pleased with the camera angles of these shots. And the final render looks really good with the lighting and fog that has been made. However, I think we could have been more creative with the shots used in the other scenes, as at the start of the project we were talking about just showing the feet running on snow, or just seeing the shadow of the character run round the streets and have the audience just miss him all the time. In the end I think we just did what was easiest due to lack of time.

Texturing

Im having trouble texturing my models as i have combined the meshes of several houses, and cant seem to seperate them to texture them individually.. my version of maya also seems to crash every time I click save which doesnt help a lot.. ahwell.

After a week of trying to texture we have decided not to use my models anyway as they don't really fit in with the rest of the environment. I think this is because we didnt have complete design sheets or complete story boards before we started modeling. Next time I start a project I'm definatly going to sort out the story boards and designs before I start modeling!!

Its alright though, I'm sure I'll use it in another project somewhere.

Its a shame because I could have spent my time working to make the environment jake had made more unique instead of just repeating the houses and balconeys and changing the textures slightly.

Recent Screens of Work

Heres just a few images from the latest scene. Im just using one basic ambient light at the moment and rendering using mental ray.


Everythings going quite well.. need to finish modeling and texturing this week and then start lighting/animating etc..