Evaluation

So, we have now finally finished the project and have put everything together using Premier Pro.

This project has been quite interesting and fun to do, although stressful at the same time! I felt that the overall video turned out quite well, it is clear that it could have been better, but I feel we have done our best. There were some lack of communication within the group, particularly with 1 member who seemed reluctant to take part with ideas and meetings, which meant some parts of the animation didn't flow correctly into the rest of our scenes, but there was not much we could do to solve this problem.

I enjoyed making the toy train move along with the light shining, I felt this was quite enjoyable to watch so should be no problem to entertain children with this advert! I know some parts in my scene such as the chairs and table being FAR too big looked a bit odd as it was far too big compared to the children, I only realised this near the end of finishing the animation so I couldn't do massive changes except shrink them a little, otherwise everything else such as the door and toys would be out of proportion.

If I were to do everything again, I would definately try to improve on my room by adding more animation in and learning new techniques, such as lighting, as well add more objects since it does appear to be quite empty at the moment. I would also correct the mistakes as listed in the final version.

I have never been confident with animating in 3DS Max, however I do feel that I have gained more out of this project seeing as I have learnt how to use the reactor tool (not perfectly, but almost there!), as well as using the Biped (again this could be improved on had I figured out how to fix the envelopes problem).

However, I am quite pleased with the amount of new techniques I've learnt this semester, and hope to continue learning more new skills within 3DS Max.

Final Group Video

The final group video is shown above. Some changes have been made to each of the scenes:

- As we all created our silhouette's differently, some of us were unable to put a question mark material onto the body, so we came to the conclusion that it was best to take the question marks off of Rich's scenes so that it would flow with the rest of the scenes and be consistent throughout instead. Rich also changed the speed of his camera so that it went slightly faster.

- Maria has changed her room so that it didn't start from left to right, but started so that it flowed from my scene into hers. She also changed some of the camera angles.

- Luke added more tables and chairs into his scene because it would look better and took use of the spare space.

- Changes to my scene includes the ball actually falling correctly and bouncing (achieved by simply scaling the ball down a little when it hits the floor). However, after rendering it, I noticed that the ball seems to stay up in the end once the camera moves away, but it's too late to change this. The hoop throwing is a little faster, although it seems to jerk halfway through, but still looks effective nonetheless. I have also changed the camera angles a lot so that you can only see certain silhouettes at a time, so that they don't appear static throughout, and so that you can see their movements better than the last video (you can see once the train hits the blocks, the silhouette playing with the hoops pays attention to the crash by turning his head).

- Music added in.

Premier Pro

After all the members of the group had completed their scenes, it was time for all the scenes to be joined up together with music included. Luke, Rich and myself managed to edit the videos in Premier Pro. Techniques used were cutting parts of videos and fading music to match the scenes appropriately (animation movements in time with the music beats etc).

The music that we decided to use is a song by Franz Ferdinand called 'Take Me Out'. We chose to use this song as the lyrics 'take me out' can relate to taking someone out to somewhere fun, such as bowling within the YMCA.

Final Nursery Scene Video

Above shows the completed Nursery scene video. I have had several problems with some parts of it being too slow (shown in the previous post), but have now corrected them. There are still some parts which don't look quite right, and could have been tweaked a bit more for perfection. However, I realised that I was unable to correct some parts as it would mess up the rest of the animation if I had moved the key frames around. So this was the best that I could do!

First Group Video (Draft) & Presentation Thoughts

The first group video that was prepared for the YMCA presentation is shown above. We did not get to show this video as my scene only finished rendering after the presentation, and some of the files that had been saved on Premier Pro didn't seem to work properly which was a shame. As you can see there are a lot of mistakes and tweaking needs to be done to my scene, as well as other members' of the group.

Mistakes/changes needed to be made:

- Rich's room (4th scene) is the only scene to have silhouette's with question marks on them and others don't. At the time we thought this would be a good idea as it shows that anyone could join the YMCA, it gives the impression that the person 'could be you'. This meant that it wouldn't portray a certain stereotype; backgrounds they're from, gender or dress sense for example, so anyone is welcome to join. We will need to all have question marks on our silhouettes for the final version, or take Rich's off. His camera angles also seem a bit too slow but this will be easy to adjust.

- My room (1st scene), has several errors. The whole camera movement was too slow, some of the angles were not right, as it showed too much of some of the silhouette's just standing there until they were key framed to animate which didn't look good! The ball at the very beginning also doesn't animate well or fully as it just seems to drop on the floor. The silhouette playing with the hoop also does a 'matrix effect' when they start to throw the hoop, it is also far too slow and does a weird movement. All these will be changed in the final version by making the camera move faster, as well as editing the animations of each silhouette.

- My nursery room goes from right to left into Maria's (2nd scene), however, Maria's room then starts from left to right which doesn't flow at all. The camera speed is also a bit too fast, and the reactor tool for her bowling pins falling over doesn't seem to work, they seem to fall before the bowling ball even hits the pins. We have also noticed one of the silhouette's hand goes through the guitar when it is playing, so these mistakes will need to be changed.

- Luke's room (3rd scene) is missing some tables and chairs. However apart from that minor issue, everything seems to be flowing fine.

- There is no music!! This will be added in the final.

Presentation Thoughts:

I have to say I feel that our presentation for this went terribly. We had it all planned out what was going to be said, but this didn't work out as we had major issues with some of the programs not working/loading properly, some scenes didn't render out in time and some of the work that was meant to have been shown for the presentation didn't seem to save onto the memory stick, so we all felt let down with ourselves and was completely thrown off with what we were going to say.

Testing Movement

This is one of the silhouettes created and has been put into the final scene, however I thought I would take this video to show it's movement as it is not that clear/visible in the final product. The silhouette is 'controlling' the toy train, and watching it move at the same time. If you look closely, you will be able to see the arms and head move.

My Silhouette & Biped

Here is a silhouette I have created of a child, seeing as the models Rich and Luke made were not able to be scaled down to size to portray a child's height.

This silhouette was created by using several boxes (for the body, arms, legs, hands and feet) and then modified by extruding polygons with the 'soft selection' tool. A 'turbosmooth' modifier was then applied to it for a more rounded finish. The head that I created from last semester's module was also added on, as I felt it had quite a child-like appearance. The legs, arms, head etc. were then attached to the body so that it was one object. Finally a black coloured material was applied as the default black colour wasn't dark enough, and with using the material colour instead, it made the silhouette actually look flat, which was what we wanted to achieve in the first place.

After modelling the silhouette, I then went on to learn how to use the Biped tool which I found extremely useful.

First of all, I had to select the Biped tool and drag out a Biped in the Front view to the correct size of my silhouette. I then had to adjust parts of the silhouette and arrange the positioning of the arms, legs, hands and feet to match the Biped.

Once this was done, I then had to add a 'skin' modifier to the body, and then select all the biped parts which meant that the biped was now connected to the body.

Now when I move the hand of the biped, the silhouette will move too - BUT, I have had major issues with the legs, and a bit with the arms, as I could not edit the 'envelopes' properly. For example, whenever I move the arms, some of the ear/head moved along with it, this was because the envelope was VERY big unlike how it should be, and no matter how much I tried to edit it, it just wouldn't work.