End Of Week 5

This is the end of week 5. So far, I have managed to build an entire road ring of various corners that will look like a mountain road when it is complete. I have created a motion path for a car to drive around so my animation has some sort of direction and initiative. I have duplicated the vehicle and motion path since both vehicles are driving side by side through the majority of the animation. I have found several audio tracks to play to add excitement and up the action feeling. I chose fast paced Eurobeat music (like techno, but with song structure and lyrics). I have found a fully accelerating audio car sound effect (most sounds were just engine revving or had rap music in the background). Its not a technically correct sound (the sound is of a Nissan Skyline GTR34 engine, both my cars are Honda NSXs and engines are either V6s or VTECs)

I have had a few issues with using the program Maya 2011. I have made different save files of Maya Binary and Maya ASCII files, but both have been corrupted in some way. I can’t seem to work on any of the animation because Maya will not show me anything in any of the cameras unless I am playing the sequence so far. The other issues are needing to know the shortcuts of the keys or where animating tools are in the lists. Essentially I need to get some shortcut knowledge. Both cars have been duplicated and painted. Some alternative animating is needed to get them both change their paths according to the storyboard. The shot sequencer has been very helpful and has made creating the shots and the animation up until now fairly easy. Just need to figure out how to get everything back on track, because it doesn’t even seem to be adding the shots into the sequencer anymore. The only teacher that can help me is Jack which is not easy since he isn’t here every day.

Background construction will begin once all my shots are sequenced together. The idea being that we make a whole animation and then place cameras at various areas to capture the happenings according to my storyboard. Maya is a very difficult program to use, so some problems I have trouble solving myself, so therefore, I ask Jack for help and he is able to fix any problems in almost exactly 2.36 seconds. Usually it has something to do with a graph editor or a motion path.

I think my animation will end up looking pretty decent but the audio will help it very much. The audio tracks I have found are very upbeat and will capture the mood and the emotion that I am conveying in my animation. I will hopefully get it looking good in the time I have left, the program is quite difficult to use, since I don’t have the program at home. But persistence will hopefully be the key to completing the animation well.