Week 12

Set dressing is just about finished. Have rendered shots of the scene and saved as images.
Discovered a mistake I made during the process was instead of smoothing an object in the up close shots, where detail is needed, I ended up smoothing the entire object which in turn took up more memory and was the major cause of the constant computer crashing. Also learnt an important lesson in backing up files.
So the set is just about complete, I'm happy with how its looking, now just gotta get the cars looking right, get the fire coming out of the exhausts, and finalise the lighting.

Sound track is done, may require some altering to fit perfectly within the scene but shouldn't take very long.

Running short on time but it will be what it will be, had some ups and downs, should probably look into doing a 2D project next year, hmm?

Week 11

Dressing of the set is still underway, but taking shape very well. The scene of the petrol gauge is taken out and I'm replacing it with a tire burst instead. Still stops the car, and will be easier and faster to make happen rather than a seperate shot with the animated petrol gauge. Its about saving time and still having the animation look good. I'm currently adding grass and trees and shrubs to various parts of the mountains for the up close shots. Lighting will be underway soon. Also I've decided not to have faces on the characters, as I do not have time for extra rigging for facial expressions. The eyes that I tried to make didn't work, I tried different ways to make the eyes work and they looked wrong.

The animation sequence is uploaded to blogspot. There needs to be some alterations to the motion paths to get the white car to be in the right place at the right time.

From here on out, I need to start texturing and set dressing. Still deciding weather to add faces to the cars or not. Issues are just with the white car being at the right place at the right time.

Basic animation sequence, needs small ammount of altering

there is no background dressing or much colour besides the cars (to tell them apart)

this is everything I have done so far.

Week 7

The major animation project is coming along nicely, so far, audio has been constructed with sound effects of the appropriate and fitting audio has been found, the music has been chosen (M.O.V.E - Dogfight) and all that needs finding is the skidding sound effect.

The sequence is coming along slowly. A few major issues have been raised, one being that when play blasting, the program wants to create an image plane, which in turn, messes with the programing and throws off parts of the sequence.

The other issue was that in creating the motion path for the cars, the motion path created originally was to go around the entire road (constructed into a rectangle, unknowing to the viewing eye during the final result) a separate car had to be made with a separate motion path, so it could fit within the story like in my storyboard.

To create the car rolling off the cliff motion. The red car was duplicated and key frames and rolls were created to get a believable car roll, this has been achieved.

The other issue that has been discovered is when each car is the only one in the view according to the story board, yet during the animated sequence, when each car was supposed to be hidden, they would end up hidden at other points too when they weren't supposed to be hidden. The hiding motion graph ended up being very uncoordinated but the layers can be viewed in accordance to the story board later on.

Because of these issues that Jack's help has been required (and appreciated) the expressions and facial construction rigging has not yet started, and we are reviewing weather the sequence will need the expressions and the car character or not (the sequence looks good without the facial expressions and the expressions could be difficult to turn out the way they were envisioned).

Conclusion: things are going slower than expected but they are being completed in a reasonable time. Set dressing will take a lot of work but in the end, I think the sequence will turn out great.

Storyboard in reverse order because blogspot cannot move images

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.