[Personal] - Conclusion

In conclusion, I believe that despite time constraints and minor group conflicts, we have still managed to work together and create a good enough animation for our client to use as an advert for her website.

After seeing that almost every other group went for an ultra-realistic style of animation, I am happy to believe that we made the right choice in going with the more cartoony Pixar-like style. Not only did this separate us from the others, but it also allowed us to go for a more light-hearted animation and include a bit of humour, and humour is always a good technique to use for advertising. It also allowed us to get away with adding huge amounts of detail to the sceneray, giving us more time for the animation and editing.

As much as I do like our style, part of me does wish that we had also gone for a realistic style. I would have loved the chance to test my skills and experiment with new techniques in order to get the best looking model I could achieve. However, I dont quite think that I am ready for modeling a realistic motoring machine which includes so many individual moving parts. Perhaps it worked out for the best.

I am happy with my individual part of the animation. It took me some time to model the scenery and the racers themselves. However, upon completion of the final animation, I cant help but feel that my section was a little boring compared to the others. Mine was purely just following the racers once around the track before linking to the next scene. I wish I had come up with some other way to either add some humour to the scene or make it more exciting to watch. To make it more humourous, I could have used my Stig parody character to the fullest and try to reflect The Stig's smug attitude to the other racers. To make it more exciting, I could have made better use of the camera and maybe follow an individual racer around the track from a close up view. I will make sure to take all of the possibilities into account when animating in future.

If I had the chance to make any improvements, I would first of all re-think the animation. It would need to be about 10 seconds shorter, have some more humour in it and have better use of the camera for more effective angles. I would also like to improve the scenery by modifying some of the textures. I am happy with most of them, but I could have probably found better ones for certain sections, such as the track itself. I wouldnt make any changes to the introduction part of the animation, as it turned out exactly as I planned. I am very happy with this part.

I believe that overall, the four of us made a good group. For the most part, we were all on the same wavelength when it came to ideas. There was one member of our group who I personally felt made it harder for us by not agreeing to compromise with any ideas that he did not like. Not only this, but due to the same member we were unable to create the interactive flash that we had planned from the start due to him not agreeing to make a template of the flash for us to fill in ourselvs at a later date like he agreed to at the start of the project. However, differences aside, we still managed to work together and in the end, create an animation that we are all very proud of.

Overall, I am very happy with the final animation. I do believe that I could have done a better job with my personal scene, but I am still quite happy with the final result. I very much enjoyed the experience and would love to do it again. I just hope that next time, we'll be given a little more time!

[Personal] - Final Scene: Lawn Mower Racing

The scene picks up from where the last one left us, by starting with the camera facing the floor. At this point during the final animation, the text "Lawn mower racing" appears alongside the British Lawn Mower Racing logo in order to introduce the viewer to the scene.



The camera then pans upwards to reveal the lawn mower track. It was at this point that I did originaly intend to have the camera zoom in on the racers and circle them before returning to its original spot. However this would have added another 5 or so seconds onto the scene, which was already approaching 1 minute.



The camera then follows the racers complete 1 lap around the track. Looking back at it now, perhaps I should have had the camera focus on the track with the racers already half way through the lap. The I could have used the extra few seconds to add some humour to the end of the scene with the characters.



The racers then cross the finish line.



Finally, a golf ball lands on the track, creating the transition between my scene and Mike's golf scene.

[Personal] - Final Scene: Introduction

Here's a few screenshots of the opening animation.


It opens with the camera overlooking the "VISIT ESSEX" grass on the grass floor. In order to create this effect I had to create a single blade of grass polygon and then use the scatter tool to create seveal thousand copies. As it can be seen from the screenshot, I ended up with well over 100,000 polygons.


2 lawn mowers the drive over the text. I created 2 planes which were hidden underneath the grass floor and were animated to rise when the lawn mower drove over it. This created the effect of the grass being cut.



The camera then zooms in on the text and then moves forwards along the grass floor. I had to do this in order to create an effective transition into the next scene, rather than just having a simple cut. I also had to make one of the lawn mowers invisible to avoid it being seen by the camera when it zooms along the floor.



The scene then ends with the camera a couple of inches away from the characters.

[Personal] - Music

Once we had completed our final animation, we had to decide whether we wanted to use sound effects, music or both.

We all had mixed opinions but in the end we decided to go with music, as we felt that music plays a huge part and can really make or break anything. It could bring so much more emotion to a scene than sound effects alone could ever do. Having both music and sound effects would probably end up causing the scene to be too cluttered with sound, especially over the lawn mower facing and air show scenes as they would require continous engine sounds.

The big dilemma was coming up with a suitable peiece of mucic which would not only suit all four of our scenes, but also give the right impression to tourists considering to visit Essex.In the end, I came up with the idea of using the theme song from the Pixar film "Up" which can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoEMx_-ccR0

I believed that this music fitted our animation perfectly for a few reasons. The main one being that I have said since the beginning that we were all aiming for a Pixar-like style to our animation. So what better piece of music would fit our scene other than one from a Pixar film itself? It was this theme from this particular film because I just felt that it had the same sense of quirckiness that our scenes had.

We were quite lucky with the timing too, as the music stays quircky throughout the first three scsnes and then becomes dramatic towards the end over the airshow scene, before slowly calming down towards the climax of the animation.

Of course, there is the issue of the music being copyrighted to Pixar and Disney. So if our animtion does get picked to advertise our client's webiste, unfortunately either they would have to pay royalties, or find a replacement song...

[Group] - No Interactive Flash

At the start of this project, we had intended to not only create an animation, but also an interactive flash. The idea being that instead of the user having to sit though the entire animtion, they could simply decide which event they wished to learn about and only watch that section of the animation.

Due to time constraints, a little lack of cooperation and some bad luck, we were unfortunately unable to do this. We all underestimated the amount of time that it would take to render our animations. We were rendering right up until a few days before we had to present our final animation to our client, along with all of the other groups. So finding the time to render took forever.

The week before the animation, we did discuss the possibility of creating the template to the flash file and simply slotting in a lower resolution version of each of our sections later once our HD renders had completed. However, we could not come to an agreement. So we had to wait until we had finished our final renders before even considering to create the flash. However, due to one of our members being ill on the final week, we decided to forget about it and focus purely on the final animation.

It would have been nice to be able to submit both a continuous and interactive Essex tourism animation, but in the end, it all seemed to be too much for us.

[Group ] - Group Meeting 07/12/10

Today we managed to stick our 4 sections together into one complete animation, and add effects to it in Premiere Pro. All of the editing work was done by Dan.

Unfortunately, due to Simon being ill, we were unable to complete the airshow scene the way in which it had been intended as he was not there to tell us how he wanted his parts to fit together. The rest of us had to arrange them ourselves.

As well as this, my lawn mower scene had a slight problem. Some of the audience members in the backround would ramdomly have some of the verticies extend to the top of the screen for a few frames. Due to the fact that we completed the final animation so late in the day and that at the time of writing, we have to present this to our client tomorrow, we just didnt have the time to fix it. Luckily, its not that noticable.

Despite these small problems, our final animation has turned out much better than any of us expected. We are all very pleased with the result and hope that our client will be too.

[Personal] - HD Rendering Problem

It was recommended to render our final animation in HD, however I came across an annoying problem when I did. Every few frames, the heads of the audience group underneath the left tent randomly extends to the top of the scene. I have no idea why it does this, as when I render the animation in a lower quality, the heads dont extend.

It could simply be because in a lower quality, the extended heads are just not visible. However , the lower quality renders were only in a slightly lower quality compared to the HD render, so you would think that they would still be visible. I believe that it could be to do with the method of rendering.

As rendering in HD takes such a long time, I had to use another method rather than simply rendering the whole animation on one computer. I had to do a net render, where by I used several computers at once to render each frame individually as a bitmap. This method dramatically reduced the rendering time. I believe that as it rendered it as bitmaps rather than an avi file, it showed these stray extended pixels. This is why they did not show up on my lower quality renders as they were rendered as an avi file.

Unfortunately, at the time of writing this, we have to present out animation to our client tomorrow morning. I just dont have the time to re-render the entire scene, so they will have to annoyingly stay. Luckily, they are not that noticable, so hopefully they wont draw the attanetion away from the lawn mower racing.

[Group] - Group Meeting 03/12/10

Today, all four of us worked on rendering our animations. They all took much longer to render than expected, and as a result, we were unable to complete the rendering by the end of the meeting.

We have to present our final animation on Wednesday, so we have agreed to finish the rendering over the weekend, meet up on Monday and finish everything there and then.

[Personal] - Linking the Opening and Main Scene Together

When I first came up with the storyboard, I didnt really come up with an effective transition between the opening scene and the main race scene. However, messing around with the camera in the main scene gave me the inspiration that I needed to come up with such a way.

I decided that once the lawn mowers had driven over the words, the camera should swoop downwards and then quickly pan forwards. I would then start off the main scene with the camera in the same position while panning forwards and eventually focusing up to reveal the race.

I did have a few problems with this. The first one being that in the opening scene, one of the lawn mowers were in the way of the camera panning forwards. So once it had moved off screen, I had to make it invisible so that the camera would not see it.

The hardest part was getting the two scenes to link perfectly. I had to make sure that the camera ended in the openeing scene in the same position as it started in the main scene. It took a few tries but I think that I eventually got there. There is a little jump when the 2 scenes are linked together, but nothing majorly obvious.

The lighting casued a little bit of trouble too. Getting the same light effect in both scenes was hard, and I still dont think that I managed to pull it off. However, there is still time to perfect it.

[Personal] - Opening Scene Update

I have managed to come up with a solution to my opening scene problem.

I was having trouble coming up with a way of making parts of the words disappear when the lawn mower drove over them. I tried to use the visibility option, but this didnt work as it would apply visibility to the whole object, rather than individual polygons.

However, I did manage to come up with another way to create the illusion of the letters disappearing. I did this by creating a plane the exact width of the lawn mower, and placed it underneath the other grass plane along the path that the lawn mower takes. I then used the Auto Key function to make parts of this new plane to rise above the words as the lawn mower drives over it. Due to the birds eye camera view, it is impossible to see that the new plane is infact hovering a few inches above the letters. I then applied the same material texture to it as the grass plane and made it slightly lighter to create the effect of the old grass being replaced by the new fresh grass.


Also, as it can be seen, I have changed the grass material. This material is much more effective because A) - it is evenly spread, meaning that I can overlap the same material again and again and it would not be obvious, and B) - It makes it much easier to read the text. I have also applied this material to the main scene.

[Group] - Group Meetings 19 and 26/11/2010

On the week of the 19th, we once again continued with our modeling. By the end of that week we had all completely or mostly finished our modeling.

On the week of the 26th, we had all finished our modeling and were well on our way through animating our scenes.

Tom - Made finishing touches to the main scene animation and began to animate the introduction scene.
Dan - Continued to animate his scene.
Mike - Experimented with a few scenery changes and rendering.
Simon - Continued to animate his scene.

We all agreed that over the course of the following week we would complete our animations, ready to stick together in Premiere Pro. We would also gather up sound effects for each of our scenes. However, we have still not decided if we will be using sound effects or just have some background music. We will make the decision on the day.

[Personal] - General Update

Over the past few days I have added some more bits to my main scene, as well as almost completely finished the animation.


First of all, I have added audience members in the background:




The group on the left tap their feet until the race begins, and then clap for the duration of the race.




The middle group wave their arms in the air.




The right group wave each arm alternatively.




Finally, there is one person standing by the fence who follows the white lawn mower racer around the track.



The reason why I am showing each group on here is because unfortunately, from the camera angles that my scene is animated from, you cant really make out that the audience is even moving at all.



As for the actual animation, I have so far had to animate it twice. The first time I animated exactly how I imagined which was where the camera zooms in on the track, spins around the racers, then follows them around the track until the finish where the camera then zooms in on a golf ball that appears on the screen. Unfortunately, this came to nearly 40 seconds. Considering that we had decided that we would each animate 15-20 second scenes each, this was not good. So I had to re-render it without the camera spinning around the racers. This cut the animation down to 30 seconds. I believe that while this is still more than i planned to do, it should still not be long enough for the viewers to get bored. However, if need be I can cut down the animation even further by speeding up the racers...

I am now at the final stages of completion. All I have to do now is change some of the textures used, position the camera at better angles, and add a bit at the end to neatly link my scene to Mike's golf scene.

[Personal] - Opening Scene Progress

This is my opening scene. The plan was to have "Visit Essex" spelled out in the grass, and have a lawn mower run it over. I thought the hardest part would be getting the grass to appear in the shape of the letters. I was very wrong. As of right now, I am unsure if I will actually be able to do what I had planned...

To get the grass effect, I just had to create one strand of grass, apply it to the text "V I S I T E S S E X" which I had converted into an editable polygon, and then use the scatter option to copy the strand several thousand times over the text. I then messed around with the options to get the final result.

I thought that I would be able to made individual polygons disappear by lowering their visibility once the lawn mower had ridden over them. However, it seems that you can only edit the visibility of an entire object, rather than the individual polygons. I hope that there is some way to do this, or else this scene may go to waste...

[Personal] - Main Scene Update

I have now mostly finished the main scene. Ive added:

- Advertising signs in the middle. I will probably change the design at a later stage, as they are quite boring right now.

- 3 tents in the background which will each have 1-3 people underneath watching the race.

- A checkered start/finish line. I will probably change the material of the flag, as there is no need for this to also be checkered.

- A couple of trees. These trees are the ones that come as part of 3D Studio Max. I didnt feel the need to create my own trees. Not when they're offered to me for free and when theres a lot of other things to do in the scene.

- Used soft selection to add a wavey effect to the fence.


I have also started to animate the scene. So far I have all 3 lanw mowers completing one lap around the track. Now I just have to animate the wheels, the steering wheels, the characters arms, and if I have time, their facial expressions. I also have to decide on the camera angles.

[Personal] - The Ctig

This is meant to be a parody of The Stig from Top Gear. I just thought that it would be amusing to have him as part of the race. The only problem with this model was that having text on one side of the model meant that it would reflect on the other side. So unfortunately the writing is the wrong way around on one side. I will just have to make sure to angle my animation so that the backwards text is not visible.

[Personal] - Scenery Progress

Here is my progress with the scenery. This is where the bulk of the animation will take place.

I created 3 planes and shaped them to form the surrounding grass, middle grass and the track. In order to make sure that the measurements were accurate, I included the model of my lawn mower as a reference. All I had to do was make sure that the scenery was big enough to make the lawn mower fit to scale.

Next, I created the black and white blocks. As mentioned before, I did indtend to use hay stacks as the barriers to the track. However due to the mentioned reasons, i went with these blocks instead. I simply made one block and copied it all around the track. The blocks are not all perfectly touching each other to form a neat circle. I did this on purpose, as the reference image that I used had done the same thing:



I then got to work on the surrounding fence. I based this off of those temporary plastic fences you see at places such as car boot sales, events, festivals and so on. I used the inset tool in order to create the holes. I will eventually use the soft selection tool to give each section of the fence some shape to make it look like the light plastic that it is:



Finally, I added the start/finish flag, a background and some grass texture.

I plan on added a section for the audience to stand, some advertising boards and perhaps some more detailed grass.

[Personal] - Unused Hay Model

While researching tracks for lawn mower racing, I found that most of them used hay stacks as barriers to the track. So I created a hay stack model, as seen above, and I intended to place all around the track. However, due to the following reasons, I wont be doing this:

First of all, it doesnt really look like a convincing hay stack. The cube body can be seen too easily. I wanted the individual hay strands to blend into the cube and make it look more realistic. It just didnt work.

Second, when it is rendered from a certain distance, the individual strands do not show. This is probably due to the fact that they are so small. So from the angle that I would be animating at, the hay stacks would just look like cubes.

Finally, the main reason for not using this model is that this model alone contains over 30000 polygons. It takes my laptop a few seconds to render this model alone. So my laptop, and most likely almost every other computer would seriously stuggle to render several of these models, as well as having animated models surronding it.

So for these reasons, I will be using the black and white plastic type barriers found on some other race tracks, as well as advertising banners.

[Personal] - Lawn Mower Update

Here is the almost completed model of the lawn mower. The model itself is now done. I just have to apply a material to it. For now, Ive just seperated the polygons into groups and given them their own ID and followed the basic colour scheme of the reference lawn mower. However, I plan on doing a UVW Unwrap of it and adding text to the model to make it look more like its in a racing event.

Once I have finished the racing track, I will be able to make a start on the animation.

[Personal] - Lawn Mower Progress

Here is my progress with the lawn mower model. It was extremely difficult finding a good reference image of the side of a lawn mower tractor. I eventually found one, but had no such luck finding one of the front of the lawn mower. As a result, I had to estimate the size.

I used Dan's model of the human so that I could model the lawn mower to match the size of the human. As it is not the final model of the human, it is possible that the lawn mower model may be slightly off when the time comes to animate it. However, it should be easy enough to modify it if need be.

I used this tutorial to create the tires:

http://www.techtut.com/Tutorial/3D-studio-max/30-Easy-way-of-creating-rubber-tire.html

[Group] - Group Meeting 5/11/10

This week we spent the whole time continuing with our work.

Myself - Creating the lawn mower model
Dan - Creating and boning the human model
Michael - Creating the golf course
Simon - Texturing the 2 plane models

[Group] - Storyboard Scene 1: Lawn Mower Race

Here is the storyboard for my part of the animation - the lawn mower race. As it is the first scene in the animation, I have found a way of incorporating a brief introduction. I will try attempt to write "Visit Essex" into the grass scenery and then have the lawn mower races drive over it.

It should be noted that this may not be the final result of the animation. I am still going over many different possible ways/camera angles etc of doing each section. The final animation may turn out to be completely different, but for now, this is how I imagine it to play out.

[Personal] - Chosen Idea

I have decided to go with lawn mower racing.

This is because at the start of the project, we thought about focusing on the quirky events in Essex in order to move away from the crowd who we thought would all be chosing the main attactions of Essex. Dan and I came up with the transition idea where it would start off with lawn mower racing. Once they move off the screen, it would rain and then the grass would turn to mud where the scene would change to mud racing. Finally the screen would pan to the side to show a beer festival.

I really liked this idea, and decided to stick with lawn mower racing as I already had ideas of how I could start off the animation.

At some point in the animation, I will want the lawn mowers to cut some grass. I am a little concerned about this as I have no idea how I can pull this off. Hopefully it will be much easier than I think it could be. However somehow, I dont see that happening.

One problem is that I have been unable to find any reference images online at all. Even the website is quite vague. So as a result, I will have to use reference images from other lawn mower races from around the world and create a generic track. Hopefully, this will be acceptable.

[Group] - Group Meeting Animation Discussion

Friday 22/10/10 - 10:30-12

Today we had another group meeting. As it had been a week or so since our last meeting, we went over our idea again and decided to stick with the transition between 4+ areas of Essex idea.

As of today, the 4 main attractions of Essex that we want to animate are the: air show, beer festival, golf course and lawn mower race.

We also decided on what type of visual style of animation we would be doing. We want to do a realistic style mixed with a little bit of a cartoony style. Like in the Pixar films where the humans have a distinct cartoon style, yet seemingly blend in with the realistic background style.

The intention is to each take 1 of the 4 areas of Essex and do a 15-20 second animation of them. We would then create an inroduction and ending to the animation together and stick them all together. We were a little concerned that the animation would not be long enough, so we deicded that if we have the time we would include a fifth of sixth area of Essex in the animation, if need be.

Finally, perhaps the most significant part if the meeting, we came up with the idea of incorporating Flash into the animation. In other words, instead of creating a continous 2 minute animation, we would make an interactive Flash animation. So for example, we could use the map of Essex that Dan created and then place our 4 landmarks on it. The user would then be able to click on a landmark and watch the short animation while having the option to read up on some facts. This way, the user would have more control over what areas of Essex they wish to learn more about instead of having to sit though an entire animation.

If time allows us, we will submit both the 2 minute animation and the interactive Flash animation.

[Group] - Animation Ideas Update

After the meeting that we had last week, we found out that most other groups had also decided to create a 3D map of Essex. We also came to the conclusion that our idea had become too ambitious for the limited amount of time that we have to complete our animation.

For these reasons, we have decided to go back to our original idea. Instead of having a character guide us around areas of Essex by walking along a map, we will take some of our chosen locations, and simply transition them together. So for example, having the animation start off at a Golf course where our character would hit the ball. The ball would then land in a field where we would pan out to show the location of the lawn mower race. This is just 1 of several possibilities for our transitions.

We believe that this would be a much more effective way of guiding the audience around Essex, and we believe it will seperate us from those groups who have decided to stick with the map idea.

First Impressions

For the second half of this semester, we were told that we had to get into groups and create a short animation promoting tourism in Essex.

Once I had formed a group with 3 other classmates, we eventually decided that we would each take one attraction of Essex, create a 15-25 second animation for that and then transition them together.

Our group consists of:

Michael Walton
Daniel Alderman
Simon Mills
Tom Early


We did come up with a couple of other ideas which can be found on our group blog:

http://3dvisitessex.blogspot.com/


I am looking forward to doing this as I really enjoyed animating last year. However my main concern is time. It was hard enough getting a 3 minute animation done in 1 semester last year. Now I have to get one done in 7 weeks. While it is true that I am in a group and that the work has technically be quartered, I still have to run by any ideas with the rest of the group in order to avoid any clashes. We also all have to work together in ensure that our models are to scale, which could cause horrible problems when the time comes to animate. Hopefully, this shouldnt be too much of a problem, as so far we have all been able to work together without any problems. Only time will tell what happens.



I will be using this blog to post the progression of my work and will use the group blog to post updates of what we have accomplished that week. From now on, I will not only be posting my own progression on this blog, but also the posts that I make on the group blog. In order to differentiate between the 2, I will type the following at the start of each post:

[Personal] - Personal blog progress
[Group] - My posts on the group blog