I thought it would be a good idea just to put a brief note about our presentation on here:
Well I think we were happy with what we produced as a group and how we presented it.
This is how it went down:
Craig introduced us and stated what we selected from the museum and why.
We then played our animation.
Adam then spoke about the environment he created.
Steven explained how we assigned the tasks of modelling the pump and its surroundings
and finally I explained why we decided to include a fire/chimnea.
The criticism we received was useful, but also somewhat confusing in one area. The confusing piece was obviously we stated that it was 'Arthur Mumfords Favourite Boiler Feed Pump' and that on top of the actual pump it is embossed 'Joseph Evans'. However we were led to believe that J.Evans created the pump but had some form of link to A.Mumford due to Craig having contacted one of the engineers at the museum multiple times and getting this information.
The other main point was simply that our animation ended a bit abruptly. Given more time obviously we could work this out and smooth the end result out.
All in all I think we enjoyed this project for the most part and worked well together.
Thursday, 10 December 2009
Wednesday, 9 December 2009
Craig Barker -Final Post
Today we all got together and finalised the video. I started by booking out a sound recorder from media services, and recording the vocals to be placed with the video.
After a bit of a mess around with the MP3 recorder, it was decided that Adam's voice was a bit more "museumy" than mine so he was used as the voice actor for the script!
The animation was imported into Adobe Premiere without any problems and the vocals were added. We then realised that the vocals out lasted the video, so we looped the video to make it all match up! Finally we added the sound effects of crackling fire to complete the video.
JOB DONE!!!
After a bit of a mess around with the MP3 recorder, it was decided that Adam's voice was a bit more "museumy" than mine so he was used as the voice actor for the script!
The animation was imported into Adobe Premiere without any problems and the vocals were added. We then realised that the vocals out lasted the video, so we looped the video to make it all match up! Finally we added the sound effects of crackling fire to complete the video.
JOB DONE!!!
Monday, 7 December 2009
Final Scene
Steven here, with our complete boiler pump finally placed into Adam's environment. Before I go into any detail, here's a screengrab of the final animation frame:
We spent our most recent meeting putting the boiler pump together, and then placed it into the environment. We also placed a camera into the scene, which moves around to give the viewer a better view of the envoronment, and most importantly the boiler pump as a whole.
Because I've been using the most recent version of 3DS Max, and since my middle part of the boiler pump (and presumably the materials too) will not open in earlier versions of the program, I was tasked with rendering the final video.
Before doing so, a number of changes had to be made, not only to shorten the total render time as much as possible, but also because of other technical issues. The aforementioned changes are as follows, with screengrabs.
Firstly, Adam's water tank was removed from the scene:
This was a difficult decision for me to make, since I imagine that along with the environment, Adam spent a fair bit of time getting the tank to look just right, and it fit in with the scene very well. However, once the completed boiler pump was placed into the scene, we initially had difficulty getting it to fit next to where this boiler was placed. It was shrunk, and even moved to the other side of the room, but I later noticed that it got in the way of the camera, so it ultimately had to be hidden. I personally feel that, had we thought more about it, we probably could have found a way for the water tank to connect to and work with the boiler pump.
Secondly, I had to replace Ryan's fire with one of my own.
The flame does look very good, but a problem that Ryan discovered early on was that, when a light source is included in the scene with this fire, it for some reasons colours some of it blue. While blue is the inverted colour of yellow, we had been scratching our heads as to why the flame was even changing to that colour, or rather how or why the light was changing it. With no apparent answer or a way to solve this, my only option (with it being 2am at the time... I just wanted to get the render started and go to bed!) was to replace the flame with one that I made and used for an earlier assignment:
So after bringing in this flame from a 3D Modelling and Animation assignment from last year, I placed it into Ryan's model, resized it as neccesary, and this is how it looks:
It is a bit of a shame that I had to resort to this, because my flame is actually dimmer than Ryan's, and the reflection effect that the previous flame had has now been lost.
Finally, a bump map that Adam applied to the concrete floor had to be removed.
Bump maps take a fair bit of time to render, so with the floor basically being a giant bump map, that would have been one of the contributing factors to a very, very long rendering time. So I simply had to make one small adjustment to the material to get rid of the bump map...
And this is what it now looks like. You can still see that there appears to be some bumps in the floor, so while it now doesn't have a very realistic texture, it still doesn't look too bad, and again reduces rendering time.
So while applying these changes, as well as making minor adjustments to the lighting and shading, I managed to get the total rendering time from 25 hours, up to around 36, and then finally down to a more reasonable 19 hours. I still didn't think my laptop could handle all of that, so I had to do it in four parts, three of which I slept through. The final render, in video form and with all four parts included, is here:
In our next, and most likely final meeting before we present it to the museum staff, we will be making some more changes like possibly adding a voiceover.
We spent our most recent meeting putting the boiler pump together, and then placed it into the environment. We also placed a camera into the scene, which moves around to give the viewer a better view of the envoronment, and most importantly the boiler pump as a whole.
Because I've been using the most recent version of 3DS Max, and since my middle part of the boiler pump (and presumably the materials too) will not open in earlier versions of the program, I was tasked with rendering the final video.
Before doing so, a number of changes had to be made, not only to shorten the total render time as much as possible, but also because of other technical issues. The aforementioned changes are as follows, with screengrabs.
Firstly, Adam's water tank was removed from the scene:
This was a difficult decision for me to make, since I imagine that along with the environment, Adam spent a fair bit of time getting the tank to look just right, and it fit in with the scene very well. However, once the completed boiler pump was placed into the scene, we initially had difficulty getting it to fit next to where this boiler was placed. It was shrunk, and even moved to the other side of the room, but I later noticed that it got in the way of the camera, so it ultimately had to be hidden. I personally feel that, had we thought more about it, we probably could have found a way for the water tank to connect to and work with the boiler pump.
Secondly, I had to replace Ryan's fire with one of my own.
The flame does look very good, but a problem that Ryan discovered early on was that, when a light source is included in the scene with this fire, it for some reasons colours some of it blue. While blue is the inverted colour of yellow, we had been scratching our heads as to why the flame was even changing to that colour, or rather how or why the light was changing it. With no apparent answer or a way to solve this, my only option (with it being 2am at the time... I just wanted to get the render started and go to bed!) was to replace the flame with one that I made and used for an earlier assignment:
So after bringing in this flame from a 3D Modelling and Animation assignment from last year, I placed it into Ryan's model, resized it as neccesary, and this is how it looks:
It is a bit of a shame that I had to resort to this, because my flame is actually dimmer than Ryan's, and the reflection effect that the previous flame had has now been lost.
Finally, a bump map that Adam applied to the concrete floor had to be removed.
Bump maps take a fair bit of time to render, so with the floor basically being a giant bump map, that would have been one of the contributing factors to a very, very long rendering time. So I simply had to make one small adjustment to the material to get rid of the bump map...
And this is what it now looks like. You can still see that there appears to be some bumps in the floor, so while it now doesn't have a very realistic texture, it still doesn't look too bad, and again reduces rendering time.
So while applying these changes, as well as making minor adjustments to the lighting and shading, I managed to get the total rendering time from 25 hours, up to around 36, and then finally down to a more reasonable 19 hours. I still didn't think my laptop could handle all of that, so I had to do it in four parts, three of which I slept through. The final render, in video form and with all four parts included, is here:
In our next, and most likely final meeting before we present it to the museum staff, we will be making some more changes like possibly adding a voiceover.
Thursday, 3 December 2009
My Final Scene
This is my final scene after some adjustments were made from the previous video clip. I added some surroundings to help set the scene. These objects could be taken out obviously for when we piece the pump together.
Almost there
I thought I would post an update to how the rest of the pump is looking, before I finish it off today (with any luck). Once its all complete I will post all the report in how I created each element.
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