Week 15

Now the final piece is finished I am over all very happy with the end product, everything we set out to achieve we did achieve, even if it all didn't look as seamless and professional as we had originally hoped but obviously there are a lot of things that I would do differently if I were to start the project again. The biggest thing that was a problem for me and my group was collecting the motion capture data, I think we were a little naive in thinking that we could stroll in and get what we needed without really having a very good knowledge of the software. That being said in a strange way I'm quite glad because of all of the things that went wrong, we now know how to rectify so when I use it again in the future there won't be many obstacles that I won't be able to over come.

    I am happy with how the main 3D character turned out but because I did the rigging and envelopes so many times it became very frustrating and obviously I had time restraints so if I'm completely honest I don't think that I can say that on the final guy I did the envelopes as well as I could have done and that is probably the biggest thing I regret about the whole project. One of the parts of the project I enjoyed the most has to be the time I spent sculpting in sculptris. Although again I ran into a few problems that I had to overcome which led me to be better on the program. The main issue I had was the amount of faces I was creating when modelling anything, I made the mesh to complicated so programs wouldn't be able to handle, including sculptris. 

The part of the whole thing I probably found easiest was the video editing side, when I was putting the sound on and the health bars and stuff nothing seemed to go wrong. I think this was down to the higher levels of planning I did in these areas. I did a lot of research into what sound effects would match and what sound track would complement the piece in the best way, however finding a suitable song to fit alongside the fight with the right timings proved hard to find, so in the end I described what I wanted to a friend involved in music producing and he created a track to suit my needs. I also find programs such as after effects and final cut a lot more strait forward and easier to use, everything is just right there in front of you and it's pretty much just a matter of dragging it to the right size an then dragging it into the right place, be that with the sound files or the health bars.I was really hoping that after this project and indeed the whole first year, my skills in the these complicated programs capable of creating some really nice work would improve greatly and I think they have. 

When I started this year I didn't really know what I wanted to do after my time at uni, mainly because I hadn't experienced many aspects of animation, I had just worked in flash and not much else. After this year I am definitely leaning towards something in 3D, even if the 3D programs are the most complicated. I am thinking perhaps some sort of animation loops for games or something, however I know there are a lot more things I need to learn and so my mind could change as the years go on. I am happy with how much I have improved over this year, I find myself watching people as they do the most mundane things, like walking to try and relate them towards work and I think this really helps. I like to think it is my mind turning into an animators mind. The foundation project really tort me attention to detail, with it being stop motion and me moving everything by hand, I had to be really careful that I was doing everything right because if you noticed something was wrong 200 frames ago it is a lot of work to go back and fix it. It also made me aware of how important planning is when embarking on any project, the dope sheet alone made the foundation project a lot easier. Over the entire year 3D is probably the area that I have improved most in but that is mainly because at the beginning of the year I didn't really have many skills in that area. I regret to say that in the final project I think my higher level of interest showed in that it was my highest area of concentration and I think I might have let the other areas of the project take a bit of a back seat. 

As I mentioned before I spent some time in the motion capture studio, initially I was quite excited to get to have a bit of a mess around with the equipment but I quickly realised it was also a very good chance to get involved with things that are used even at industry standard. With a lot of help from Andy Serkis the involvement of motion capture in professionally created products is becoming more and more common. I really wanted to try and bring my skills in that area up to a decent standard and I feel, because of the time I have spent around the equipment, I have done that. Even if I do still have a lot to learn. 

Over all I am happy with how my skills have developed this year and every day I feel like I am getting a step closer to being able obtain my ideal job and I eagerly look forward to what the following years have to teach me. 

  

Week 14

I decided to go back into MAX open up the mesh with no rig and texture it using the sub divisions like I had originally tried first then put the rig in afterwords, with the help of Steve and the other two members in my group. For some reason it worked this way round and here is how it looks:

I also managed to get the health bars completed using flash and a little bit of tweening to get Tom's health to go down when he gets hit:

Here is how it will look when it is stretched to the right size in final cut:

 and the sound track, I sat with one of my friends and he created a track tailored to the needs I had. I am now just waiting to get the finished file with out the health bar and sound so I can incorporate them into it using final cut pro.

Week 13

This week I was mainly focusing on sorting out the envelopes of the character, with the guy now being in a Tpose it was a lot easier but still took a lot longer than I had hoped. after a lot of messing about I managed to get it up to this standard: 

After this I Attempted to get some colour onto the character, this did not go well. First I tried making a texture that had several sub divisions, so his trousers could be a different colour to his skin etc. When I tried to render this out for some reason only his trousers stick to the biped but the rest of his body stays still, extremely annoying and I have no idea how to fix it so I started looking into UV mapping but because the file is so big it is too hard to see what you're looking at with the map and 3DS MAX starts too lag. I started looking into other programs like blender and zbrush to see if I could solve this problem. Despite trying trying and trying again I couldn't get to grips with the UV mapping on a mesh this complicated and with so many dodgy polygons. I am going to wait until the next tutorial with Steve to see if I can get some help.

I have also started looking at sound effects and a theme song to be running in the background of the action. I also did a bit of research into the health bars and what they should look like;