Final Thoughts & Evalutation

Though there's still a little under a week left before the presentation and final deadline, the majority of the work has now been completed. The only tasks left are to format the videos and add the sound. In effect, the majority of my work here is now done, aside from lending a hand with the narration if it needs re-recording. So it's time to sit back, make a cuppa and reflect on a pretty intense few weeks...

I'm glad to say that it has been an absolute pleasure working with the group. I admit, I entered the group-phase with a slight sense of cynicism. I'd never really worked with a skilled group before, and always ended up picking up the slack... however, I'm glad to say that this was not the case here, not even remotely. I was privileged to work with a dedicated and exceptionally skilled team, who not only excelled in what they did, but equally encouraged me to strive for perfection and a high quality of work.

Anyway, it'd be bad taste for the others to brag about their abilities, so I'm going to do it for them:

Lee's confidence and natural sense of leadership make him the ideal front-man for the group. He was organised and kept us all up to date in the loop. At no point did I feel as if I wasn't being kept informed of the latest changes or new plans. The meetings were consistent and everyone was always kept updated. In addition to the majority of the paperwork, presentations and sound production, Lee also took on the train motion-side of the animation, and modelled the tracks and tunnel. The skilled Jack-of-All-Trades of our group.

As for the twins... well... the train renders say it all! They look like they've been taken straight out of the Museum of Power... and they haven't even been boosted with enhancements like Ray-Tracer! I said this before and I'll say it again, their eye for detail and strict attention to every little bolt and scratch are exceptional. It was a pleasure to work with them. I was able to work on my tasks without worrying whether theirs would be up to scratch... in fact I actually put in more work in the hope of meeting their level! Whilst the high level of detail did backfire slightly and create some problems later on, the additional hassle was honestly worth the superb outcome.

As for me, I think that I've been able to maintain my side of things and keep my work on par with the high standards set by my group. I'm very happy with the train's construction (I admit, I'm quite proud of how well the flying-parts worked out), but feel that I could have spent a little bit more time working on the movements of the passengers, so that they had a lot more 'character' to them.

Overall, the module has actually been pretty fun, considering how intense it's been. I was fortunate to be able to spend most of the group animating (Which I prefer a lot more to modelling), and was also pleased to be able to work with a character (I really enjoy the animation of characters and even trying to add a personality to them). The group was kept well organised, which meant that it easy to keep on top of things and not worry too much about deadlines or experience difficulties trying to contact other members.

To be honest, the only real difficulties of the project were the recent technical ones. To be fair, this was largely out of our control, and less of a problem with the group organisation or people not pulling their weight. Luckily, these problems only hindered us for a few days, and we were able to overcome them.

All that's left now is to patch the video and add my bassy voice to the clip. I'm really looking forward to the final presentation and honestly feel that we have created an incredible piece of work.

Well done Many thanks guys, it has been a pleasure!

Week 11 - How Rob became the Champion of MeshSmooth

The animation was finished... but the technical troubles hadn't. When it came to rendering the video, my computer threw and tantrum and complained repeatedly about the mapping and the number of faces in the scene. For the time being, and to have a result to show the group, I was able to get away with rendering at 720 x 480. It was a lot smaller than we would have liked (Not even half!) but it was sufficient to show the others where I had got to.

We were in luck though. Rob's computer far superceded all of ours, so we agreed to see if his computer would be able to handle the pressure. We all transferred our documents over and waited with trepidation. Luckily, our prayers were answered at 22:11 Thursday night, as we received a message saying that a few test shots had been successfully rendered at 1280x1024. The following morning, a full-sized render had now been completed. At that moment, Rob was crowned the Champion of MeshSmooth (MeshSmooth being the main culprit of the majority of the technical problems thrown up).

With the my side of the animation now completed, the only phase left is to put everything together and add in the sound. I was nominated as the voice of the narrator, and a basic rendition was recorded earlier today. So aside from the small tasks and odd jobs to help polish everything off, my work here is done

Week 10 - Animation - Part E - The Final Section

With the team of SteamBot's created and ready to go, I was in a position to complete the final section of the animation. The Harwood twins had also completed their superb and highly detailed train model by this time, providing all the finished components required. Unfortunately, we hit severe delays with several technical faults during the exchange of models. Unfortunately, the high-quality train model proved too much for mine and Lee's machines! We had repeated attempts and re-hashes of the model, some of which refused to render, lost it textures or even just refused to open. After a few failed attempts, we managed to get a few working models going, albeit slowly. Luckily, my computer was built to take punishment, so I was able to make do with the larger model (Unusually, the smaller files actually created more crashes). It was a slower process and required me to use a single window to prevent my computer running out of memory... but we managed to get by. Additionally, I found that 3DS MAx would have a stronger chance of coping if the unused sections were hidden during construction. It was considerably slower and more fiddly than I would have liked, but we at least were able to make progress nonetheless. Fortunately, my interactions with the train and carriages were minimal, and did not require large amounts of work.

The first order of business was to update the undercarriage model. Since it's last implementation, it had seen several tweaks and adjustments. Fortunately, the undercarriage was moved as a whole, and had an exceptionally simple movement (3 Key frames)... thus, all I had to do was copy the movements of the older model, and then delete it. Within a few minutes, the improved undercarriage had slotted perfectly within the old animation. The only additional tweak required was that SteamBot had to be moved back a bit further so that it comfortably sat on the floor of the cabin. The camera was also nudged upwards slightly to compensate for this, and to place more of a focus on the top of the undercarriage, which would be seeing the imminent arrival of...

The Boiler and Engine Chassis! The screenshot here really doesn't do justice to the awesome finished model. Some screenshots are on the main blog. If you haven't seen it already, then I'd recommend you do so! Fortunately, the chassis was perfectly constructed so that it was able to fall as a single object onto the undercarriage. It could be grouped and moved as one. Because the chassis acts more as a 'frame' than an actual working component of the train, it seemed best not to focus too heavily on this and have effects like separate pieces flying in. That said, when sorting the camera work out, I was compelled to zoom into the little plaque on the side of the train before skipping to the next part of the animation. As I said before, the attention to detail was fantastic... they went so far that they included the exact plaque of the mode!

So the next phase was to bring in the carriage that would hold the passengers in the animation. With the front of the train complete, the first step was to 'hide' it so that it wouldn't pointlessly eat away at my processor (Aside from a few moments when I needed the model to align the carriage perfectly to it). The tracks were brought up behind the model, and the carriage wheels rolled in. Much like the chassis, the workings of the carriage were a lot less important, so there wasn't a great need for much attention to be brought to the intricacies of it.

The floor and undercarriage were then dropped in from above. Again, it was a simple and relatively straightforward motion.

The tricky bit then came from animating the 4 passengers. It was a fiddly process and wasn't entirely helped by the fact that I hadn't quite grouped and attached everything correctly, which threw up a few difficulties during animating. Sadly, I hadn't grouped all of the new additions to the models, which made them unresponsive to some animations and awkward in others. Nonetheless, I'd already created the falling animations by this time, so I decided to press on, rather than attempt to re-tweak everything.

Luckily, the fact that they weren't going to have a large amount of focus placed on them meant that I was able to skip some of the unnecessary details of their animations. All of the smaller additions required in the basic steamBot model (Moving dials/clock handles, spinning cogs etc) were left out, as their effects would be too minimal to justify the animation. We were working to a deadline and I needed to get a finished render ASAP. However, the reduced smaller details meant that they needed to be compensated by more 'eye-catching' motions elsewhere. The original SteamBot model needed the smaller details because it was so close to the screen and had moments with little action where the audience's attention might drift and notice their absence. However, as there were 4 models, each with their own unique features and details to distract the attention, I only needed a few eye-catchers to compensate for the lack of smaller movements.

The most obvious answer was to throw off one of the bot's hats as they landed. The ProfBot was chosen for this task. So as he landed, the hat was thrown off and spun in the air, only to be caught by the smaller kidBot, who would proceed to hand the hat back to ProfBot. Unfortunately, the positioning of the characters meant that I was unable to properly have the professor pick up the hat and place it back on his head. Luckily, I was able to arrange a quick compromise: The Professor would flip the hat instead. As the KidBot held out the mortarboard, the professor would proceed to flip the hat back on his head. The advantage here was that this motion had a lot more power to it, and would again help compensate for the lack of small details.

The animation between the Gent and Boiler Bots were pretty simple too. The BoilerBot tipped his hat to the Gent, and in return the Gent returned with a curt nod (Well... leaning forward, as the bots don't exactly have necks!). The graphics of these were interesting enough to not require a lot of motion. To be honest, these robots are more eye-candy for the viewers, so they didn't exactly need a lot of focus to be placed on them. They basically needed to appear for the narrator to comment on who they were and how the trains by this time were available to everyone.

The final step was to simply have the carriage chassis to fall down onto the undercarriage. The movement here was essentially the same as the engine chassis

I finished the animation by scrolling the camera down the train so that it pointed to the front. Personally, this seemed like a nice angle to prepare for the initiation of the movement. It would be from here, that the video will cut to Lee's animation of the train's movement, where the motion and specific movements of the train could be observed and demonstrated in detail.

SteamTeam - ShowReel

And so, presenting the DreamSteamTeam!

SteamBot - (Main character for the animation)

GentBot

BoilerBot

ProfBot

KidBot

Famous 5, eat your heart out

Passengers - BoilerBot

The last, and perhaps trickiest addition was the BoilerBot: AKA. The Coal Worker. The idea was to give this one overalls and the old fashioned cap. However, the overalls were a lot trickier to pull off than I first envisaged. Not only was it hard to make the shape, it was also a lot harder to make the overalls fit snugly around BoilerBot's body. The texture didn't even work very well either. After a few failed attempts, it seemed more constructive to try for something a bit simpler!

The first step was to give BoilerBot a more 'dirty' colour scheme. Opening photoshop, I took a dark, earthy green, and smeared black smudges all over it, creating a nice 'coal' effect. The trim was also made lighter and more prominent (Giving more of an impression of something like steel)

Next up was to try and build the flat-cap most coal workers wore. I started off with a simple cube on top of the head, and spent a good 5 minutes playing around with the 'editable poly' tool. The 'Soft Selection' option helped greatly here too.

The main cap was finished off with a blast of 'turbosmooth' and given a denim texture to it (Stolen from the failed texture I used on the overalls).

The 'stripe' to the cap was made from a chopped-up sphere. A combination of the hemisphere and "Slice from / to" helped to cut the sphere down to a single, rounded wedge. It was finished off with a bit of 'edit poly' to pull some of the vertexes out to cover the cap properly.

The final stage of the cap was simply to add the bill. This was made from a heavily-flattened sphere (Thanks to the humble 'scale tool'), and in 'editable poly' mode, the centre was raised up slightly, to create an overall bend. And with that, BoilerBot was finished! (For now anyway...)

Passengers - KidBot

Scratching my head for more ideas, I stumbled across a good one: KidBot! The locomotives at this time were available for public use, so children would often travel for days out with their parents. Creating a KidBot was therefore another good addition to the SteamTeam. It was pretty easy to pull off too. The first step was choosing a cute colour scheme (I tried polka dot, but the chocolate brown worked a lot better). All I did then was remove the clock, enlarge the eyes, and change the 'Claw' so that instead of having teeth, it was more of a grabber.

Aww, isn't it cute!

Passengers - ProfBot

The next passenger on the train was to be the humble University Scholar / Professor. And so, ProfBot was born. I started off with a nice royal blue colour scheme. It's a rich, smart colour, which suited the role of professor nicely.

So to begin with: I made the spectacles. The first step was to make a pair of cylinders and use the built-in "Slice from/to" options to chop them into semi-circles.

The rims were built from a trio of tori (Plural of 'Torus'), all hit with the "Slice to / from" tool. A pair of half-tori built the frame, and a smaller segment of one created the bridge. At this point, I left the model for a while. Whilst I wanted to add a beard, I realised that the hair/fur modifier would eat up far too much processor to be of any real use. However, a brainwave hit me the next day:

Starting with a basic sphere, I reacquainted myself with the humble 'Editable Poly' tool to drag out the points of the sphere to make more of a tear-drop shape. With a light flick at the end, and playing around with the 'scale' tool to flatten it, we had ourselves a whisker

Duplicate and mirror created a full moustache. Ideally, ProfBot would have had a goatee aswell, but I had trouble with that, and it never came out how I wanted. So I left it just at the 'tache.

The finishing touch was the all-important mortar-board. A pretty easy creation as you can probably tell... 1 sphere and a rectangle on top. Simple additions, but now we have a fully functional ProfBot!