Final thoughts

It has been a busy 3 months with modeling, texturing and animating. But now it's coming to the deadline with the project finished.

Due to the workload of other assignments and with my modeling abilities being at a basic level, the project was designed to be relatively simple to complete while still fulfilling the specifications and learning outcomes.

Remembering the process last year's project helped me to remember how to perform certain techniques such as texturing and using keyframes to animate the sword which saved time from trying to remember from scratch and to overcome problems that could occur (for example, the eyelids would behave incorrectly during the Summer scene unless I've added more keyframes). But in addition, new skills were acquired from attending lessons and looking up tutorials from the Internet (for example using the aim and constrain method to move the eyeballs) which greatly assisted the project to become more advanced. Not all tutorials were helpful though (such as animating the eyelid) which was disappointing but I've made sure that I didn't dwell on the failures too much and just continued the project using alternative methods.

While the sword model and animation are basic, they do their jobs well. The sword's simplicity helped convey its emotions such as anger and sadness so the audience can sympathize with it easily. The environments helps convince that time has passed and support the sword's emotions. Overall, I am pleased with how the project turned out in terms of the process and the final result which were done with little problems.

Fun with Lattice

Even though my animation's finished, I still had time to look at a new tool: Lattice. What this does is that it creates a box around your model which you can use to animate in all kinds of simple yet fun and strange ways.

I've decided to try this out for my sword (saving as a separate file in case it all went horribly wrong). The result is pretty unusual. It does allow more character for the sword at a cost of losing its realism since most swords are rigid in order to be usable in battle so I probably won't replace this version with the previous one.

Still, it was an interesting fun tool to try out (might have helped me with the assignment if I've discovered it earlier) so I've decided to save the footage of what I've done and post it here for all to enjoy.




In addition, I've edited this post making all the images darker so they're easier to see.

Big update

Hope you all had a happy holidays.

Quite a bit happened regarding the assignment since my last post.

For starts, I've added a sky background to hopefully convince that this is a mountain area. I've took a picture from my brother's room (my bedroom faces the woods so the trees would get in the way of the photo)



With this, the scene was ready to render. Rendering all 480 frames (16 seconds) took some time but not too long. I understand that the longer the animation and the more complex the scenes are, the longer it takes to render. However putting all individual frames into a video editing software (I've used Vegas Movie Studio) took longer; in fact it took me all afternoon yesterday to finish it. It was worth it though as this meant I could put in sound effects to add atmosphere to my scene. I've found a forest and snow sound effect from this site for free:

http://soundbible.com/

While the fire and rain sound effects were downloaded from this site which I've used for last year's assignment as well (which is also for free).

http://www.pacdv.com/sounds/index.html

You can see the final results here:

Have a snowly Christmas

Christmas will soon be upon us so I wanted to finish off the modeling assignment before then...at least the main animation bit. That way, I don't have to worry about this assignment and can focus on my programming assignments. Funny, I thought I would enjoy my programming lessons and assignments more but this modeling assignment is not so bad after all. Maybe it's due to past experience or getting better tutors.

Fittingly, the final part represents winter so naturally there is snow. The sword will also go into a deep slumber. Unlike last time, there was no problems with animating the eyes besides resizing the pupils so that they fit inside the eyelids.

Here's the full preview (not rendered yet).





The animation is fully complete. The only things left to do include polishing the scene up like perhaps making the background look more like a mountain.

It's Raining Swords

Today, I've managed to get the rain falling to represent Autumn. Apart from my birthday being in October, Autumn is my least favourite season. It's the season where it gets colder and wetter. Adding rain was quite simple even though it may look like there's lots of rain that it blocks the scenery as you can see below:




In actual fact, the rain looks more natural in render as shown below:

Also managed to increase the size of the flames and tackling a problem I've had with the sword's eyes. You see, for some reason, the eyelids were moving erratically on their own in between the time frame from angry to sad when they're supposed to be still. This was a problem that happened in my last project too and I have no idea why it does that. To solve it, I had to copy and paste frames in between the gaps.

There is now only one more season to animate.

BURN IT WITH FIRE!

Moving onto spring and entering summer (I wish it was summer now actually. So cold this winter) with fire.

In order to make the fire appear at a certain time (six seconds onwards) and make the grass disappear, I've used the Visibility check box under the Attribute section. It is checked when I want them to appear and unchecked when I want them hidden. At both events, a keyframe is set on the timeframe.

There are probably other ways to achieve this but this is the method I've found and tested myself. You can have a look below:



Although I think the flames could be bigger...

In addition to the flames, you can see that I've got the sword's eyes to look angry. This was also achieved by using keyframes, moving the eye lids where appropriate. Its looks give me shivers down my spine...

Is it Spring yet?

Today I was leaving Blend Shapes for now and moving onto animating the scene (as there's about a month to go before the deadline).

One thing I've learnt is that it is better to have a couple of small patches of grass than one big one. When I've tried painting in a huge chunk of grass onto my scene, my computer started to load very...very....slowly...so after I've managed to delete the huge grass, I've made a few smaller patches. I can justify this reason by setting the scene in a mountain area as you don't get that much grass in the mountains anyway. It's mainly rocky. Speaking of which, I've needed a rocky texture to make the setting look more convincing. There are no mountains nearby where I live so I took a picture of the gravel in my back garden instead.

More background scenery could be added soon but this will do in the meantime as you cans see in this five second preview which represents Spring. The ideal total time could be 20 seconds, 5 seconds per season. You can see the grass blowing in the wind and the eyes moving from side to side as if it's waiting for someone and examining its surroundings.




The "Es" that were used to move the eyes (from the Aim and Constrain tutorial used earlier) are hidden off screen so they won't appear in the video but I can still use them while animating.