Special Effects For Tom

Tom's Animation and my knowledge of After Effects make this... Just one of many different things I want to get my head around before the year is out!  Its not great in anyway but its the beginning of my learning into SFX and After Effects.  Could have done it in Maya particles however AE was probably a better choice considering Maya just slows down everytime you attempt something with Particles... maybe I'll give it a go and compare the two.

The End... Or just the beginning

And so the project for Team Authentic has ended now.  Its a shame really as we worked so well as a team.  Its the end of the project however I feel the Blog shall live on.  I think it'll be good to keep a blog going throughout my projects and different pieces I create so that future employers may be able to scan through and see my work style.

Did You Know...

Each One Of Team Authentic Features In the final piece... our pictures are in the finer details... whether it be on a wall, bottle or sign....we are all there. Try and Spot us :p

Heres the Textures we applied!

If I were to do this project again...

Looking over what we have acomplished is quite an impressive list.  Working in this group has allowed me to assess other peoples working styles and other team members qualities.  Each of Team Authentic had some great qualities which no one else had which was good ... I won't bore you with the details but only let you know that it worked well and each person brought knowledge and enthusiasm to the team.  If I were to do the entire project again I'd have experimented slightly more with rendering out and compositing.  I'm a little upset with the quality of animating that well all had time for however as the project isn't based on this its not a neccessity this time... Maybe next project in the new year.  One of the major bummers I've come across is the scale which the team decided to work in - HD 720... clearly too big for what we are working on and this just made massive file sizes all over the place which were hell to keep track of and made everyones computer slightly laggy at different points.  Looking back across the final piece we've made so far (not quite final final as it needs a couple more shots and sounds on Monday) I think the problems with rendering were to do with the camera.  Many think that it was duplicated Geometry however, checking the outliner there was only one of everything.  I think it had something to do with the Scale tool which Jared refered to as 'Lethal'... so I'd keep an eye out for that in future and look into working on a different scale where I didn't have to scale everything I create (eg a camera of box) by about 10x or 15x!!  That was a major bummer.  I know we had problems with rendering left right and centre with glitches due to something and I think thats what the group settled on blaming.  Other than that the gruop itself worked very well on the whole.  There were disagreements occasionly however compramises were made which everyone agreed on were for the best.  Each person in the group learnt how to texture, animate, model and light their own scene as in Team Authentic we believed that these would be key skills for everyone to have.  One of the great things about Team Authentic.  Another would be that if anyone person had particular interests they would be allowed and promoted to experiment in the initial stages of the project while it was in its infant stages however due to lack of time we had to cut the majority of them out *sigh*

The time frame which we were working in was not quite good enough for us and therefore I believe setting personal deadlines is the best approach to any team as each individual knows how long it takes for them to work on each part - eg a quick animator can take 10 mins to get a small scene spot on others can take 10 hours!  Another lesson I learnt - TIME PLAN YOUR WORK!!

I'll hopefully upload a You Tube Link to This post so others can see what the group has accomplished.