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.

Night Fever

Just found this image... Classic.... Our guy exiting the night club....what a legend. ... we were experimenting with lighting to see which one was messing up our render....we couldnt pin point it however we had a chuckle at this shot ;).... I believe I or Alec said "ITS OK ....ITS THROUGH THE TELESCOPE!!!" so that solves EVERYTHING.... we'll see 2mr.

hope everyone else completes theres on time too :)

The Race Is ON!

It would appear that students being students, even with a (slightly tempremental) Render Farm have to leave all their work to the last day!  I'm glad to say we've managed to do most of our rendering now - even if some we are having problems with some of the Glitches going on in there is no longer time to re-re-re-re-re-render them again so we'll have to make do with what we have.  Its not hte best animation as its VERY rushed but as we are not marked on this side of the piece, and majorly on the environment I'm fairly happy with the outcome.  Tomorrow the team minus Simon as he's away in Wales will be finishing off the final renders tomorrow and choosing what makes it into the final render, with sound and with fades and transitions.  The titles I have FINALLY finished I think and hope... just waiting to check the render... Came out ok but I can't quite tweak this one thing which is REALLY annoying....but hey....It's ok...guess I'd just like it the best it CAN be....Ach! Nevermind...I'm tired...and have to get some sound FX together now.... Alec and I stayed behind and got a few more recorded sound effects for different areas using different materials... just trying out different things.  Was fun and pretending to be a pirate is always a laugh!!! HARghArrrghARGH!!!! A few Videos from it :D

  

I think we're going for the whole story as well which will be nice - I think Alec is starting to believe we can finish this which is a MAJOR bonus as he'll crack on now a lil harder - only about 2 shots left to do and we've rendered and converted most to AVI's.

I'm just so glad Alec is bringing in his Laptop with C&C Red Alert 2 on as Simon and I are rendering a lot and therefore freezing our computers and the Render Farm takes ages to que and we need to test so we're on and off 5 minutes at a time.

Its all down to the last day now.  5 o'clock hand in.... LETS DO IT!!!

Tonights Work Is Done

I've finished the Final sequence for the Titles... all I need now is the Music to add to it and away I go.. depending on what time I feel I should go to sleep tonight I might work on that in a minute... I don't want to do EVERYTHING last minute.. or do I...**CLASSIC STUDENT**!! haha

I took into consideration what Alec and Simon mentioned about making the Titles slightly better and now I'm finally happy with them myself.  Even if the sequence is going to take quite a while to get through at least it shows off some of Alecs work in a nice way as well as presenting ourselves and our project.

The Last Week of HELL

A Poem about Render

Rendering - Not Cool. Render - Not Fun. Rendering....

The End.

Yeah sums it up. We've had some major highs and lows while rendering. Last night I stayed late trying to do bits and bobs and sending things off to the farm. Unfortunately the shot I sent off wasn't any good as Jared said it was overlapping files such as two boxes consuming one area. This was not what it was at all. I checked the outliner and checked the Hypergraph. It was infact the near clip plane too near so we bumped this up a wee bit and it worked a dream. EXCELLENT news so that we don't get any funky distortion anymore.

I was looking through some of the files coming out that we HAVE rendered and while exporting as AVI's I found that they were very laggy. Alec says it is due to the FPS I'm rendering at. I have just changed it to 24fps from 30 and it worked a dream.

The images that we are getting out are encouraging however I hope our animation we are doing looks good too.

Been Working On The Title Sequence/Ending

Not entirly sure what this is going to be... what I've been working on tonight.  I'm not going to upload it onto here as I don't want to spoil the supprise but believe me... its looking quite nice :)  The title sequence is what I thought it would be for however its Very long... it'll be about a minute... for a two/three minute piece... lets see what the guys think tomorrow.  I'm very happy with the outcome.  If they decide that its not worth keeping I'll upload it... if not I'll keep working on it.  So far I've done Tom and Alecs Titles, Simons, Mine and TEAM AUTHENTIC to do!!!!

Just A Taster

Me just playing around a little ... maybe a teaser for whats to come if the guys in Authentic Like it... I may get the job of the title sequences ... I have idea for them but will explain it only to Authentic Members for now... Think it has potential though :)  So much to develop within it.