The Final Animation

It can also be viewed here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHkUVIOe45Y 

Individual Videos for Final Animation

The American Take off.

The End Sequence.

The state of Europe Intro.

The Main body section I produced for the Animation.

Learning Experience.

My learning experience within this module has been quite concise rather than the spread of knowledge gained in the previous year. It has been a nice change of pace to focus in on areas and work hard on learning the in and outs of specific tools.

One of the most valuable things learnt was the fire particle system. I had touched on particle systems in the past so knew a little about the particle side of things. However I had never experienced the material utilised to create a decent looking fire effect, thus it was fascinating to learn the method of doing it then manipulating that basic method to create many alternate effects.

Alternate particle related skills I got to use once more was the ability to have particles form shapes, this was seen when both forming the quote and having the quote blow away in a mist of particles. 

The discovery of inserting a vertex on a line was illuminating and provided a vastly greater ability to create interesting shapes via polygon modelling. In the past I had always used the insert loop or slice and quick slice, however these methods tended to make unnecessary polygons around every other side of the shape. This new method proved highly useful throughout the modelling process, which included multiple buildings, odd props, and an entire island.

One of the more astonishing lessons learnt was about the Loft tool; this was due to the revelation of how much more it is capable of than I had been aware of from previous learning. This primarily revolved around being able to take multiple shapes along the single path therefore creating unique 3D shapes from simple 2D ones. 

The locks and linking were something I had been aware of being possible but was unsure precisely where they were located or how they functioned. This led to me being able to control the motion of cameras via linking their target to objects they were to focus on and also the vehicles were able to be linked rather than grouped meaning the independent parts could be moved without having to remember to open the group. 

A useful part of the graphite tools I have a new appreciation for is the smooth and smooth 30 options. This is because models tend to look better when given a Turbo or Mesh Smooth because it gives a flat surface and can take out the obvious signs of a model’s polygons; however these Smooth modifiers do exponentially increase the polygon count which is something that ideally needs to be kept as low as possible.

One of the more negative experiences was the unfortunate server issues which equated to the loss of work and to a gap where 3DS Max was unavailable. At first this didn’t seem too much of an issue, with many locations to which my work was saved I hadn’t lost anything and ultimately I had access to 3Ds Max at home. The problem that occurred was that it caused a mass break in work as we couldn’t meet as a group and do things in a central location. Losing the week or two interrupted the flow of work and that flow never really came back. It seemed to be the case for everyone to at least some degree, the abrupt nature of the event really violently halted work and returning to that was immeasurably difficult.

Leading on from this, another downbeat point was the unfortunate lack of resources we have access to. This is usually felt most when transferring work between University and Home, as the University is still using 3Ds Max 2011 and we have access to 2014. This meant always remembering to make the saves back compatible or else we would have come in with files we couldn’t access. It was inconvenient but nothing too bad; the real issue was how large some of our assets became. We ended up having to seriously adjust a lot of the textures or else the active viewport just couldn’t handle the size. This was an unfortunate situation owing to the inevitable hardware limitations an institution such as a University has.  Another constraint of the program itself was the restricted number of particles from a particle emitter, however it  was eventually worked out that multiple emitters would allow for thicker particle emission whilst maintaining the lower number to meet the limit placed into 3Ds Max.

Group work has never really been my specialty; I find working on my own a lot easier as usually I can dictate my own timings and actions with greater comfort. However as a group we managed to get along quite well, the design process went smoothly and we were able to incorporate ideas from everyone and the allocation of jobs was an easy task. Unfortunately towards the end of the project everyone’s mood had begun to slip, this is likely due to the issues mentioned above where everyone lost momentum, it did however mean group meetings waned and communication between group members faltered. We also ended up doing things quite autonomously which led to scenes being created that didn’t necessarily match up with others. This is perhaps one of my weakest points, compounded by the university machines being slower than my own, I frequently remained at home and was able to do things efficiently but alone thus not fully being part of the group.

Improvements to some of the scenes I created were realised after they were past the point of being changeable but are worthwhile noting for future endeavours. 

When dropping the bomb onto the island I think one of my original shot ideas would have been superior, it was to have the plane with the bomb go over the camera and the camera rotate following the bomb, until the bomb was now heading downward, essentially gaining an undercarriage view of the plane and then what would potentially be an upside down view of the island, it struck me as this might be quite a nice shot, however with the target camera I was unable to gain such a shot as the camera constantly tried rotating which gave a very jarring animation, possibly with a free camera the effect could have been gained, it is difficult to say if it would have been better or worse than the one that was used but I never got time to try.

I didn’t push myself into experimenting with an alternate renderer on this occasion, witnessing that people were having issues with certain elements using MentalRay I chose to stick with the Scanline default renderer, maybe with more time I would have tried to get to grips with the MentalRay and the power it holds to adjust lighting etc with exposure control but with the limited time it proved difficult to justify potentially longwinded test sessions to find the ideal settings with the MentalRay renderer.

Although the island did look quite good and ideally I would have liked more buildings and more detail on those buildings and a greater variety it already proved a nightmare to work with when trying to animate anything. This meant the inevitable conclusion that the island could have done with less detail and perhaps been smaller to allow an easier time when working on animation elements.

The Japanese takeoff was another thing I would have rather liked to have dedicated more time to as I was never completely satisfied with the fly away part. The camera angle was a little off, I did attempt others but I just couldn’t manipulate a shot that was any better than the one I produced first. 

Ultimately I feel that this project has taught me a lot and has been quite good preparation for expecting the unexpected and I feel I will be better prepared to deal with issues such as that in the future.

Dropping da bomb!

As a big finish to the piece it was always thought that a large explosion from one of the bomb drops would be a good plan. Therefore it is roughly what was accomplished. The scene is designed to be a contrast between what the island once was and what the island has now become. This is why the island changes from those two states while the bomb is left as the focal point. 

To realize this idea a destroyed Island state was constructed, this included planes crashed into buildings, a car flipped upside down, propellers flying about, and general smoke and flame, the bomb was then dropped from a burning Japanese plane and heads towards the island. A little above the ground time slows down and the bomb is panned around 360 degrees. To match this to a pristine version of the island, I grouped the objects utilised for this scene and merged them into an older version of the island which was setup to look normal and without any smoke or flames. Rendering out the same camera angle from a point a little later from the plane view meant I could get the same angle at the same pace so that the two can later be edited together to shift between the chaos island and the normal island. 

A key element of this section was the propeller slamming into the wall, although extremely quick and easily missed, this part was interesting to accomplish. I began by spinning the propeller into the wall with simple key frame animation, but the debris was created via a PFSource. The source was situated within the wall and using the particle view, I tried to find a way to get object fragments like with other particle arrays. Unfortunately I couldn’t find it but had accidentally set the PFSource to eject the building several times over. Initially it was huge full sized buildings being thrust out, but when I tweaked the size it sort of looked like bricks, it was a little bit lazy to leave it but the tiny buildings did actually work and with the scene being quite so swift it made no visual difference. As an added factor to this element I included a deflector on the floor in order to catch the debris and for it to pile up.

This blog is really taking off...

It seemed appropriate for planes that are in the air to have had a takeoff, which meant working out precisely how each one would do so. 

This process began with the Japanese Planes which had already been seen to come up from the bowels of the Carrier. It was decided that the plane would be seen from engine off to engine on. In order to accomplish this I did some research into a Cessna engine starting up and followed its examples to match the sort of motion that the propeller would partake in. With the propeller motion sorted I played with some extra particle effects just to add some emphasis to the engine starting. I always thought some smoke would be good, and initially with the tubular vents it seemed natural to place smoke there, however with the dragon head motif it just seemed right to place the smoke near the nostril like protrusions and also include a quick burst of flame when the engine begins properly, this was to have a hint of dragon breath.

With the American takeoff I didn’t want too many similarities with the Japanese one, thus I decided to take it part way through the takeoff and thus not show the engine starting up. I also wanted to display the damage the Harbour base had taken and to show the continuing attack by the Japanese, this was why I demolished several of the planes that were originally on the runway whilst also having a trio of Japanese planes perform a brief flyover. 

This flyover did allow me to work out an interesting technique that can be used for this sort of thing. I had used loop before but often when it came to parts just moving in the background I would just move them from A-B and be done with it, in the past this has caused issues as you can sometimes catch a glimpse of the now static objects in the background that was not intended. With a linear loop you can just have the objects continue at a steady pace into the background. This meant the Planes could be setup then just forgotten about, this makes it somewhat simpler when moving cameras to capture alternate angles.

The next step of the takeoff was the surprise, this was always meant to just be an explosion which would send the plane off course, but in the end it became a Japanese Plane crash landing into the front American plane. The second plane then has a nice action takeoff by flying through the explosion.

This explosion was created via a particle superspray, something I hadn’t intended to use. I originally tried a standard fire effect explosion within an atmospheric apparatus, unfortunately when rendered this yielded distinct squares when viewing the other particle effects through the explosion. This explosion went moderately well, and by manipulating the use rate statistic with the autokey I managed to produce an explosion that expands and then fades. The biggest problem with this explosion was the sheer volume of particles present, this ended with a render time that at one point quoted over 16 hours, the worst render time of an individual frame was a little over 5 minutes. Reducing the particle count would have helped but unfortunately it would also make the explosion less impactful. 

Expectedly the particles that came from the crashing Japanese plane went straight through the runway, on some occasion a little bit of particles passing through terrain is acceptable, but in this it looked awful. I thus deployed a deflector in order to stop this occurring. Interestingly this yielded a fantastic result, not only did the particles not go through the floor but owing to the motion of the particles at the time of crash they flew off in the direction the crash would have naturally taken them. 

All in all the scene went well, it was a far cry from the original dramatic takeoff idea of having it spin out and fall off the island, but it worked and made for an action packed scene showing the likely difficulties of taking off whilst being bombarded.

 Video depicting some tests and some reference footage:

 

In the End...it doesn’t even matter?

When displaying the intro piece to the rest of the group it was suggested that a quote at the end would be appropriate. This would make a nice symmetry between the opening and the ending. Through perusal of quotes seen within the film “Tora! Tora! Tora!” an attention-grabbing quote proved to be one from Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve”

The scene was created in approximately the reverse of the opening particle effect for turning the text to ash. The ash then blows into the scene which is reflective of how it blew out of the intro, it goes on to form the sentence of the quote. The key elements to this particle effect were to have it ‘find target’ (its target being the text shape) and then having the particles stop their movement and spin in order to sit inside the shape forming each letter through particles alone. 

In order to display the group SID’s I also delved into differing ideas for displaying them, it could have merely been a piece of text up on the screen but owing to the work put in the flag on the command building, and it having not really been displayed anywhere throughout the animation, it seemed appropriately American to have it wave at the end with our SID’s over the top. The flag was simply motioned via a ripple effect that was auto-keyed to shift its phase over an amount of frames. I kept it so that the first and last frames were identical in order to allow the footage to be looped indefinitely when editing in Premiere. 

The final step was the text and this was done solely in Premiere. It was a simple overlay opacity which sits above the flag ripple. The font was chosen due to its quite bulky military-esque nature. 

The overlay within Premiere the faded text gives a nice gentle display of our SID numbers.

A telescopic periscopic pan...

For the opening image it was chosen to have a nice pan of the island in its tranquil beauty. As a slight alternate and to match up with the Carrier bursting through clouds scene previously created, I stumbled upon the notion that this pan could be used as a prelim to the attack and to give the suggestion of surveillance to work out the best plan of attack then and there. This led to the thought of submarines being under the water and using periscopes, and considering the Carriers had already been seen to start out under the cloud layer it was a reasonable thing to go down the periscope route with them. 

With the simple pans created via 3DS Max I used Adobe Premiere to create a circular feathered crop on the footage to suggest a scope, and also added an effect which curved the image as if it were a lens. Following this editing up with a new graphic of a scope, laid over the top, it was relatively simple to take 6 frames of the footage and rotate the scope round as the transition occurred to give the suggestion of adjusting the lens in the telescope/periscope to get a closer look at the island. 

It gave a rather pleasant intro to the island whilst also including reference to the imminent attack without fully giving it away.