week 12

The animation is just about done apart from some hopefully minor changes.. This animation is fine for the moment, I am still not satisfied with the animation of the human characters.

The texturing is a very long process. I have tried to create custom textures with uv unwrap and pelt but I can't get it to work well. The bodies and clothes look good but the face doesn't look very good at all. I have found it almost impossible to get the features into the right position so that i can texture them properly. I think part of the problem is that I have to many faces on the model and it is hard to separate them. I am really disappointed as I was hoping that the textures would be one of the strongest parts of my animation. I will continue trying to get it up to a good standard with the little time I have left.

I had a bit of trouble when I tried to render the animation. One of the walls kept rendering black no mater how much i changed the lights around it or the texture itself. It took a while but I found out that it was a lighting problem i solved it by adding a sky light and turning the brightness down.

OVERVIEW OF ANIMATION

The overall animation, I think is very good. I believe that the camera angles and cuts are very good and I am very pleased with the way that they came out. The cuts build up tension in the way that i hoped they would. The textures for the walls and objects are very well done as well, they give the feel of the original clip very well it is very clear that this is the iconic laser scene from goldfinger that is being recreated. The textures of the characters on the other hand are no as good, this is especially apparent as there are close ups of the characters faces. The lighting is very good, giving the dark atmosphere of the film's scene. My favorite bit of the animation is the laser coming towards bond. not only does the lasers animation look good but the laser leaves a trail in the gold as it is cutting through.
 Another good thing about the final animation  is the camera shits. As well as trying to use a variety of different shots I also tried to frame the shots very well. I kept the rule of three in mind and I think the dynamic shots adds a lot to the animation.

Week 11

I finished on the animation of the characters using the bones as discussed before. I do however have mixed feelings about the results. The animation of the characters body are fine it was awkward sometimes but I got used to animating them. The arm movement are good however I did have some trouble rotating the character and the bones. I couldn't seem to rotate te bones all as one and had tonmove each bone individually and gradually. This was okay for the scene but was very frustrating when I wa trying to add bones to bond's character because he was lying on his back. I had to rotate the bones awkwardly to get them onto position to anate them. This was very time consuming. another issue I had was animating the faces and heads of my character as the bone in bonds head would not control all the vector of his head and just kept leaving points behind.

I went online and found a good tutotlrial on creating glass and I followed it. I like the outcome a lot.

http://www.3dvalley.com/tutorials/creating-realistic-glass-material-in-3ds-max 

I also started the textures for te characters I haven't got very far and I plan on using pelt a lot. I used this a few weeks ago and it worked well then

Week 10

I have finished the cameras and I found a useful video online that shows a good way to cut between camera shots. It involves sing one main camera and linking to the others so that it follows their movements.I used it and it worked really well.

http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/louis/switching_cameras_in_an_animation_in_3ds_max

I have started animating the characters and I am having a lot of trouble at first I started by just animating them as I did the last, but that was never going to animate properly so I did some extra research online and found the use of bones and skin to animate human characters. I have given it a little go and it has worked ok. I am having trouble making the bones only work for the desired limb instead they keep moving parts of the body I want to stay still.

I continued to work on the texture for the geometry and the props. I used a segmented texture for the laser after splitting it up Into sections. This made it easy to add all the different parts. It also used a bit of uv unwrap for some of the machinery and it worked fairly well. I think I might do them again given the time as it only involves drawing over a photoshop file which isn't that tedious.

Week 9

Continued with the animation. I worked on the laser and I have to admit I like the result. The movement it very steady and robotic which I want, plus I managed to get the laser to fire a beam and then for it to disappear. I am however not looking forward to animating the characters as the stiff jerky movements that lend themselves do well for the laser will look a lot worse on the people.

I also tarted working on the camera i have decided that I want to use a variety of shots and cut between them at speed. I want to use a variety of camera shots and I think scene lends itself to that. For example a close up of the laser between bonds legs or a long shot establishing were everything in the scene is or even a POV shot from bond looking at the laser. I have put a few if these ideas into the storyboard of the last hand in