Final animation

Conclusion

Within this module i had learnt a vast amount of techniques, most of which were learnt from modelling my face and then introduced into the Griffon engine animation. Orginally the animation was to contain a whole runway, fields forests, hangers and full textured spitfire. There had been a turnaround when we realised that we had a realistic looking engine and a clearly cgi made environment. The clash of the two entities could decrease the viewers enjoyment and appreciation of the animation. The decision came only 2 weeks before hand in. This put pressure on producing the script and working out how to end the animation without it just cutting off. Overall i found this module to be not only enjoyable but also rewarding. I do regret not being able to use my whole group work however everyones views within the group contributed to what we think is a succesful and effective animation and one that we hope the client will apprecate and pick.

Rendering

Just before rendering i had to set up two cameras, one coming in from behind the spitfire and another which circles the engine. The cameras had to end and start in the exact same place, this was to add to an aesthetic flow. In regards to rendering this took several days. Originally the scene was to only contain a mere 750 frames (60 fps to give the flexibility of slowing down the animation without loss of quality) however to my horror each frame was to take 2.3 minutes. So to reduce the time taken i had cut down the frames to 350 and reduced the resolution to 800 x 600 (had the resolution originally set to 1024 x 768 as this is the screen size for around 45% of the worlds screens). The render was done by rendering individual mental ray PNG files. Using PNG allows more flexibility in premiere and a far more colour depth as PNG use around a trillion different colours, far more advanced then AVI video.

combining pistons, engine and spitfire

Combining the engine and the pistons was not easy. This was due to the complex design of the engine. Because Jonathon had modelled the engine so well it made it easy to implement the pistons together. What we did know is that we could not resive the pistons, this meant merging the engine with the pistons and resizing the engine. The wireframe mapping from the spitfire was to be implemented into the engine. We had an idea to wirframe a snippet of the engine allowing the vew of the moving pistons inside while keeping the exterior solid. To add realism i had used an occlusion texture, this allows for advanced shading however the drawback isd in the increased rendering time. I then merged the wireframe spitfire around the engine. The idea was to have the shot come in from behind the spitfire and as the camera gets closer to the engine the spitfire starts disappearing from the tip. This was done by animating the slice modifier on the Spitfire.

piston test

creating the pistons

The pistons proved to be the hardest. The actual piston was relatively easy, by using 2 cylindars and two and two boxes i was able to model the piston (no parts were actually attached), the hardest part was to get the piston to move in a "piston way" ie the top cylinder only moves up and down where as the boxes attached to the main cylinder would move in a circular motin pushing the piston up and down. To tackle this i used bones, after many atempts of trying to get the piston to only move up and down i finally found that you can use lines and then attach the main object to the line, in this case the piston head was attached to the line meaning that it could only move up and down but the boxes attached to the piston head where free to move in a circular pattern. After creating my first piston i decided to clone it so i could get 6 pistons, litte did i know cloning bones, ik solvers and lines was very difficult. At that point i thought that i would have to make 6 seperate pistons and bones, the drawback to this would be too much time taken up plus the possibility that they are not all identical. Before i attempted to start buling another 5 pistons from scratch i decided to try one thing. I made a saved copy of the 3ds file and then merged it with the one i was working with. To my surprise i was able to merge the piston files together which meant they had their own bone entities but were all still identical.

The making of the spitfire

To make the spitfire i had incorporated the same principle as when i had made the head model. This was to use reference images in order to get an exact model of the spitfire, i found that box modelling is quite simple. I started off with a cylindar to go right down the centre of the plane. By using cut i was able to create lies and vertices for the extremeties f the plane such as the wings, nose and tail. What proved to be quite difficult was the cockpit. I was advised to just have a simple bulge and then use texture mapping to give the definition, however i did want to have the plane as a wireframe model so having a defined cockpit was a must. Just like the face modelling i had used symmetry in order to keep both sides identical. See below for screen shots (pictures may be in an irregular order, this is due to bogger)
(pictures may be in an irregular order as :ts