Animation Creation Analysis and SWOT

As of this writing, I had barely finished creating my animation this morning. And ultimately I'm fairly pleased with how it all turned out. This is probably going to be my final post to this blog because It's all finally finished.

My animation itself looks fairly sleek and matches my initial vision at least moderately well. As I predicted, I was able to use my limited toolset to it's maximum potential. There was definitely a few hiccups though. The scene that represented the third panel of my storyboard was a HUGE problem as expected (remember, I have no idea how to attach a camera to an object), as trying to move the spaceships & camera separately AND keep it looking fluid at the same time was looking to be downright impossible. Every attempt at this ended up having the ships jitter back and forward inconsistently and just look poor.

To circumvent this, I cheated and actually kept the spaceships in place for almost the entire scene (they fly off the side of the cameras viewpoint at the end of that scene) while having the camera pan very slowly in order to give the false illusion of movement. Ultimately it would have looked better if I had the knowledge of the correct tools. But I made use of what I had here.

Another issue I had initially was making legitimate looking lasers/explosions. I initially creating a long, thin cylinder and coloured it green to use it as a laser (This is actually what I did for my lasers during my cybernetic-inspired year 1 game design project), but they were still very dull. My Explosion/fire was just a large yellow sphere and it looks absolutely awful. It looked like someone had stuck some play-dough to the back of my imperial destroyer.

In this particularly instance I received some unintentional help from my friend Jack (also taking this course) who told me about the 'Glow' effect he used in his animation. I viewed his animation and it was immediately obvious how much better his lasers and explosion looked because of this effect. Naturally, I went and added the glow effect to my own animation. The lasers were immediately far better and the explosion were a definite improvement....I wouldn't go as far to say that the explosions looked GOOD though, I made an effort to add some distortion to my spherical fire in order to make it more realistic, but it didn't really work well.

The music I selected previous did fit fairly well with my animation. I midjudged how long a certain section of the song was though and as such it hits the 30-second marker at a weird time and cuts off the song at a really weird interval. Ultimately, this isn't an issue. But it's one that annoyed me slightly anyway.

As with any work done, a SWOT analysis is possible. As such I chose to add mine onto the end of my creation analysis.

Strengths:
-Totally obvious, but I didn't have to remake the models because they had been made already in the first half of the semester
-I had the rare luxury of knowing actually how I wanted my animation to look, and how each scene would flow into the other. This meant that I didn't have to re-think much (if any) of my storyboard during the animation phase, while many other would have had to change their original plan because of the storyboard not connecting too well.
-I seem to have the god-given ability to innovate in unfavourable situations. As such, my horrendous lack of Maya knowledge was covered well enough by my creativity for my animation to not suffer too much

Weaknesses:
-The aforementioned lack of Knowledge. I am certain that I would have been able to create a (relative) masterpiece with all of the knowledge I was supposed to learn for this assignment.
-Multiple unexpected and highly unwanted life events occuring during the second half of this semester meant I missed a lot of classes that would have made my life that much easier and also meant I wouldn't be sat here typing up my final blog in January 12 hours before my deadline was due.
-Also having 3 different jobs. When it comes to uni, 3 jobs is a severe weakness

Oppurtunities:
-This module allowed me to really explore the other side of my chosen industry. I have many friends that do this side of the subject and now I actually have an idea what they're on about now. I can see this becoming super helpful down the line when I need to convey myself to co-workers
-On a more spiritual level, this module allowed me to re-discover a more creative side of myself that enjoyed thinking about the artistic and even psychological side of things, A talent that school and working life desperately tries to beat out of you.

Threats:
-The previously mentioned unwanted life events were a major threat to my project as a whole. They still are now even 12 hours before my deadline. This is really the biggest one going as it really crippled me for a good 4 weeks and forced me to get my deadline extended
-Having equipment stolen, I had to do my entire project on the universities H-drive, because my external hard drive was stolen during Week6 and I don't have enough money to replace that hard drive.
-I was under a lot of pressure to not make a mistake on this half of the module. On the previous half, I gave a blog link that actually didn't work and this led to my work getting a far lower grade than it deserved. I had to double-check everything along the way this time because I needed it to be at highly marked as humanly possible to ensure I passed.
(Note: I find it extremely funny and sad at the same time that all 3 of these 'threats' were things that actually happened to me. It's like I wasn't supposed to pass this module)

And with that, this is the end of my blog. The work is all done!
I may possibly add a youtube video of my animation, on the off-chance that the DVD doesn't like the video. but that would be in it's own post.

Animation Plan: Reflection

This is the part when I look back on how I planned my work, and see how I could have done better, and what I already did well.

To be brutally honest, my plan was partially perfection, and partially disastrous. On the one hand, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my animation and why I was using each individual camera shot/action/etc. However at the same time I had absolutely no clue HOW I was going to implement all of these decision into Maya.

The reason I had no clue how to implement my ideas was down to the fact that - due to various life events - I had been completely unable to attend all but one Modelling&Animation lecture in the entirety of the second half of the semester. As such, my knowledge of animating is only what I've learned from reading on the VLE. This means anything I didn't learn from that is a tool I can't use and ultimately, I've been left with the bare minimum of skills to complete a working animation.

A lot of my animation will have to be done in key frames and with Belzier curves. These are two of the few (a.k.a: only) methods I know for animation objects as of this time. during the actual creation of my animation, I might be able to learn another to aid my creation.

I cannot really go into more detail about what I feel I did right with planning then I have already. I know exactly what I want to happen in the animation, I know exactly what camera angles/sizes/movements I want in each segment of the animation and I know why I'm doing it. I even know what music I want to use on the animation and - if my calculations are right - the animation should even sync up with the music! (For reference, It's this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKZKzINMSGk)

I can see my lack of knowledge causing a few problems for my 'vision'. For starters, I cannot figure out how to attach a camera to an object for the life of me. This will inevitably cause problems with panel 3 on my storyboard, where the idea was for the camera to follow the two smaller spaceships at they flew towards the imperial destroyer. However, if there's one thing I know I can do, it's get creative with limited options.

If I could re-do this half of the module all over again, I'd humbly request all outside life problems would NOT be present, so that I could actually attend lectures and be on time to finish my projects, rather than be forced to get an extension and complete all my work without peers around to offer help if I needed it. This was a huge inconvenience to everything and I really hope I don't have to deal with anything like that again for the rest of my life.

Unrelated, Course-based venting

So, as a random side-note that's not really relevent to this blog, I recently caught wind of the knowledge that our course representative was caught red-handed copying his models from some website. It's really disgraceful that the person who is supposed to represent us was caught cheating on a module that ultimately isn't too difficult to grasp.

If I'VE managed to not cheat despite all of the obstacles I've encountered this semester, then he has no excuse at all. I always thought he was a bit of a prick anyway and this just cements my opinion as fact.

Camera Techniques

Before I continue with this post, I will be referring to my 'Storyboard' post a fair amount, so here is a direct link to this page: http://tomswonderfulassignmentblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/storyboard.html

In the first lecture after the completion of our 3D models, we studied how camera techniques are used in media to portray and display different things. A large majority of these could potentially come in use for the creation of my Animation.

Camera techniques can be split into 3 main areas: Angles, Shot sizes and Movement

Angles: A cameras angle is used to give a different feeling to a scene, a birds-eye view can be used to display a location to the viewer quickly and establish the feeling quickly, while an over-the-shoulder view is used to make the viewer see a scene from a certain characters perspective.
Another interesting angle that you can use is called the high-angle shot. While this is ultimately similar to the birds-eye view, it look down into the scene at a slight angle rather than directly from the top. This allows the viewer to see everything thats happening in a scene. I use this angle in frame 6 of my storyboard to easily display the acrobatic movement from the two smaller spaceships.

Shot Sizes: This is what most people would refer to as 'zoom'. A shot size simply refers to how close or far away the camera is from the main focal object. The names of a shot size is very much self-explanatory. A close-up is a really close to the object, probably even taking up the whole shot and is commonly used for showing emotion or other small details. A long shot is when the camera is a long way from the focal point, and is often used to show the scale of an object. I used a mix of both close up and long shot sizes in panel 1 of my storyboard in order to try and convey the imperial destroyer as being an enormous spaceship. I don't yet know if that will translate into the actual animation that well.

Movement: This is what a lot of my shots relied on. Movement is also self-explanatory in that is covers all forms of displacement, rotation and zooming. These can be used to create almost any desired effect, but movement is most effective when used for high-speed sequences or generally any sort of action-based media. I plan on using a lot of movement with my cameras in my animation, Panel 5 of my storyboard is probably the most notable example of this, as the plan is for the camera to start at the front of the imperial destroyer, and then quickly crab/pan towards and beyond the back of it as the other ships fly over/under it. Hopefully, speedy camera movement will create the effect of fast-moving spaceships, or at least appear to move faster than they actually are.

Storyboard

Now that I've finished making my textures models, I now need to move on to the final section: The storyboards!

The storyboarding is necessary for a later part of this module, in which I will be doing a short animation featuring my models.

Text if you cant read my writing:
1: Imperial flies past, camera pans to follow
2: X-wing and headhunter swoop down and toward camera, camera remains static
3: Sprays lasers. pewpewpew
4: Lasers hit imperial. no damage
5: Xwing and headhunter loop over/under imperial
6: Xwing and headhunter loop around and fire more lasers
7: lasers hit booster, it explodes
8: Imperial falls out of sky, Xwing and headhunter fly off into distance, come in from off camera

Model Texturing

Now that we have made our three models, we need to texture them. Texturing is the necessary 'cheery of top' of the modelling that turns a lifeless, but accurate grey-scale model into a fully fledged model of a ship.

There are multiple different ways of texturing the ship, but we're going to be using a mix to get an accurate texture. For this Blog, I will be using my X-wing model to display the methods I'm going to use.

To get the first initial step done, we want to use 'block texturing' first to turn the entire ship into the most accurate 'general' colour. to do this, we need to select the entire ship and select 'Assign New Material'

This sets a new material on the entire ship, it then gives you a whole bunch of texturing options, which I can then edit as necessary. In this case, the most common colour of the ship is a cream/white colour, So we'll change the texture colour to fit that.

Now that the ship as a whole is close to the colour that we want, we just need to add some of the larger colour changes, like the silver nose/cockpit and the Black sections on the turbines. This is done by selecting the desired faces and doing the same 'Assign new material option we used for the whole ship earlier

Just like earlier, we can now change the colour of the texture to suit what we need it to be. in the case of the turbines, we want to change it fully to black. We do the same things with other parts of the ship, and we will end up with something like this

Now that we've got most of the basic colouring done, we can begin to go into detail. To do with, we need to select the faces that we wish to work on. First, I will be choosing the front of the ship, in order to add the red/yellow accents.

To do this, we first must select the faces we want to work on (These being the 3 long, thing faces that make up the front of the ship, the top half only) and selecting 'UV texture editor' and re-arranging the layout so only the 3 necessary faces are on the beige square.

Once we do this, we need to take a 'UV Snapshot' and save the image as a .jpeg file, so we can freely edit it. It was suggested to save it as a .tif file, and then edit it in Photoshop. However, I have absolutely no idea how to utilise photoshop effectively, and therefore decided to edit in paint, sacrificing detail in exchange of easy use.

Once you upload the picture to paint, you should see something similar to what we have in the above screenshot. all you need to do then is edit the picture (without deleted the pre-made border) in order to look similar to the ships original design. for my design it ended up looking like this

Once again, save the image. and we need to import back onto the faces of the model. If Everything has been done properly, the crudely done paint image should map itself perfectly to the model, and it did.

This is everything to the UV mapping. from here all I need to do is repeat this process a few times and then we're all finished!

Using the UV mapping seems convuluted for someone who are largely unused to it, and trying to use photoshop was almost impossible. However, theres always a workaround and workaround I did.

Final designs:

Third Ship: X-wing

The Third and final ship of my project will be an X-wing Aircraft. When looknig at my references images in the Moodboard, we can see that the X-wing looks functionally similar to the Z95 Headhunter in that is seems to be a small, agile fighter ship, but with a few key differences. The most obvious difference being that this aircraft actually has 4 wings instead of two, and they are aligned to form an X shape, as the name implies.

Due to the obvious similarities to the Headhunter, I'll be taking a different approach to this model. First off, I will be starting with my completed model of the Headhunter, instead of work from scratch. From a quick observation, we can see that the Turbines, wing and even the chassis for the X-wing are almost identical to the Headhunter, So I will be keeping those and just touching them up slightly in order to mould them to the X-wings design.

Here, we see that I have separated the important components from my Headhunter: A turbine, the Body, and one wing. If you remember my wings were one big poly last time. I've separated them into one wing by selecting it and choosing the 'Mirror Cut' tool on it in order to have only one wing.

Now that I have my Needed components, We need to edit them. I'm going to start with the body, as that's the central part of the ship and can't really do much without it. The body of the X-wing is a lot longer and thinner than the body of the Headhunter, and does not have the huge cockpit, instead having a Cockpit that moulds much smoother into the body.

As you can see, I have now created a much smaller, thinner body, Which now has the cockpit built into it. Now that we have the foundation built, We can add Our wings to it! If you look at the reference images of the Xwing, You'll see that the guns are set up in a fashion that wouldn't allow us to simply use the 2 wings together, so I had to split them up. But now that I've done that, I can place the wings in the correct fashion.
It's incredibly hard to see in this screenshot, but there are actually a few ridges on the wings. These are highly unwanted remnants of the previous extrusions that were the turbine supports on the Headhunter. And I have absolute no clue how to un-extrude the faces.

Anyway, now that we have the wings in place, we can attach the turbines to it. The turbines from the headhunter are very similar to these, but there are a few tweaks that need to be made, just like with the chassis and the wings. 

Here is the edited version of the turbines. the exhaust is now offcentre, aswell as the turbine as a whole having less indentation.

Now that I've gotten the turbine perfect, These need to be attached to the correct places, just like the wings. This part is easy enough but I also need to create the turbine supports on the wings, just like last time. This is relatively easy, but yet another slight tweak to the design of the Headhunter.

Here's the edited version of the wings, the underside has little to no change, but the side containing the turbine is slightly raised all the way along, albeit more discreetly right at the back.

Now that the wings have been altered, the third and final model is completed! Being able to use the assets of another model in this one saves a LOT of time overall, cutting production time greatly. Trying to undo areas that have been extruded is extremely hard though and an overall pain. I'd also recommend not ever using the 'Boolean' function on meshes if you want to use them as Assets later on, as doing this on my wings/guns cause a lot of issues that created mild, annoying problems with the mesh.

Once again I will be doing the Textures in a different Blogpost, but untill then, here is the final product: