It’s been 10 days since the last post, 6 of those days were spent completing a radio hand in. And if we’re being honest technically i’d count it as 9 days since last post as I haven’t been to sleep yet; but when you’re having some trouble rendering switching camera’s and spinning things sacrifices have to be made. It’s fair to say learning a new piece of software and then creating and animating two 3D models was ambitious, but do-able. I’ve just finished animating my first one:

I know it doesn’t look like much but this is the .avi file of the first, finished, matte textured object. The animation is 1801 frames and made my mac hot enough to fry an egg on when I rendered it. However I am happy to say this probably the thing i’m most proud of since coming to university. Learning a new piece of software and being able to use it competently, after spending about 2 days every week for the last 3 weeks practicing and creating my final pieces, I don’t think is too bad. Here’s a link to just the animation on YouTube as well:

Ok so there’s two things that seriously kill me about this final render. I spent about an hour trying to match up and getting two camera’s to move in sync, spawning and finishing at the same location, and in the Blender playback they were perfect, however now I have just rendered it and one is a little further forward than the other, so it jumps and I think is very noticeable, however I don’t know how to fix this because both outlines of the camera’s are directly on top of each other. The second is the close up of the buttons and lights. When moving towards the right side you can tell the camera is on a tiny slant. I’ve messed about with the rotations and scale and positioning so much today that I can’t do it without changing/moving lots of other things, but right now i’m too far into the piece with keyframes etc, but after close inspection I think it’s down to having a wonky line when I did my path, I really would love to spend more time on these issues to get the render perfect, but I really need to start my second animation.

I also wanted both the product animations to be 40 seconds, and i’ve animated them at 60 fps, so 40 seconds is 2400 frames, but I ran out of way to interestingly manipulate a rectangle, as there’s nothing to show on the back, so I have left it at 30 seconds, (1800 frames) and will be aiming for the same time with the camera animation. This will bring my video to 1 minute, and then with the introduction and outro hopefully all together it should finish at around 1 minute 20 or 1 minute 30, which I was the target I said I wanted to hit when writing my R&D PDF.

Oh and on Monday during the workshop I found the easiest way to light my object was create 4 lamps above and 4 lamps below the surface layer, in the same spots, and animate the animation in the center of them. This might not work for future projects but for this it seems to have done the trick. More later on today when I finish my next render.