Evaluation

I have learnt many things throughout this project which will come very useful in the future. I was able to put my skills to the test and use my strengths to make a successful animation.

One of my strengths which helped me through this project was that I already had extensive experience in 3Ds Max which helped a great deal. I was able to easily solve problems without spending hours trying to fix them like I usually would have to. I also had experience in modelling characters, specifically children's characters, which came in very useful. Research also went very well as I love watching cartoons and know most of the Disney films back to front.

I also had a few weaknesses during this project. One being that I had to work in the labs of the university which meant that I wasn't used to the systems and they kept crashing. This meant that I had some last minute errors which caused panic and chaos.

I have learnt a great deal from doing this project. I have learnt good time keeping and management and also many new skills in 3Ds Max which may benefit me in the future. After this project I want to continue learning new skills on this program as I find it very interesting.

If I had the chance to do it again then I would spend more time perfecting the animation process as it was very rushed and if I had allowed myself more time then I would have been able to create extra renders and perfect the film editing as well.

Film Editing

- The film editing was surprisingly very easy to do as all I needed to do was put the clips together in the right order. I found some appropriate music from a blog website about cartoons and also watched many youtube videos of cartoons until I found the appropriate sounds for the eyes blinking etc. I recorded the sounds using Audacity and then imported them into the premiere pro project. The only thing which I found challenging during the editing process was making sure that sounds matched the animation. The premiere pro program froze many times while I was trying to put the clips together which made it almost impossible to do big tasks on it.

Animation

The animation was surpringly easy to do because of the experience I had with it before. I did come across a few problems such a linking and mesh's distorting but nothing that couldnt be fixed.
I used many different techniques during the animation process. I used path constraints for the cameras in many of the scenes and I also link constraints on the apple at one point. I used techniques I had learnt in the tutorials and this came in very useful. The most challenging part of the animation was making the elephant move after footsteps. I had to find out how to add keyframes after a set of footsteps and I found out you have to use a convert tool. I found the apple animation very challenging because it was difficult to guess which keyframes the apple needed to drop in depending on how fast it needed to drop. A few times 3ds max froze which made things even more difficult because i had to start again on many occasions. - This is why auto-backup came in very useful at times.

Link constraint Problem

In order to make the animation process easier I tried to link all the body parts together on both the elephant and giraffe to make sure they were both ready for animation. I had many problems doing this as, on many occasions I made a link between two mesh’s and forgot. So later when I tried linking them again, they just became distorted.

The eyes were the hardest thing to link as there was about 4 parts of each eye. I made sure that the actual eye was linked to the head and the eye lids were linked to the eye ball. The FDD box was also linked to the head to make sure it doesn’t distort the eyes when the biped moves.

Lighting

For the lighting I decided that I wanted to use a skylight because it gives a very good lighting effect for cartoons and it also gives the characters very even and soft shadows. The sky light looked very effective until I rendered the tree in the scene with under the lights. For some season the tree showed no colour or texture under the lights and I tried everything to fix it. Eventually, after playing about with many lights, I pointed a target direct light at the tree which seemed to help show some colour in the tree. By using a skylight it made the rendered very difficult to do considering it made the renders go very slow. I solved this problem by using a setting called light tracer which apparently renders the scene in a less visually impressive format. In my opinion I think that the light tracer makes my cartoon and the characters look more effective because the elephant looks like playdoh.

Tree and Apple

After making my other animations and getting lots of experience of 3Ds Max, I know about some of the features and shapes and how they can help you to create a scene. I used the foliage "shape" to create a realistic tree to suit the scene. I looked at American Elm firstly which was the perfect colour; however it had way too many branches which were unrealistic on an apple tree. I then tried an oak tree which looked perfect. I reduced the density and increased the pruning to adjust the tree to the right shape and size.














The apple was very easy to create but it took a very long time. I followed and tutorial which I found online to help create the shape of the apple as I had no idea how to do it. First I created the shape of the apple by using the line tool and made sure the start and end point were parallel. When I got to this stage it started to look very realistic which made me very proud. I used the edit poly and noise modifier to give it an uneven but realistic look. The material was the hardest part of the apple to do.

Giraffe Body and Legs

The giraffe's legs were very difficult to model. I was unsure of how they should look so i created two different models to see which one looked better. I made the legs by applying to symetry modifier to the body and using the extrude tool to shape them. I decided to use the thin legs as I wanted to create a tall and goofy looking character instead of a small and cuddly one. The legs took quick a long time to make because of the detail on them. They needed to be a specifica shape to look good.

Elephant Nails and tutu

I made the elephants tutu my cloning the body and then deleting soem fo the polygons, when a had a hoop shape I then extruded the edge and mvoed the vertexes to make a tutu effect. This was very easy to make. I then attatched it to the body.

After I made the tutu, I came across a big problem. One of the arms had become severly distorted and it wouldnt let me undo it. Because of this I thought it would be easiest if i remade the arms. They did not take very long to do. I later found out that the mesh was distorting because of being linked to more than one object.













The Elephant’s nails were very simple to do as I just simply created a multi/sub object material to create the different colours for the nails and the skin and applied it to the arms and legs. I then moved the vertexes to create arches for the nails and then selected the polygons and changed the polygon material ID in the edit poly modifier. I thought that the nails gave the elephant and very nice realistic effect.













This is the final image of the elephant. I am very impressed with how it is looking at the moment and I cant wait start animating.