Individual Conclusion

Virtual Environments has been the module that I have spent the most time on since my time at Uni by far. The amount of hours I have put it has been off the scale, a lot of that time has been spent problem solving things that wont work but mistakes have to be made when learning.

Its particularly rewarding producing 3D work, the results are normally impressive more so than other work in other media. Learning solid surface modelling techniques has been very enjoyable, its been something i have wanted to experiment with since I started producing 3D models. The chamfer tool is my new best friend. Other new skills include the mental ray render engine. It arch & design base templates are very powerful materials and can totally transform a model, mental ray also renders scenes with complex lighting quicker, cant see myself going back to scanline now.

Another new skill I have learnt is the use of the rayfire tool. This tool creates spectacular results but is by far the most unstable software I have ever used. You have to have the patience of a saint to use it, if you think its not doing anything, well it probably is, just leave it. Thats my best tip for the software. If I knew the problems it would cause us at the beginning of the module I would still go ahead with it. The results are spectacular and its definitely something I can use in future work. I always look to push myself and always try new things, sometimes this is more successful than other times but I am very happy with the way the work came out.

I think our final animation was very strong if a little rough around the edges. With pushing the boundaries comes risk and in using rayfire we were pushing our skills but we wanted to produce an animation that was truly unique and in the end our animation was totally original which is something we are proud of.

Because of the apparent complexity of having all our models on one globe we could not render the image because of ram issues apparently which stopped us producing a long shot of the globe which lost a lot of the surreal effect we were trying to achieve. I will now look at tidying up the animation for personal reward and separate my own parts of the animation to include in my portfolio of work.

Rendering and Premiere Pro

Camera pans were applied to animations and then we rendered out the finished rayfire animations out in 720px hd format. This was done at a much later stage than we had planned for due to earlier problems, however we did manage to render the majority of what we wanted to get rendered. Sadly a few compromises has to be made at the rendering stage meaning we had less camera angles for the final composition.

We post produced the animation in premiere pro. I applied a reverse speed to the rayfire clips to make the buildings seem to be constructing. Had we had a little more time I would like to have used the Time Remapping feature in premiere to control the speed of the clips however we were unable to do this due to time constraints. Sound effects and a soundtrack was applied. The music was royalty free under the creative commons license and would be allowed to appear on a profit organisations website. We could have picked a song that would have sounded better however the client was a real client and we did not want to use copyrighted music. However after watching other presentations no other groups seemed to take this into consideration.

Lighting

A lot of time was spent finding ideal lighting with the group experimenting with different styles. In the end we settled on a natural looking 5 light setup - 1 skylight and 4 omni lighting objects separately with them all excluding different objects.

We did initially decided to go with the surreal lighting created by Arnas however this caused max to crash on any other machine than his, after not finding a solution to the problem we resorted back to the earlier lighting setup already mentioned.

Rayfire Problems

Once all the models were at a final stage the rayfire animation was ready to be put into its final stage. However this was highly problematic. For still unknown reason this did not want to work, buildings were not fragmenting properly and they weren't fragmenting. Eventually after 3/4 days of playing with settings after constant crashed I managed to overcome the issues, largely due to the complex materials on all the model and the computer running out of ram on my 32bit version of max. This has left a mad rush to get all the models finished rendered in time. We did not plan for this delay that rayfire has caused. 

Rayfire - great end results: not good for complex models unless you like enjoy the 3ds max loading graphic. :(