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.