I'll go into a bit more detail about the animation etc, my specs, the problems I see with it, and the creation process, but first, the video itself.
The Video
As can be seen there are some real problems with it of course and it pains me to watch.
But anyway, let me explain about this video.
Why and when was it made
This was done as part of the CSCI236 3D Modelling and Animation subject at University of Wollongong in 2008 (some time ago). This is essentially the first Animation I had ever done in Lightwave (or anything else for that matter) that was more complex than a car moving across a scene or a ball bouncing and so on. It was a pretty big learning experience and I think, perhaps a tad ambitious.
This Subject was taught across Spring AND Summer session, so basically a standard semester to do our lectures and small incremental assignments. And then an extra summer session period, during which we were to complete two major assignments. The still scene render using a 'complex model' that I posted in the last post here. PLUS a 30 second/900 frame animation that is the video file linked above.
The Reports & Process
We then had to submit a report with each of those that detailed the assets, textures and methods used, as well as (for the animation report) a short 'reflection' on what we learned as well as our original plan and storyboards.
In case anyone may ever get any use out of them, I shall share these two reports in PDF for you here (click the images):
Welcome to Problem-town
Okay, so as I said, we had the summer session to complete the project. Summer session (for us here in Australia) runs over Xmas and New Year... Which also coincides with the annual family holiday for a couple weeks up the coast to Queensland. (Lofty ideals of getting a lot of work done on my trusty Mac Book Pro while on Holiday with the extended family proved to be loftier than practical...) And in general, having 3 kids, one of them 6 months old at the time, and all of whom also got rather ill over this period put a bit of a wrinkle in my grand plans for my first major and polished mighty animation.
Sooo, cutting to the chase, the upshot of all this, coupled with my general inexperience with Lightwave and animation/modelling in general (I'm actually a programmer) as I arrived back in town and the Universe rapidly approached the due date, I then realised that RENDERING actually takes a HELL of a lot Longer than I ever expected...!
The couple of rough renders (as i wasnt really in a position to properly render anything much on my laptop) revealed that a lot of the animation needed to use a lot more frames to look like it wasn't some kind of sped up Benny Hill themed animation... And of course having re-used models in the animation that were originally created as "complex" models for the still scene requirements meant that there were a lot of unnecessary polygons there.
Alas, time was running out. In the end I had to break up the render process into blocks of couple hundred frames and set some going on my home PC, some going on my work PC and some going on the faculty's computer Labs, and then edit those renders together. I cant recall the actual number of hours to render, but I had numerous computers tied up for days...
Also, as a complete novice at this, I had no idea at the time if there was a way to easily reveal and hide objects in a scene during a render, of the best way to switch cameras etc, so I did a lot of keyframes where I suddenly jumped a camera from one spot to another and dropped elements out of sight for a few frames. Which had unintended consequences when i enabled motion blur. So I REALLY need to investigate a better way of handing that.
Overall, it very much meant that the final product, as submitted was a Hell of a Lot rougher and has a lot more flaws and dodgy animation than I had time to fix.
Result & Onwards
Basically I consider this animation to be a rough draft, and now that the rest of my degree is finished, I hope to go back to this to fix some of these issues and polish it up. :-)
But I did end up getting a 94% HD mark for the whole subject overall so I guess I should be happy with the end result. And of course learned a hell of a lot, and despite the stress, really enjoyed it.
I don't know if im actually really any good at this, I know a lot of it is dodgy and I really suck at setting up lighting and stuff, but I do think I'd like to dabble some more with it and see what i can do, if only to improve this particular video and make it a bit more polished and a bit more in line with vision I had for it...
Of course the Monkey models have already been reused by me in some other projects and experiments...
A follow on subject in this degree from this was Game Design, so the Monkey model was revived as a dancing, poo flinging, banana chucking, hat wearing, coconut lobbing and knife wielding soviet genetic experiment in our game project "Monkey Knife Fight"... but I shall perhaps talk about that one another time.
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