Conclusion

I have now completely finished my animation and have it in a .avi file ready to be handed in. I would have to say that I am very pleased with what I have produced. I have enjoyed the past 12 weeks spent more on the “Animation” side of things rather than the modelling. Semester 1 was enjoyable but I think I struggle with my lack of patience when it comes to intricate modelling. I felt that I was far better when it came to thinking up ways of animating scenes and using cameras and lighting effectively to create a mood.

As mentioned I am very happy with my overall animation but there are 3 scenes that I really feel showed off the skills that I have learnt. The first being the scene where the camera circles round the goose just before he is killed. I feel that I used the camera angles to show off the animation and model of the goose whilst also creating the feel of the Goose being helpless and all alone. I feel that the lighting in this scene really makes it stand out from others.

This follows in nicely to the 2nd scene that I am very proud of, which is the actual killing of the Goose. This was a tough scene to create because I knew what I wanted to achieve but needed to go about it in a certain way that would appeal to my target audience without being regarded as too gruesome or horrible. I also feel that the animation of the Goose after dieing along with the reaction the Axe chopping through the body came out very well and realistic.

The third scene that really stands out for me is the final scene where we see the farmer distraught after realising that he has just wasted a huge opportunity at becoming rich because he was too impatient and greedy. This scene took me a long time to work out how I was going to do the ion because it was extremely important to portray the farmers feelings to the audience. It took me a long time to work out where each bone needed to be/move/rotate to to ensure the perfect body position for falling to his knees. I feel that the final outcome of the scene was very good and worked well.

I believe that throughout this project I have learnt a wide range of animation techniques that will stick with me for any future projects. Examples of some of these could be:

Creating A Biped
Skinning A Model
Weighting The Bones Of A Model
Using The Timeline
Using The Walk Cycle

and many more. My aim was always to try and incorporate as many of the techniques that I learnt throughout the year in my animation. I did this as a test to make sure that I was listening and understood what was going on as well as using them to create some great effects.

One thing that I focussed heavily on in this animation was the use of lighting and cameras to enhance what is happening in a scene. Last semester I was criticised for not using them enough so I really wanted to try out all the options in this animation. I feel that I did this well and used a range of lighting techniques including “Omnilight” and “Target Spot”. I used these lights to create effects such as the sun rising by moving the Omnilight upwards on the scene through the timeline. I believe the cameras give the viewer a range of views of the scenes. These range from face on, from behind, over the shoulder, point of view and roaming camera shots.

One of the things that I struggled with was the skinning and weighting of my models. I found this hard because it is a very tough, tricky and long process to ensure that all the bones are affecting the correct vertices. I had to keep moving bones on my models to see how the skin would react in different situations. The problem would usually come when one vertex was being affected by a random bone on the opposite side of the body. This then created a horrible reaction and I then had to spend time sorting it out. It took a long time to get both my goose and my farmer skinned and weighted but I was happy with the final result.

If I did have a lot more time to spend on the project, I would definitely have spent some more time on the skinning and weighting. Most of the bones movements and rotations work fine however there are occasions when they did not react correctly. When the farmer is in his Walk Cycle, you can see that under the upper arm towards the armpit, there is the skin pinching and creating an odd shape. Unfortunately after spending a lot of time trying to fix this, I had to settle for the best I could get. it still looked good but when you compare it to some of the animations that big companies such as Pixar make, you can see the difference in ability levels.

I would have also liked to have put some more effort into the hands of the farmer. These were very tough to work on because a human has so many bone links in their hands and fingers that to put the full amount of detail could take hours. The only other thing I would really like to spend more time on is the smaller features of both the farmer and the goose. For example on the farmer, a lot more animation on the eyes and mouth would be very effective.

Overall I have enjoyed this project. I have learnt a lot of new skills, which will be used in any future projects using 3DS max. I feel that my final animation is very good and gets across the morale of the story. The cartoon theme runs all the way through the animation as I wanted to ensure that the theme was consistent.

I hope to continue using 3DS Max in the future because I believe that there is lots more to explore within the program. I have enjoyed working with the 2 Richard’s in either semester. They were both able to give superb advice and take me trough different techniques step by step.

The only two things I dislike about 3DS Max is the amount of time it takes to create such a small model or animation. Hours can be spent on a small animation and after allowing for Render time, the time to complete a whole animation can be ridiculously high. The other thing that annoyed me about 3DS Max was the amount of intricacy involved in creating the models. The model had to be dealt with 1 vertex at a time and when you can have a few thousand on a model, this increases the time spent on a model.

Adding Sounds To Video

I now had a fully working animation that was running for just over 2 minutes and showed off all of the scenes that I had created. I decided that I wanted to add some sounds to the animation to create more atmosphere in some of the scenes. To do this I was going to use the Internet to find some songs and sounds and then use Adobe Soundbooth to edit them. These files could then be found by Premiere Pro and drag and dropped into place.

The first sound I had thought of was in the opening scene where the camera is behind a window as it opens. I wanted to create that realistic feel of opening up a window and then hearing the birds tweeting. To do this I searched on the Internet for sounds of Birds tweeting. I struggled to find te perfect sound from websites that offered free versions of clips. I was not happy with just settling for a sound that did not fit the scene and was unrealistic. I decided to get a number of different bird sounds and add them all into one file in Soundbooth and create what is known as a “MultiTrack”, which is basically multiple sound files being played in one go. The outcome of this was superb and I was really happy about it because in real life when you open a window there are a range of bird sounds you can hear and not just from one bird.

The second sounds I added was a very small clip to the actual killing of the Goose scene. I did not want the sounds to take the attention away from the death of the Goose so I decided to have the sound of the Goose as it was killed. Again I searched around on the Internet to find a suitable sound for this sound moment. Realistically the perfect sound would be of a Goose dieing but unfortunately there isn’t many places where you could legally get those kind of sounds. I managed to find a sound of a Goose flapping about and it sounds as if the Goose is quite distressed as it would be in this situation. I was not overly happy with this sound but due to the nature of the scene it was going to have to do.

I then struggled to think how I could add more sounds to the animation. I did not want to overload the animation because I feel that would take the interest and focus off the models and what is happening in the scene. I thought about songs that would be appropriate to different scenes because of their lyrics or titles. I decided to add a few snippets of the songs below:

Katrina And The Waves – I’m Walking On Sunshine (For when the farmer is walking out of his and towards his goose. Mainly used just to show a happy farmer in good mood)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKh0dLIuIu8

Pink Floyd – Money (For when the farmer is thinking about all of his money)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_anbEJsr6s

Jaws Theme - (To create tension before the Goose is killed)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLAYvjaGGqM

Mariah Carey – I Can’t Live If Living Is Without You (For when the farmer is distraught over the fact he has just made a stupid mistake by killing his source of income)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvumVJCCWGM


An example of one of my sounds in Soundbooth.

Editing Video In Premiere Pro

Once I had rendered all of my videos, my next step was to collaborate them all into one film that would be used as the final animation. To do this, I had been told to use a program called Adobe Prmeiere Pro. I was a bit worried about this because I had never used this program before and in truth never actually done any major video editing work.

I was pleasantly surprised however when I actually started to work on the file. I found it very easy to navigate and most of it is pretty self explanatory once you have located the file with all of the final video renders. There is a main timeline where I was able to drag and drop my videos into to create 1 animation in the order that I chose.

I used a small tutorial given by Richard to create some transitions between scenes in my animation. These would occur when the scenes change over and did not really flow well. They could also be used for affect but my main reason was to make the animation flow well. I used fade ins and fade outs to move between two scenes that had pretty different backgrounds and character. I also used the Fade-to-Black option where instead of fading into the next scene, the scene would fade into a black screen and then proceed onto the next scene. These were used when the two scenes had no relevance to each other and it really gave the impact of moving into a different room.

I finished off the animation by adding two small clips that had text on so that I was able to add a title and my details to the video. These were used as Opening and Closing Scenes. The opening scene gives my information and the name of the Fable whereas the closing scene simply has the moral of the Fable. I also made this closing scene run for a long time so that the message of the animation really gets across to the viewer. These were very simple to create, which I thought was surprising as I expected them to be quite tough.

I was pretty happy with the result because I had now got a complete video that was working for just over 2 minutes with successful transitions between most of the scenes. I felt there was a good flow between the scenes and there wasn’t any time where one scene jumped to the next and left you a bit confused how this happened when watching it. The final step of the animation was going to be to add sounds.


My final video in Premiere Pro

Opening/Closing Credits

In Adobe Premiere Pro I decided to add a very basic opening and closing scene, which just give my detials for anybody who is watching the animation along with the name of the film.

The Opening Scene

The closing scene contains the morale of the story.

The Closing Scene

Scene 12 – Angry Farmer

This is the final scene of my animation. The scene starts with a side camera view of the farmer standing up with his hands up in the air. When people are distraught, sometimes they throw their hands in the air as if to say “Why Oh Why”. This was the look that I was going for.

The farmer then drops to his knees and then falls over forward as if he has got no energy and has given up. I wanted to show that the farmer was extremely angry because he has lost a huge amount of possible income. This is why when he is knelt over on the floor, I created an animation of him punching his fist into the ground followed by punching the ground with both fists.

I was very happy with how this scene turned out because it was tough making sure the animation looked realistic. First of all it took me a long time to work out what bones needed to be moved/scaled and rotated in order to create the kneeling affect. I also had to then do some editing half way through the animation because the front end of the farmers foot, the toes, were going underneath the ground plain. This meant that I had to move them up slightly on a number of frames to ensure that the animation looked realistic and the feet did not go under the ground.

Scene 11 – Inside View Of Goose

The main reason for the Farmer killing his Goose was because he was under the impression that his Goose had gold inside of it regardless of how unrealistic this sounds. After the previous scene where we saw the Goose being chopped in half, this scene starts with the same camera angle that the previous scene finished on. The camera then zooms in to the front half of the dead goose that is lying on the floor. It focuses on the insides of the Goose as the farmer is expecting to see Gold here.

The camera then turns to the back half of the Goose and again focuses on the insides of the Goose, which are now visible. To the farmers despair, he realises that the insides are pink just like a normal Goose rather than the gold he was expecting. The camera is now looking from the point of view of the Farmer. The camera then quickly shakes back to the front half and then back to the back half of the Goose. This gives the impression of the Farmer’s worry and fear that he has just made a huge mistake.

This scene was tough to create and animate because there is a lot going on in the Scene. I wanted to make a lot of things visible and obvious to the person watching the animation. The first thing I had to deal with was the cameras. As mentioned in the Scene description, I wanted the camera to be from the point of view of the Farmer. I needed to get across his emotions of shock, worry and fear when he first sees the insides of the Goose. The quick movements between the two halves of the Goose show this very well I feel.

The next important part of this scene was allowing the user to be able to get a good view of the inside of the Goose. The first issue I had was to make the two halves of the Goose not completely hollow from where they had been chopped in half. To do this I selected the border of a half and used the “Cap” function to put a polygon over the edge of it. I did this on both halves. I had a problem with this when I added a “Turbosmooth” due to the topology and amount of polygons on this cap. To conquer this I used the “Cut” tool many times to create a lot of smaller polygons on the cap. This then allowed the Turbosmooth to have a lot more affect and a more realistic look.

Once I had sorted out the Cap on the two halves, I now needed to colour the insides to show that they were a regular pink rather than the Farmer’s expected Gold. I decided that I wanted to keep the theme of the cartoon look rather than creating an in depth image of the goose’s innards. To create this effect, I selected a range of the inside Polygons on the Cap of the goose’s halves and applied a simple pink colour material to them. As they were both editable Poly’s, I was able to adjust the positioning of some of the vertices to make it look less like a rectangle.

I was very happy with how this scene came out because it is a very important one with a lot of action happening. It was important to get across to the viewer that the Farmer was unhappy and shocked by what he had seen. I felt that the best way to do this was by using the Cameras to make them look from the point of view of the farmer himself. I believe that this was achieved and was very effective.

Scene 10 – Goose Being Killed

This scene was one of my favourites to animate however it was important to ensure it was realistic and also suitable for my target audience. The overall fable finishes with the farmer killing his goose as he believes that there is gold inside of it. This meant that I needed to animate the death of an animal. This sounded like it would be fun to animate however as my target audience in mainly children, I did not want to make the death too gory that would be unsuitable for them to watch.

The scene starts with the same view of the goose that was left from the previous screen. There is a target spotlight that highlights the Goose in the centre of the screen. With the spotlight, it makes the rest of the screen black therefore it allowed me to make the axe appear out of nowhere. This also made it very easy to animate as I did not have to show the farmer using the axe as the shadows would have covered him.

Halfway through the scene we see the head of the axe come down and chop the goose in half. When it hits the ground after going through the goose it then rises back up to its upright position. As the head of the axe rises out of the flesh of the Goose, the goose breaks into half with both the front and back falling away from each other onto the ground.

As I mentioned I did enjoy animating this scene and I feel that I did not make it too gory or inappropriate for my target audience. The target spotlight gave the impression that the Goose has been captured and was being interrogated.