3D Animation - Take Two!

Design Practice 1 - Animation take 2 - Graeme Nye from Graeme Kickass on Vimeo.

Ok, so I was being lazy before! I felt that a nine second video just won't cut it, so I made it longer and fixed a few things.

In the first video, you can actually see the word "Gray" fly across the screen during the first camera pan, I only noticed once I uploaded, and that just had to go. Secondly, when the objects start falling, I decided to space it out a bit for two reasons; it would extend the animation more; the sound effects won't get as muddled together.

Obviously I added more to the end, I feel that it looked quite spiffy.

Comments would be lovely :)

Animation

Design Practice 1 - 3D Animation - Graeme Nye from Graeme Kickass on Vimeo.

Hmm, animation... Definitely the hardest of the 3 Design Practice tasks.

For the past three weeks we have been taught the very basics of 3DsMax which just include the basic interface, how to make things move (obviously) and the basics of modelling a character.

While I found animation to be the most interesting aspect of the Multimedia course so far, it was by far the most complicated of the three. This is mainly due to the fact that 3DsMax is such a huge piece of software, it's nearly impossible to learn it in just 3 weeks. So I had to experiment and discover features mostly by myself. A lot of time was also spent looking at online video tutorials, which helped, but for the most part just seemed to advanced or just not very helpful for what I needed.

In the second week of the module, we were taught how to make a funny little character called Jellyhead. This lesson was very helpful; and while the character 'JellyHead' looked very cool, I didn't want to copy it for my Ident. So instead, I took a lot of what I was taught, and tried creating a different character.

There isn't much I would do differently if I were to do this task again. I think the main thing holding me back was my inexperience with the software; most my time was stressing out trying to find out why things weren't working instead of actually animating. So all I need to do differently now is to just practice.

Please give any feedback you can if you're actually reading this :)

Interactive Space

We were given 3 weeks to create some kind of story. But instead of your usual linear story, we had to make it interactive and let the user make decisions which could affect the outcome.

In order for the interactive part of the project to work, we were taught the basics of HTML. Luckily for me, I was already quite competent with HTML and CSS so that could lead me to focus on the other parts. Such as story, and the picture quality.

The whole project was created in Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, and the pictures needed to be edited and compressed in Adobe Photoshop CS4. Again, I have already had a lot of experience using both these software, so it wasn't too difficult to get things done.

I didn't come across too many problems along the way, the task was quite simple. The hardest part was coming up with an original story, which would stand out from the rest. I decided to use a character I made a few years ago from an animation I created (Socially Awkward Alan. You can see the cartoon once you have finished the game!). I thought it would be a bit different and quirky if I could add someone/thing from the 'cartoon world' and put them in our own. Now that I had one concept sorted, I needed to actually think of a story. I finally ended up creating a slasher/horror story, but with a twist. I wanted to add some comedy to the project, so I made Alan the slasher, and when he catches you, he kicks you in the groin; the whole point of the story is to avoid the groin shot, and to somehow kill him.

There were a few things I would definitely change if I were to do this project again. I would make sure to use a better quality camera. I ended up using a camera phone, for no better reason other than the fact I was being lazy. I didn't want to have to walk through the cold to get a camera, and have to walk all the way back to Waverley.


Here are a few screenshots of my work, be sure to check out the full game at http://www.makingnewmaps.com and click on my wonderful face.


**SPOILER ALERT**

Click for larger images.