Summary

Over all I say I have good looking models and animation, but because I’m a gamming student I should have tried of made low poly models, while using techniques like normal mapping with materials to get the detail in the models. The animation of the models are good but they are a bit unrealistic, when R2D2 hit’s the wall R2 bounces back too far, its like the wall is made of rubber. I still got a lot of areas I need to improve on like animation and efficient low ploy modelling, and I should work on improving these in the future.

Post Production(Adobe Premiere)

Once I had all the files rendered I need to put them together with a video editing software, originally I was going to use Windows movie maker, but its not possible to have multiple audio tracks. I downloaded a trail version of Adobe Premiere. I watched a quick tutorial on how to use Premiere, as I have never used it before, I found the program easy to use and I can have multiple audio track for the video. I got my audio sample from 2 different website:

http://www.findsounds.com/ISAPI/search.dll

http://www.mobiles24.com/downloads/s/249798-3-star_wars-r2d2_scream

For the music I found an old copy of the star wars sound track on my computer. The music is by John Williams and is from the 3^rd star wars film. The song is called: Battle of the Heroes.

I made an overlay in Photoshop by using a transparent gradient, the overlay will be used to darken the edges of the video, I find this to be a nice effect for short animations/videos.

On one layer I applied the overlay for the full 30 seconds, on the other layers I have the video clips and sound files. I put a gap before last scene, to create anticipation as the viewer hear R2D2 screaming.

I used a three Way colour corrector on all the scene to soften the colours for the eyes, and to try and get that film look to the animation.

I also used a brightness and Contrast effect to counter some of the side effect from the three way colour effect.

On some of the audio clips I change their volume overtime, for instance when the mouse droids get closer the volume gets louder, and then gets quitter when moving away. I also doubled up the mouse droid audio file to get the impression that there is more than one mouse droid.

Problems

After I rendered the scenes I notice a couple of problems, for the materials on R2D2’s head and the mouse droid’s body they are set to world. The materials are not moving with the body because I made a mistake when setting up the materials. I don’t want to fix it at this point because I’m running out of time, and I don’t want to end up with more problems than I already have. The mistake is not that noticeable because of the low definition of the video, but it could have been a problem if I rendered the video in high definition.

Animating Scene 6

Just a quick scene/credits to show what happens to R2D2, and to show the credits.

Animating Scene 5

This scene is a lot like scene 3 but I have Vader’s shadow covering R2D2 slowly. I did this by a spotlight and using a cut-out of Vader. I attached the cut-out to the biped and need to exclude the biped from the light, so it doesn’t cast a shadow and ruins Vader’s shadow.

Animating Scene 4

This scene is for anticipation and to show R2’s fear of Vader. If I did not have this scene here, there would be about 15 second scene of Vader just walking to R2, what is slightly boring and doesn’t express any emotion to the viewer.

Animating Scene 3

As the camera angle for this scene is the perspective view of Darth Vader, I needed to get a walking effect, I decided to use biped and link the camera to a the walking effect. As Vader walks very slow I need to change the walking speed and how far the legs move. I used a target camera as I want Vader to always be looking at R2D2 to show that R2D2 is his destination.

Animating Scene 2

For this scene the mouse droids still follow a path, but R2D2 was animated by using the auto key function, the reason for that was because the directions R2 be moving in would not be that suitable to use a path. I linked all the different parts of R2’s to R2’s body, so all the parts stay together when it‘s body is animated.

First of all I did about 3 to 4 basic key frames for R2 hitting the wall, then bouncing of to a different direction. I used the curve editor to make the movement more realistic when R2 bounces off the wall then slows down and slides across the floor. I added a bit of rotation it the curve editor to show R2 trying to gain back control of it’s movements,. I uses off set movements to turn R2’s head before moving it’s body, what is seen in other animations.

Animating Scene 1

I thought the best way to animate the mouse droids was to have them follow a path, animating the droids this way will take less time and will look more realistic as the movements will be smooth. A good thing about having the mouse droids following a spline is that I can move the spline and it updates the current key frame, this help me to make sure that none of the droids go into each other.

On the curve editor I change the percentage of the droids, so they slow down and speed up at certain times, this makes the droids look more realistic when its moving.

Render Engines

I decided that I was going to use the metal ray render, as I prefer the end look compared to the default render. Although the mental ray render will take a lot more time to render, I worked out it will take about an hour to render each scene with the mental ray render, and this is not really a problem for me. From my understanding mental ray does calculate bounce light, unlike the default render, although I still put my own bounce light in the scenes to strengthen the bounce light effect slightly, as it was slightly to dark.. From the image you can see a real different between the two renders. There are lots of different render engines like V-ray that could make the animation look a lot better but from what I read, the rending time would be to high.