Fantastic Voyage: Final Animation Production And Reflection

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 I started animating and rendering the animation on Wednesday 12th of May, giving me 7 full days to work on the final animation. I had improved upon the scenes I had problems with in the pre-vis and had also rigged and skinned both characters. 

I had never rendered a sequence before and so was eager to get my first scene done in order to see how long it took. My first scene was the Ghost in the sky and was 300 frames long. The scene continued only the main character and a matte painting of the sky and so rendered in about 40 minutes. 


I used a directional light for this scene, which I would continue to do for the duration of the animation. I also set the render setting to Arnold, changing the diffuse, specular, transmission, SSS and volume indirect, to 0. I did this for every scene to come as I wasn't using those settings and it improved the time of the render by a large amount. When testing out the settings, I found if they were all on max, it would take 15 minutes per frame on a single animation. Although the render looks good (see below), this is far too long considering the time limit I am working on. I liked the look the settings I ended up giving to my animation as it was reminiscent of the BBC Bitesize animations I had been watching. Very simplistic to allow the audience to easily follow along. 

Max settings render



The colours used in the animation are basic on purpose to insure the audience is not overwhelmed with information. The Ghost character is textured with a Blinn, meaning he is shiny. This makes him stand out in scenes, ensuring that the viewer can follow along with what he is saying.



Below is the final animation. 







Overall I am very pleased with the animation I have managed to create in the timeframe given. I feel through extensive research of audiences, it has allowed me to understand how to best create an animation which is educational and interesting for the viewer. My target audience was KS1 (ages 5-7), which I picked after establishing the requirements of teaching at that level from my research. I'm glad I did pick such a young audience as it gave me free reign over my ideas. Nothing seemed to strange and I was able to stay on track with the topic of evolution by keeping the information simple. 

One big problem I ran into when making my animation was my character rigs breaking. If I was to keyframe more than 4 actions, the character would either get stuck in the last keyed position or would explode across the screen (see image below). This was probably due to something going wrong in the skinning process, which I struggled to understand. Before this issue I managed to get my models to move with the rig and perform basic actions. It wasn't perfect but I could definitely work with it in order to create some good animations. However because of this issue arising so late into the process, It resulted in me having to limit the charterers movement. This doesn't really effect the overall product too much however it limited my animations potential.




While in the planning phase, I do feel I should have considered the characters I was including into my animation more. I was warned by my tutor not to create a human character as it would be harder to rig. I tried making a simplified version of a human when making Darwin, however it still complicated the rigging process. I also feel I should have considered the use of the Ghost character a bit more as it proved to be a very hard character to transition into 3D. I wanted in the final animation, for the characters body to continuously move in a flowy sort of manner. However this proved more complicated than I had anticipated and has since caused me to reconsider the use of the character. 

With that in mind I still feel I have managed to create something which I can be proud of. I had to use all the skills acquired throughout the year in order to complete the project. I like how efficient I have become, knowing I was struggling to reach the deadline on a single part of the process with the first unit, to now essentially doing all of the units in the same time span. I definitely improved with using Maya, particularly making rigs. I just need to work on skinning my models so that I can complete the project at the highest quality I can. 













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