Gannt Chart

Below is a Gantt chart, created to organise more efficiently what had to be completed in the set time frame. In red are the estimated completion times of each aspect and in grey is the actual time each section took to complete.

Completing the modelling took a week longer than expected which pushed other aspects behind schedule. However we believe that the extra time taken to complete the models was important in getting all models to look the best they could.

The animation stage also got pushed behind schedule due to the unexpected complexity of how some of the mechanisms moved. More time could have been spent on getting each mechanism to animate better but an extra week was the most the group could afford to allocate otherwise there would not have been enough time to create a professional looking video ready for the presentation.

Group Minutes 3rd December

Present:
Aaron Cracknell
Richard King
Stuart Norton
Tom Robinson

Progress:
With a week to go before the final presentation and hand in date, the group are nearly ready to begin rendering and start the post production. Today, group member Stuart recorded a narration to accompany the final animation and also provided his final environment scene finished. As a group we decided to go for a night time snow scene for our animation and this was added to the 3ds Max scene today.

With the steam pump now finished and fully animated the group today concentrated on cameras and lighting. With three separate cameras in the scene we can render a selection of different views for editing later. One camera provides a close up of the steam pump and rotates at different angles to see all areas of the pump. A second camera is static which gives a single view of the steam pump from a high angle. The final camera rotates around the building which holds the steam pump, the camera shows the environment and creates the atmosphere. This particular camera animation was made with the help of a eclipse shaped path constraint for a smooth animation around the environment.

Richard created an excellent model of a lamp to be used within the scene as a visible source of light. The scene is mostly lighted by a small number of omni lights to get the right amount of light in certain areas. A balance had to be established with the intensity to stop the omni lights clashing and making the scene far too bright. The group is on track to render out the required animations and hand them over to Tom Robinson's 'Final Cut' expertises where all three animations will be edited together along with Stuarts narration piece and a number of other audio files to create a realistic scene. Aaron Continued to finalise the animation and worked on finishing touches to the textures and modelling. Aaron and Richard began to place 3 cameras in different areas, and created the movie aspect. A short list of scenes that will be renederred at the end are shown below:

RENDERING

CAMERA 1
First section: Frames 1 - 613
Second section: Frames 760 - End

CAMERA 2
Frames 200 - 900

CAMERA 3
Frames 1 - 501