Assessment 2

Today I began work on my second 3D assignment, this time it is for animation rather than modelling.



The task is to create a 30 second fly through video of my original assignment model from last semester, including animations to demonstrate what I have learnt during the term.



I began by trying to get the render times down on my assignment because, they were far too long, it was ok for modelling last term becaue it only had to render a few times, now it will have to render hundreds of frames for an animation, so it would have take way too long to create an animation in the state it was in.
There are many ways of speeding up renders, basically you have to remove detail to keep things as simple as possible:

• No particle effects
• No textures
• No Mirror
• No Transparacny
• No Nor
• No emitters
• No lights
• No subsurf
• Objects have as few vertices as possible, do this by removing subsurf, removing doubles, re-calculate normals, and try merging the object at the center.
• Turn ss off in render buttons
• Use decimate modifier to remove vertices from models
• Remove ambient lighting
  

I than began on my animation, I am starting with the external scene, the camera flies in and looks around, the teddy bear falls over, the flowers move around a bit and the ducks swim around, then the camera looks up to the sky ready for the next part of my animation.
I am going to animate my video in parts to save on render times, so the only objexts needed are the ones on camera because less objects means faster renders. I will then edit my videos together in sequence in windows movie maker.

So far I have only used key frame animation on the objects, camera and lights. But I will try to implement all the animation techniques I have learnt in class and hopefully a couple of new ones.