Overall Evaluation & PDP

This module has definitely helped me learn many new skills and improve my existing knowledge of 3ds max. Not only have new skills been learnt, but existing skills have been expanded on.

I had already modelled buildings last year, but my methods of using lots of polygons and by placing blocks together was not the best way to do so. This year, learning how to extrude, bevel etc. has reduced my polygon count and improved rendering time, as well as making the overall appearance of the building look much more professional.

Another important new skill was UVW Unwrapping. This took me quite a while to get my head around, and the buildings that were used weren’t exactly the easiest to texture, but the end results were excellent and definitely made all the difficulties worthwhile. It helped that I already had lots of experience of using Photoshop for this particular skill.

Rendering using targa files definitely made the final stages a lot easier too. There were no crashes for any of my renders thanks to this simple method of rendering out a scene. The group members that exported as avi’s all had trouble with their files afterward, but even though my files were large, the targa files proved to not be a problem whatsoever.

Although I feel that many new skills have been learnt and my 3DS Max knowledge has improved greatly, the group work aspect was one element that has frustrated me pretty much constantly throughout the module, as was to be expected. I and one other member I feel have worked to the best of our ability, always working well and meeting our group deadlines. However, the other two members although working hard have always left their work till the last minute, which got frustrating. However, this has helped me improve my leadership skills so something good has come out of the stress. Also, the amount of work and detail that went into the animation would have taken much longer on my own and it wouldn’t look anyway near as good as the final result. So group work did have a definite advantage when it comes to creating a good quality, lengthy animation. However it had its definite disadvantages too.

Although group work was difficult at times, throughout the module we have all shown up to lessons for our group meetings and communicated with each other effectively. We have shared opinions of each other’s work and shared out the workload when others were lagging behind to ensure that it all got handed in on time. All of the modelling and animation looks brilliant - the water, scenery, buildings and daylight system are all excellent. If there was one model to be criticised, it would be the planes. Everything else looks consistent with the scene and fits really well together, but the planes look more cartoonish. This works well for the flashback scene involving toy planes, but if there had been more time I would have helped to re-make the planes and texture them better.

This module has been my favourite module of the semester and has renewed my enthusiasm and enjoyment of animating. The modelling side was the most enjoyable; as I feel that this is my main strength. The animation was probably the part that was the most difficult, mainly because of the amount of time that the rendering took. But the end result is something that we all feel looks very professional and we are proud of.

If there was one thing that I could do again, I would probably have started the Premiere aspect earlier. Premiere was one part I was not looking forward to, but team work made it a lot easier than previous times. Exporting out of Premiere took a ridiculous amount of time, much more than I remembered last time, so allowing more time for this part would have been an advantage were we to do this project again.

But, overall, I am very pleased with how the final animation turned out. It looks and sounds professional and will be an excellent addition to my portfolio.