E4 Stinger

I found this project on the whole very enjoyable as a whole, this is mainly due to the amount of time we had to do it in, which made the work load much more bearable. This meant I could spend more time editing, and setting up my ideas to make a quality final animation. However because the project ran for 7 months it was hard to keep a good structure with what I was doing, as I had other modules and briefs to do during the 7 months. Even though I wrote up a good time plan, I dint manage to follow it to the last detail. I think this was down to the fact I had so long to complete my animation and my ideas kept changing, or I found things to improve on. This meant that the ideas I was currently working took priority over what was down on the time sheet. Overall I don’t think this affected the quality of my animation as I still completed all the tasks I had set myself at the beginning of the project, albeit at a different time.

A lot of this project was learning new methods and techniques especially when it came to setting up the scene and environment. During the making of the main wall, I could get the wall to look right. I wanted the graffiti on the wall to look real, so I tried applying a bump map to it to try and make the texture of the wall come through, but this didn’t work. The method I was currently using meant I had to layer up each plane with a different bit of graffiti on, this was making the wall look to jumbled up and littering the materials browser, so not only was it not working aesthetically it was not working practically. I decided to create the wall texture as a whole on Photoshop. This meant layering up the different graffiti on the wall before importing it into cinema 4d. this also meant that I could use the bump map of the wall without any graffiti on make the texture come through the graffiti making it look more realistic. It also solved the problem of the material browser being clogged up, because now the wall only required on texture instead of 15 or so.

Due to the nature of this project, I could look at it a month down the line and decide I want to change something, this was the case when I decided to change the scene and try and add more objects to it, as I thought it looked too ‘flat’. To help add depth to it I modelled 2 buildings to sit around the main wall, I also added little things like lamp posts and an air conditioning unit. Little objects like this made the scene look more realistic and fuller. After a Crit it was suggested I add more grime to the walls, this was a good method of hiding the joins between the walls and the floor, it also added to the theme of a grimy urban area.

My strengths for this project was certainly the 3D modelling as I found it quite fun to make the various items and props. I also enjoyed putting the tutorials on mograph to the test especially when it came to making the E4 logos fall. There was a lot of problem solving involved trying to make that part of the scene. This was mainly due to the fact I couldn’t control the time at which the logos fell. I tried moving them up further to delay the time it took for them to land. But by the time they did land it wasn’t in the desired place. I got around this by making a new scene just as the last scene stopped. This meant I would have to edit the two scenes together but this was a very good solution to the problem as it didn’t add that much extra time on the post production side of things. There was also a few problems with the amount of logos that dropped, I couldn’t seem to have enough fall. I had currently used the grid layout with the mograph clone tool. So I decided to change it to linier, this meant the logos would appear in a vertical line instead. I then copied about 6 lines worth of E4 logos next to each other, they all dropped at the same time improving the amount of logos and resulting in a much better effect and end result.

Overall this project didn’t throw to many problems at me and I found the work load extremely manageable. I even managed to complete another live brief during the time of this one. However I do think I could have improved on my time management. If I stuck to a good strict time plan I think I could have finished this project a lot earlier. On the other had though because this project ran for so long it allowed my ideas to evolve and improve in to what I think is a very good animation as it combines good 3D modelling with pose to pose animation. The next thing for me to do know is upload it to the E4 stinger website and hope for the best.