Animation Evaluation

Well, the animation is finished. Sort of.

I've got the ships moving, lights on, and a good track that follows the storyboard, less the camera angles that weren't possible with my models, and it works. It's on render now, as I don't have the time to add much else. Sadly, if it wasn't for the complications I've had, combined with rushing things for my other module, I probably would've been able to do more; as it stands, I really don't feel cut out for animation.

As I said originally, the textures and the models drag things down, but that was to be expected; I've also had problems with the sheer scale of what I'm doing. As I ensured all of the models were scaled to the specifications I got from Wookiepedia, they compare well against each other - but they're so far apart in the animation that it doesn't matter much. As of the actual ships, they travel at around 20 m/s - meaning they travel a total of almost 15km in the space of the animation. As such, I found it very difficult to keep the ships a sensible distance apart, without one of them being little more than a single pixel blip in the distance or not actually on screen. I only managed to partially rectify this with use of 3ds Max's 'camera lens' function, that allows you to change the field of view angle for the camera; this allowed me to get the main image in view without the model being too small, but meant that the other models would shift in and out of view sporadically. In addition, one of the craft refuses to orientate to the path, and instead constantly faces one direction, regardless of the fact I set it up in exactly the same way as the others.

I also didn't have the time to delve into effects, such as explosions or dynamic lighting, either, which means it's very difficult to tell when any of the ships impact the asteroids (if you're lucky enough to tell they're there) where I was intending to have at least a bright flash to indicate an explosion of some nature. The animation is also woefully short on blaster fire (nil) which eliminates some of the 'Star Wars' aspect. The animation is very bland because of this.

I suppose in future I should be a little less ambitious and a little more hardworking, and not focus all of my efforts into one module (as happened this semester). At least, though, I can say that I'm looking forward to working as a group on games design; at least then you can pass the modelling and animation on to the modellers and animators.