Project

Introduction

    First of all we would like to say that despite all the difficulties we have encountered, we really enjoyed doing our animation project. Our main purpose was to understand different aspects which are involved in animation creation. Here we talk about character modeling, character animation, working with camera, lights etc. Therefore in order to feel the whole complexity of animation creation process we started from creation of our own characters. After characters were created we started working on there animation. After animation was finished we worked with lights and then we spent a lot of time fixing mistakes.

Character creation

    Character creation is not an easy process because you have to take into consideration how it will look like and how it will be animated later. Most important lesson we learned from designing of our characters is: poor design of your characters leads to even more poor animation. Fortunately, we have realized that in the very beginning just after we started to animate them. After a couple of changes in our characters we achieved much better results.

    One area of the animation which we really have to use our imagination is the depth of the character, the length from front to back, since the template simply don't give out that information, but only the the look of the front and back.

About the characters

    We have made two characters. First is bio paladin, but we simply called it biopala for short. Paladin is a holy warrior wearing heavy armor fighting undead monsters using big hammer and forces of the light. It is a very popular character in many online video games and we like it a lot. The name pala is used by many players in these games when they talk about paladins. That's why we call it pala. Since our animation takes place in far far future, instead of human warrior, paladin is a robot.

    Our second character is another robot which is called Gundam "Clone". Name of that robot is a result of our imagination and we can't really explain why we picked it. Idea and design of that robot was taken from one old(not really that old) Japanese cartoon. However, the Gundam "Clone" and the template it is based on are not totally identical. Gundam "Clone" has a protection shield with built-in power gun as its weapon.

Animation

    Now we would like to explain what is actually happening in our animation. First each robot is doing its own introduction which is about 10 seconds long for bio-pala, and 5 for Gundam "Clone". Each of us made introduction for his own robot. During introduction stage robots make different moves, dances and jumps. After that they start to fight with each other. First biopala attacks Gundam "Clone" by running close to it and hitting him hard with his hammer. Gundam "Clone" blocks attack with its shield but palas strike is very hard so Gundam "Clone" falls on the ground. After bio-pala tries to finish his enemy but he fails as Gundam "Clone" flies up and stays in the air where pala can't reach him. In the end of animation, Gundam "Clone" shoots pala from his power gun and supposely wins the battle(since the deadly blow wasn't shown.

    All actions take place in space on the asteroid. First we wanted to do a complex background scene with mountains and trees but unfortunately Poser is amazing in making bone animation but it doesn't provide any tools for creation of the background scenes. Bryce is program which can be used to solve that problem but we did not have enough time to learn it. Main thing which we learned from creation of our animation is that it takes a lot of time and effort and you should start doing it as early as possible. Otherwise you will end up sleeping when you can't work anymore. Another important thing to know is that rendering takes a lot of time too. Our animation is about 45 seconds long, excluding the text, and it took us about 8 hours to render it in Poser.

The scene

    The scene was created by putting the robots in a cube, and cover the inside of the cube with textures, each side of the cube was textured with a different image. The space,other than the asteroid surface, was simply a image that was located in the NASA site, and which we simply into 5 parts(with a bit of tweaking for the top face, and mapped them to each side of the cube respectively, since we build the cube face by face in Poser. And as for the side that contains the asteroid surface, more work was required. Two images were used, one as texture, and the other as the displacement mape. First, we find a picture of an asteroid on the internet, then by following a tutorial to make the moon surfaces in photoshop, we modified the surface of the asteroid to become more rough, and get rid of the exising stars. So the only thing that we used from this image is the shape of the asteroid. Next, the resulted image was duplicated and used as displacement map, while the other goes through a process to be added stars onto it, so when this image is used as texture, it will have stars. The "starring" process was followed from another photoshop tutorial we find online, but it wasn't followed word for word since it crowed the sky with too many stars.

    The seperation of the texture map and displacement map was necessary, since we don't want the asteroid surface to look flat, and we don't want the stars to be displaced.

Conclusion

    We find this graphics course was very valuable and challenging. It was a lot of hard work but we really enjoyed it. First of all we would like to say that creation of animation is a very long process so when you start doing it for the first time try to start early so you have extra time. If you make your own characters think in advance about how you will animate them, later this will save you a lot of time. Another thing is that spend enough time to learn the software you are going to use. Don't just go through one tutorial, take your time.
    Doing animation is creative interesting and challenging process. It takes a lot of hard work patients and time. While you are doing you work there is one thing which we think is important to remember: If something doesn't work out don't get frustrated don't start blaming everybody and everything including your computer and software you are using just take a break and then continue working and don't give up.