Digital Media Level 3 - Spectre, Part 10

This is the last blog entry before the animation is put together and it has been done late because I forgot to add a few things before hand in. First of all, the music included is made up of various pieces of different tracks done by an artist called Masami Ueda and edited with audacity so they do not sound similar. In order to do this I have sped up the tracks, altered the pitch and tempo and added filters where necessary. The end result will be necessary to add atmosphere to the piece and build the tension included with the story.

Digital Media Level 3 - Spectre, Part 9

The animation design has been completed and the rendering has been finished. The audio and sound effects have also been completed. All that's left to do is put it all together. In order to do this I will be using windows movie maker as I am experienced in using this program. Putting the sound effects, speech and music in will have to be done in three stages as this program only allows on audio overlay at a time. This does slow the progress down but it not to a great extent. Below is the animation without the audio added.

Spectre - Without Audio

Digital Media Level 3 - Spectre, Part 8

The animation is coming together well. Rendering is taking a little longer than I would have thought but it can't be helped. I seem to have over come all the problems that have hindered my progress except for one; after assigning a walk cycle to either of the bipeds, I am still unable to input keyframes after the last footstep and I have been unable to find any help on the subject. In order to get around this problem, I have been forced to render the walk cycle and then animate the movement of the arms and head as a separate animation clip. This is time consuming but it cannot be helped. Either way the transition between clips should be seemless. Below, is one of the scenes that have been rendered.

Introduction

Scene 2

Digital Media Level 3 - Spectre, Part 7

Encountered a problem with the character modelling; the materials that are assigned to the different selections (e.g. eyes, hair...etc) wont stay assigned to the objects they are placed. This only occurs when the objects are linked/connected to the biped head. So far this has only occured to one of the character models.

As of yet, I haven't been able to find a way to solve this problem and will have to leave the selections as they are. The only thing I can do to cover this is manipulate the story so that the eyes of one of the characters is hidden from view. This shouldn't be too difficult seeing as most of the animation takes place in the dark.

I have currently begun rendering the first scene, which takes place from a distance anyway so the abnormalities in colour wont be noticable. The only other problem faced during the production of this is the slow rendering time of the animation, which could become a problem if any other problems occur.

Below is an image from the opening scene, which is in near complete darkness but can still be viewed due to the flash light animations;

Front Drive of Mansion at Night