Evaluating my Animation

From the beginning of the planning I've had a pretty good idea of what my animation was going to do. I wanted to make use of as many tools, modifiers, shapes, objects and different types of animation as possible. My original plan was to shoot four scenes, those scenes being intro, shooting barrels, shooting statue, and finally shooting human. I wanted to show off how different modifiers and forces impact the environment during the crossbow shooting, such as wind blowing the crossbow bolt slightly off course, but unfortunately I wasn't able to apply the force to anything except cloth, which I used for the flags and banners in the animation. Another thing that changed slightly was the scenes. I took out the statue scene and replaced it with an additional barrel scene. I did this because unless I built the statue out of individual elements, I wasn't able to create a smashing effect, and the animation wouldn't have looked as good without it. I also changed the last scene alot due to restructions with the bipod and rigid body modifier.

Scene One
I managed to get this scene almost exactly how I wanted it to be. The scene served as an introduction to the animation, and took us through the castle and into the courtyard where the crossbow was in place. I did manage to get a human modeled and animated, and during this scene you can see him waving at the camera at it passed, and he tracks the camera with his head. I animated the human using the auto key for movement of the arms, fingers and head of the skeleton, and for the camera I used a free camera and manually set keys for each movement and rotation from start to finish.

Scene Two
Scene two overlaps on what I wanted scene one to originally have at the end. I changed the text overlay from 'wind speed & direction and durability of object' to 'giant crossbow vs. object' as I wasn't able to get the wind force to have any impact on any non-cloth item in the scene. I was however able to make the barrel explode when shot at by the crossbow bolt, as opposed to the barrel just being hit and falling over. I did this by using one of my old barrel rigs where I had set up a dynamic rigid body to each individual part of the barrel, and hadn't attatched the barrel together. I set it up in a kinetic state up until the frame where the bolt is about to hit it, when it transforms into a dynamic state and exploding. I found this way to be effective for the purpose of my animation, however the barrel only explodes because of the kinetic grip that it has until a certain frame, and not because of the crossbow bolt hitting it. Another use I found for using kinetic until a certain frame was with the crossbow bolt itself. If it started off in dynamic it would just fall through the crossbow and not go anywhere, as the crossbow itself did not have a rigid body defined. I set it as kinetic until the point where it had been shot out of the crossbow and was moving by itself towards the barrel. Another couple of objects I had to attach a rigid body to was the ground plane and the wall behind the barrel, and these are both static and with collisions enabled so that dynamic objects do not pass through them.

I also decided to use two camera shots for showing the explosion, as it adds a different perspective and for the second camera I used a directional camera which was focused on the barrel.

Scene Three
This scene is similar to scene two, except this time multiple barrels are being shot at as opposed to just one.I decided to stick with only one barrel exploding - the one that is hit by the crossbow bolt - as unfortunately I wasn't able to animate an object that had a kinetic rigid body on, nor was I able to make the barrel shatter by itself as it hit the ground as a dynamic rigid body, which is a shame because if I could have done that, I could have applied that same technique to all of the barrels instead of having to make the exploding barrel 'self-explode.' An additional technique I used in this scene is panning the second camera around as the barrels are falling down around it. Originally, there was a barrel that lands right in front of where the camera stops, but when I rendered the animation something must have changed as it came out slightly differently and the barrels didn't fall in the exactly same way.


Scene Four
Scene four is the shortest scene of all and only really serves as an outro to the animation. I tried to make it so the human got hit by the crossbow but I didn't really know how rigid bodies worked on skeletons and when I attempted to enable a dynamic rigid body, either nothing happened or the model teleported half way across the scene for unknown reasons. Due to this, I changed this scene so that it bought some closure to the animation by carrying on from where scene four left off, and flying the camera back past the crossbow and into the wall behind it.

When rendering, I wanted to render the animation in 720p (1280x720) so that it would be high definition and the animation would be more visable, however when setting the output to the correct resolution, it still rendered as 720x480. I tried to fix this before rendering out my final animation but I wasn't able to find anywhere with any information on it. Therefore the scenes are rendered in 720x480 at 25 frames per second.

I decided to add a sound track over the top of my animation to add more emotion and tension to the footage. I wanted to use something without vocals and I decided on using a track called Wax Figures by 65daysofstatic. I edited the track in Audacity to lower the volume and slow down the track slightly, and imported everything into Adobe Premier before re-rendering.

Overall I'm proud of what I've produced even though alot of what I had decided upon being in the animation didn't happen. I've learnt alot about 3d modelling in general and have got good use out of both Autodesk 3DS Max 2011 and 2012. I've enjoyed the module and will use what I've learnt during the course of the semester in future projects.