Final Outcome and My Thoughts

My Final Movie


My 30 Second Movie from Matt Evans on Vimeo.

My Thoughts

Personally I am not very pleased with the outcome. While having so many frustrating issues towards the end I found myself rushing to get parts completed. While I am not fond of my animation I am really proud of all my final models. I took an enormous amount of time refining and making them look great. I believe having them become corrupt really brought my willingness to perfect the animation lower.

From this I have learnt that I should not wait to be told when to start each section of a project. Although helpful with giving out tasks, everyone works at their own pace and has their own work completion threshold. Waiting until the final 4 weeks was not enough time to create what I truly wanted. Also my planning was not up to scratch as I had planned to have many more scenes than actually shown. If I had spent more time planning I could have known how long to have each scene in and what was possible with out 30 second time-limit.

Houston We Have Another Problem

While trying to complete my animation in Maya 2016, I have never had so many issues with files and programs crashing and models messing up.

Issue #1:

Installing Maya at home.

As a student you can get Maya really easily as an installer, Just get to correct tab, select the correct OS, the version you desire and the language. At this point you can install properly using an installer. But every time I attempted to install using the installer it would always fail installing three different sections. I had even attempted getting the installer again after getting rid of the first version and trying on a different PC all together. But to no victory.



Issue #2:

Corrupted Scenes.

After creating three or four different .avi scenes ready for hand-in. I thought I would have a break and come back to it. Once I returned Maya could not recognise the file type and loaded nothing on to the scene.









Issue #3:

Corrupted Models.

Models saved as a .FBX (exported maya model) was not the correct file type and were wiped.
Models could not be exported as a .FBX later into the course.
Models saved as .MB (maya binaries) were not supported and were wiped. Meaning I had to re-texture my X-Wing model.
While trying to import my Imperial Star Destroyer and my TIE Fighter it would just change the scale of my Star Destroyed without a visible TIE-Fighter model.

Issue #4:

Corrupt .avi

We had to create our animation using .avi file format. So once I had completed one of my scenes and already previously viewed the file I had carried on creating more scenes. Later on my .avi file had been corrupted and wiped so the scene was completely lost.

Texturing TIE-Fighter

Using the Blinn material made the TIE-Fighter shiny compared to the default texture used. Once completed I moved to the wing. I wanted to wing to look as detailed as possible as it can potentially be the only thing viewed by the audience from the right angle.
This was achieved by using bump-mapping. Upon searching for a TIE-Fighter wing on Google I saved one and placed it on my model.

But viewing the material as the wing on the right left the metal rods coming from the centre to the edge; where I already have my own model rods created. So using Photoshop and the stamp tool I removed the rods and therefore just left the rough looking dark faces.

Bringing me to the lower image that I had edited. Although the centre was left and you can see where the stamp tool merged each section. This was no issue as I have a model over the top of the centre and the edges of each section.