Evaluation

The final group animation managed to convey the concept that we had. I think the flow of animation is very good. First exterior is exposed followed by insides of the guildhall and then the close up of the interior.
The trip to Finchigfield was very useful as I got to see how Guildhall actually looks. The architecture drawings were great help for modelling. I have spent great amount of time analyzing the plans to understand how Guildhall will look in the future. I have tried to make Guildhall look as realistic as I can do at this time.

I have learned some new animating techniques. My favourite was biped walk. And this was just a small part of what bipeds can do. Bipeds are the part that I want to look into deeper as next semester I will have character animation module.
As for my next project I would try to be more organized during the production process cause its hard at the end to track down the in between creation parts. I also should focus more on pre-production stage and layout clear final concepts that are meant to be visualized. The first animation scene was made as intended. However, I have not thought about distinguishing the exterior walls in 1st scene. The same material for both present and future walls makes slice animation less noticeable. The second scene was time consuming because I had to put all inside walls in the place as mentioned personal organisation problems. The text describing rooms is not vivid, does not stand out. I would think trough how to make text more distinct from the environment. My exterior scenes could be improved with better lighting set-up instead of using just a skylight.

Titles

The text was created using text creation from splines menu. Then text was changed to editable poly. Then polygons were extruded. First title sequence has short animation with material morph and text coming to the view. Camera is static and scene has a light in it.

The elements of Interior model were detached to new objects. This way I managed to apply different material to different letters groups.

Making Space redevelopment scene

First I had to set up scenes by importing earlier made inside wall to the exterior file. Then it took a lot of time to actually place everything in right position to be ready for animating. The concept of the scene is to show how inside space of the Guildhall is going to change after restoration. Present walls are replaced by new ones. To do the transition opacity material option was used. Each wall was applied with its own wall material. Then with autokey on I changed opacity setting from 0 to 100 and to make new wall visible and from 100 to 0 to make old wall invisible. This approach was used for all walls in the scene.

Eventually I encountered a problem when trying to change opacity of present stairs and wall connected to it. This model has numerous material applied to it. Therefore I was suggested to use visibility option in object properties window. It worked perfect and was great replacement for material opacity animation as it did not require to create separate material for each object. Visibility was also used for text boxes. Text was created using text creation tool from splines menu. Then text was converted to editable poly and polygons were extrude to give shape and depth. Then as usual it was applied with uwp map and material.

As mentioned in first scene Morph tool application to material is a new thing to me. I used this material morph approach in this scene for every floor material change. I found material morphs great to switch from one object material to other one. I only changed between two materials but I noticed that various amount of materials can be used for morphing.

The camera used for a scene is Free Camera. It was animated with autokey on and moving camera in horizontal position and eventually moving towards the Guildhall for the ground floor part.

The animation switch from 1st floor view to ground floor is unnoticeable. That was made after animating everything op 1st floor. Then everything was grouped together and cut off using slice tool which worked well for this project.

Test animation was rendered to check how the animation is working out. Apparently 20 second animation that was indented originally for this scene appeared to be to short. The animation was occurring to fast making it hard to recognize what is happening. Therefore, I encountered the problem of extending 500 frame animation to 1000. First I thought that only way to do this will be by inserting more frames and then moving keyframes of every single animated object. I knew that this process would take a lot of time so I was looked for a way around it. I looked closer what time configuration has to offer and for my luck I found the Re-scale time option. This allowed me to double frame count with keyframes extended along 1000 frames aswell. It id not work perfect, as I still had to go trough timeline and adjust keyframes for some animations, but it definitely saved me great amount of time by getting most of animation to the indented places.

Setting Up the Rooms for Interior scenes

I set up the Room scenes for other group member to animate and refurbish. The scenes were made using models from the exterior scenes and previous files that include walls of the inside of the Guildhall. The exterior scene models were edited to divide the model into 3 different sections. First section is the Library room. Second section is Museum and shop rooms. Third one is the 1st floor rooms. Most of models have been already created earlier. The models were filled with vertical beams as it is at a present Guildhall.

StoryBoard

The storyboard for first two scenes that I am going to create.

First scene "Exterior":

The title sequence to introduce the project. First fade in to text "Finchingfield Guildhall" in black background. Then text "Restoration" is brought to the scene. The "Finchingfield Guildhall" text material morph to the "Restoration" text material. This material change for old to new is suppose to present the renovation process.

After the title sequence video fades in to exterior of the Guildhall. Camera shows the South wall of the Guildhall which is next to the road. Throughout the sequence camera pans around the building to the ground crosswalk. While panning old/present exterior walls are cut off and covered with new/future exterior walls. The cut off is also made for the new glazed walkway of the North building side. The sequence is reinforced with the text presenting present and after effect.

Second scene "Space Redevelopment":

Introduced with title sequence. Title text "Space Redevelopment". Letters of the text are switch to present changing space.

The scene fade in to the top view of the Guildhall. The roof is removed and the insides of the building can be seen by the viewer. Camera pans from left to right throughout the 1st floor. During panning old/present guildhall inside walls fade out. Old walls are replaced by new/future walls. Same process happens with stairs, floors and outside walkway. The 1st floor is sliced/removed from the view after is shown unveiling the ground floor. Camera zooms in and pans from right to left. The same process of changing wall and floors happens during the sequence.

Third Scene "Interior-Library":

Scene is introduced with title sequence. Title text says "Interior". Each letter has different materials.

The presentation of the scene includes fire in fireplace and view of the library with person picking up the book. The final scene presentation to be made by Martin.

Animation Biped new technique

I wanted to include a person walking around the Guildhall in the exterior scene. For this I decided to use biped. The free person model was taken from 3D World magazine disk. First I imported the human model to the scene. then I created biped to match the size of the mesh. I had to align the biped to match mesh as precise as possible. Adjusting biped to the mesh was done in biped figure mode from motion panel.

The physique modifier was applied to the mesh. Then in modifier sub-menu envelope was chosen. Each envelope of all biped parts where adjusted in size to cover the mesh. After this character is ready to be animated.

in Biped motion panel i choose Footsteps mode. Footsteps were created using Create multiple footsteps: walk option. Then I selected create keys for inactive footsteps option which inserted footsteps to the scene.

Then I moved and rotated number of footsteps to match with the Guildhall floor environment.

Modelling exterior scene

For the scene background I created a meadow. First I created a plane. Then converted it to editable poly. Using soft selection i created few bumps in the plane.

Here is the glazed walkway that is going to be build during renovation. The structure was made using box creation tool. Then box was converted to editable poly. The shape was finished using edge connection and extrusion tools. The glass was made using simple planes.

For the overall environment i created a sphere. Then I applied a texture from internet which was made for sphere skies.

Most of the materials used in the scene were images I took during finchingfield trip. Almost all materials include diffuse and bump maps which I created in Adobe photoshop. Other half of materials were taken from internet. The wooden material below was taken by me and for second path material image was taken from internet and bump map was created by me.