Evaluation Of Group Work

The whole project was very enjoyable and due to good time keeping and hard work we have created a fully working train animation and it looks fantastic.

With the quality and eye for detail Rob & Steve Harwood have created a great looking train and carriage that looks just like the images from the steam museum, and the pictures from the internet.

Steve Muller has created some superbly animated characters and put the train together with procise accuracy which helps the animation come together and look the part.

I have created the tracks and tunnel and animated all of the train movement on the tracks and edited the last parts and collected useful sounds to create the scene.

Overall I feel the project has gone very well and the team has worked extremely hard to create a final piece that looks and sounds brilliant.

The only problem we all faced through this project was that it took up alot of our time and stopped us all being able to focus on anything else but this.

The skills we have all learnt from this project will help all of us when looking for a job and all of our skills have been brought together with great effect and helped us to complete the project in 6 weeks.
If we had more time I think the animation would have been longer details would of been even better and the sounds would have been created with more effort.

Last Render & Editing

The final task that I have had to complete was to create the final animation with a title, sound and all of the animations joint together.

To do this I imported all of the videos into Windows Movie Maker and started by sorting the videos into an order and fade certain areas between them.

Once all of the videos had been put into an order and effects have been added to each part I started adding sound effects and the narration to the clips so it had some details about the train.

The final part I had to do was add the steam train to the end of the clip and then added a Title and Credits part to the video.

Creating Tunnel & Finishing Animation

Now that most of the animation has been created it was time to create somewhere for the train to go, so we decided as a group it would be a good idea to make the train go into a tunnel.

As I had finished 90% of the train animation I took on the task of creating the tunnel and got onto it as quick as I could. Here are the steps I took to create the tunnel.

To start with I created a plane and placed an image of a tunnel on it so I had a starting point for creating a tunnel, I then decided to use the spline technique I had learned from creating my face.
To create the shape of the tunnel I selected the "Line" tool and selected corner and corner for the line types so it made straight lined boxes. I created lines all around the shape of the entrance of the tunnel to build a structured tunnel shape.Once I was happy with the overall shape of the lines / boxes I right clicked on the bottom right hand box and clicked on the option "Converted To Editable Poly".
This made the first corner box turn brown and was became a solid object.
The next step was to make all of the squares become objects, to do this I selected the "Attach" option in the dropdown list on the right hand side of the editable poly I had created.
A list appeared and I selected all of the lines I had created and attached them to the first line object I had created.
This created an arch for the tunnel ready to start editing & extruding.
Before I could start extruding the object I had to select the outside vertexes and weld them together and do the same for the inside vertexes so that it was a joined object instead of being single objects.
Now that I had one whole object it was time to "Extrude" out all of the Polygons, to do this I selected the "Polygon" option on the right then clicked "Extrude" and pulled the objects out to create a 3D shape on screen.
After I had a reasonably good shape to the tunnel I decided to make the sides smoother to do this I selected the whole tunnel and clicked on the tick box "Split" and selected the smooth area and clicked on "3" and it made the whole tunnel smoother. I also used the "Border" tool to select the back end of the tunnel and clicked the "Cap" option to seal the other end of the extruded object.

Now that the shape was right I decided to add a stone texture to it, to do this I searched on the internet to find a suitable stone material, once I had found one that I liked I clicked on the material editor or press "M" on the keyboard, created a new texture and clicked the box next to diffuse and selected "Bitmap" and found the file and attached it. Once I had the material I clicked and dragged it to the object and UVW Mapped the object to make the material fit better.
I decided to try adding a light to the scene to see if the tunnel would look right when rendered.
I tried two different lighting techniques a Target Spotlight and an Omni with shadows, both worked well but the angle of this first image didnt quite work as I want the light to come from behind the train not behind the tunnel.
After a few changes to the angles I found one I was happy with and this is what the light looks like when its rendered.
The final area that needed to be animated was to make the train go into the tunnel, this was created by keyframing the movements again to cover the distance from the tracks left over to reach the tunnel.

Week 9 Meeting

It was my job to document our weekly progression again and show how well the project is going, we have made a few changes to the final ideas for the project which will show the working of the steam train better.

Here are the screenshots of the meeting minutes

Week 9 Presentation

This week it was our time to show the class how well our project was progressing by showing a presentation of our work.
We also showed our current stage of animation too showing the steambot animation and the side and camera videos of the train animation.

Here are some screenshots of the presentation we showed.

Changes to Animation

After watching the video a few time I started to notice a few problems with the animation, the joints were glitching alot and the movements werent smooth enough so I decided to re-animate certain areas of the model.

In the screenshot you can see the item I selected to re-animate, I needed to animate these again as the movement wasnt smooth or right so I tweaked the animation and made it alot smoother and more realistic.
I used the same techniques as before by using the "AutoKey" tool so it keyframed all the movements as I did them. I made sure that the main bolt was always in the centre of the coupling rod joiner.I also selected the joining bar and re-animated all of the points for it so that it moved properly with the bar below it.
I used the select and rotate tool to make sure the movements were fluid and smooth.
Here are some screenshots in parts of the animation to show the changes.

The bar moves up to above the framework.
It then goes straight upright.
It goes all the way back round to the left like a pendulum, back to the starting point.
The next part that I decided to add was the train tracks movement.

I used the "AutoKey" technique again as it makes keyframing alot quicker and saves alot of time in the long run. I started by making part of the track appear under the train wheels and undercarriage and the next section of track appears below the track so that it can raise up.
I then moved the train track upwards to be inline with the starting track at the 15th frame, I then started moving the tracks backwards like a rolling road, so that all of the animation from the train movement wasnt destroyed by moving forwards.

I did try to make it all move forwards but it kept glitching and messed up all of the animation so I decided to try a rolling road technique, I call it rolling tracks!I then keyframed every 15th frame so that it would move at the same pace as the wheels.
This technique seemed to make it look like the train was moving and was pleasantly suprised with the results.After I had animated the tracks to the point that the wheels werent moving anymore I decided to add a camera to show the movement of the tracks.

I selected the "target camera" and aimed it at the back of the train, then I used the "AutoKey" to make the camera move positions half way through the animation to show the side of the train movement.

Here is the new side animation showing the changes made to the movement of the wheels and bars.

Here is the video using a camera to show the track animation

Week 8 - Starting Animation

The first part of animation is one of the hardest but once it has been completed for the first time it can be looped and sped up or slowed down to make the effect more realistic.

The undercarriage and wheels are the most important part of the animation as there are so many moving parts to it but the main area I focused on was the coupling rod and bar and modelled the animation around this part.Firstly I select the "AutoKey" box so that any movement is recorded onto the timeline at the bottom of the screen. The main idea I had to make the movement smoother and more effective was to create each autokey on the 15th frame so it starts at 0 then 15, 30, 45, 60, 75, 90 etc.

To begin animating I selected the main parts such as the coupling rod, the joiners such as the front rod and the back rod that connects all of the wheels together. I then moved them in a circular motion around the wheel trying to keep the same area of the wheel as the beggining of the animation. As I moved the main coupling rod I rotated it slightly so that it has the effect of movement.
I repeated the same technique to make a full 360 movement around the wheel with the effect of the coupling rod moving with it.
Once I had made the full 360 movement around the wheel it was time to copy the keyframes and paste them into the timeline ahead of the point so that it was a repeated motion like a loop.
The next step was to make the attached rod move with the coupling rod connector, this was very time consuming as when I keyframed every 15th the same as the coupling rod, and all the connectors but it kept glitching and kept going out of the area it should have been so I had to individually keyframe sections when it did glitch so that it was a smooth movement from start to finish. As the screenshot shows there are alot of keyframes for it!
The next step was to animate all of the joiners and connections from the rods already animated, this made it easier to animate as all of the other sections had been animated so I could move them using the select and rotate tool and move the points to move with the previous animations.
The pistons were quite difficult to manipulate but once I had watched some videos it was easier to animate as it just moves from left to right down the slider. To animate I moved it by the same technique as before on every 15th frame so that the movement was smooth and in time with the other movements.
The last section of main movement was the bars around the piston the top moves up and down so this was easy to animate using the rotate tool I moved them every 15th frame.
The same was for the right bar as it moved left and right I had to select and move it and select and rotate it to make the positions right on every 15th frame.
The bottom bar moves to the left and right and up and down as it connects to the middle and right bars. To animate them I selected each 15th frame and moved them in the directions they needed to move to connect to the right and middle bars.
The last bar to animate was the middle one that joins onto the piston and the bottom bar, this was easy to animate as all it needed to do was follow the movement of the piston and rotate to connect to the bottom bar.
The last area that needed animating was the wheels, to do this I select all of the wheels and on each 15th frame I selected and rotated to the angle of 30 degrees so that it moved at the same rate of the bars and rods.
Here is the animation so far, there are a few little glitches on the movement of the rod above the coupling rod, this should hopefully be changed by thursdays presentation so that I can show a good animated train.