Evaluation of group work

In our group, group meeting was held about once a week in average. During a group meeting, basically we just demonstrated what we had done in the past week and made sure everything had been carried out gradually and successfully.  As we agreed in a group at the beginning, each of us would carry one scene to work along, and generally speaking, each of us has done fairly equal amount for this group work. 

Henry had been working with his part of animation, plus the sound effect and connection work for the final movie;

Matthew created the outer environment of the house for the beginning and ending part besides his own radio modeling;

Regarding my contribution, apart from attending group meetings regularly, I also basically produced my own radio animation with an emphasis of the functionality of each button (but didn't have enough time to put all sound effects for the buttons). Also, I’ve created a room template with some furniture as well as the animation throughout the room.

Moreover, I tried to do some research work on radio history at the beginning in order to obtain more information how radio has been produced; also, the research of how to produce an attractive radio animation, which are the ads links of radio transformation posted earlier, after viewing the existing videos, we had a clearer clue of what we were going to do specifically for the radio animation. 

From my point of view, I like the radio that I’ve created the most, which I spent most of the time on it, in particular, the appearance, materials and textures. It looks so stylish and similar to the real Bush TR-82 model. Also, the button animation of the radio itself is cool!  Regarding to the group member’s work, I like the idea of showing a landscape of Essex at the end from the top view as well as the sound effect when playing the radios.

I believe that everyone has done a good job and personally, I have enjoyed very much in this module, I am proud that I have mastered new skills besides the ones from the lectures, which encourage me a lot. Last but not the least, it was really enjoyable to see the fellow students’ work in the classroom at the end of the semester, I think , to certain extent , we are all inspired with new ideas for our future work on 3d. Thanks to the lecturer's hard teaching of the lecturer and amazing video shows…

Demonstration of new skills

The new skills I’ve mastered are:

1. Use Loft to create an innovative shape for an object, such as the examples of curtains and the table, and this method is based on creating a Spline; also, the way how to make curve by using NURBS Curves in regard to the curtain;

2. Personally speaking, Lathe modifier works similar to Loft, but it is still - quite new for me to try. The examples are of the coffee cup and the plate;

3. When I tried to created a room, I didn't realize that I could use all the existing tools to do it – no need to create a box to mimic space of a room, I can just use ‘Wall’, or ‘Window’, or ‘Door’ to automatically create them, moreover, there are plenty of functions, for instance, how to control the extent of open the door and window.

4 Use Boolean to embed one object to another is appealing for me too, take the radio buttons as examples, they look perfect;

5. In addition, some material assignment settings are new yet useful for me to learn, such as the material effect of glass, liquid, metal, etc.

Final stage work

Lighting experiment before rendering

It is necessary to experiment with different lighting settings before take the whole scene to render. Also, it is very important to know what kind of lighting effect we want to have in each scene. For our group, we decided to use Omni for the room, but Skylight for the outer environment.  What are shown below are the experiment of the lighting settings with Omni.

 

Therefore, after having been experimenting with various setting of the Omni light, a decision of only one Omni light has been made with the following details, which looks more realistic and is currently applied as final resolution for the scene.

The animation

As is agreed in the group, each of has one scene of animation to produce and I am working basically for the second scene, the animation of the 50’s radio. The animation was made on the basis of the timeline by changing the lens or the target of camera, or by repositioning the object in the scene.

The overall timeline in scene two goes like below:

Outside of the house--> move camera towards the window--> open the window--> camera goes into the room (show all the objects in the room) -->(start to give a close-up to each object) camera moves towards the picture frame --> close-up to chair, coffee and egg --> eventually close-up to the radio

The main part of the animation is to show the functionality of the radio, which starts with the play button, and then the pause-play button, and then the volume-controller button, and then channel-controller button, with a stop button at the end to stop the music in the backdrop. Therefore, the sound effect plays a significant role in the radio animation and makes the animation livelier!

The animation for scene two is shown below: