Sunday, 10 May 2009
Thursday, 9 April 2009
The Deadline! Today
So the film is finally done and clocking in at only 4 minutes 30 seconds most people would be thinking that not a lot of effort goes into the movie, so here are a few figures to help the scale of the project be noted.
In chronological order from April 2008 -
Started working on the project ideas and a general design brief, we knew that it was going to be something to do with formula one cars that would be driving around a track possibly racing.
I started modelling the F1 car as we knew it would be needed. oddly starting from the front wing seemed to be the easiest place to start.
May - July
Research continued on the brief trying to find a purpose or cause to have the two cars racing, nothing came up.
The car continued to develop along with my Maya skills making the work a lot easier and quicker.
The FIA announce the change from Silverstone to Donington for the British GP in 2010. This suddenly presents us with an awesome opportunity to give our video a purpose. although the idea of using Donington was immensely optimistic it was still possible. Having never modelled an environment with my limited university teaching i started research on how to go about it whilst still finishing off the car.
August - September
The car model is complete and now the hard part of trying to rig the model so it can be animated. This took far longer than initially thought as I had to research everything before anything could be done figuring it out for myself as I went along.
The first draft of the rigged car was made, it looked terrible when animated.
We started to get in contact with Donington in the hope of getting their support. Communication between us and them was very long and sometimes we would wait as long as a month to hear a reply.
October
New university year starts our 3rd and final year.
Donington give us the go ahead along with a few design drawings of their plans in the rebuild. I also manage to find a huge pack of their submitted planning permission forms on their local council website. These forms detailed every modification and rebuild from small things like the types of apex's right up to the designs of each grandstand and major buildings like the new pit complex.
With this new information and permission to use the track not using the track would have been a crime.
I start making the track using their planning permission forms as a close guide to follow.
Jon starts making the buildings to fit onto the track.
I continue with the cars and re rig them using a royalty free rig as a base and modding it to accommodate the f1 car instead of the old Chrysler it came attached to.
November
The cars are still being rigged in a very long tedious process, I switch between the car, track and the texturing of the cars to try and keep my sanity. none of these tasks came naturally to me and so much more research was being done to keep up with each job.
Jon finishes half of the buildings
December
The cars are textured and look awesome
The new rig is modded to include suspension, driver controls, fixed the tyre rolling speeds as best I could and also spent a lot of time researching ways of animating it properly. It looks awesome
The track is finished and looks rubbish, dodgy road edges, impossible to lay proper textures on the surface and a real lack of aesthetic appeal to the track. The day after boxing day I start work on redoing it, this time with new help after much foraging on the internet for a new way of constructing it.
Jon Finishes the buildings but we decide it'd be quicker if i did the texturing.
Jon starts on the DVD menus, sound effects, music, and post processing work.
January
Continue working on the new track layout, its prooving much better looking and far more efficient to construct and texture once i've got the hang of it.
I start working on the storyboarding, This would normally have been an immediate job were this an animation involving characters and different sets however at this point we knew that the track and the cars were the most important and needed the longest time to work on. once these were constructed everything would come easily.
With the new story board completed we knew that we needed two settings, the track and a garage. this is a fairly simple setting and jon managed to set it up fairly quickly.
February
The track is now finished with only one or two bugs to work through, the lighting is put together after a fair amount of research and then the final textures are added to finish it off.
The garage scene lighting is far more difficult as this requires the use of the mental ray renderer to give a far higher quality to the shots making them almost lifelike. James Parsons is owed many thanks for really pushing me to keep working on those scenes and get the looking as good as they can get.
Thanks to a lot of research i'd managed to modify the car rigs to add a lot of flexibility in animating them, this meant i could simply draw a line which i wanted the car to travel on and it would not only follow it but turn the wheels with the corners as well. this meant that the animation which had been sheduled to take 6 weeks ( a shedule which we were now behind ) infact only took 2 afternoons. which catapulted us straight into the rendering phase. as we were now so far ahead of the schedule i decided to put extra time into rendering research. with pleanty of time to do test renders and work out the absolute best settings it saved us many many hours of rendering when the time came.
March
With just over a month to go it was crunch time. me and jon started to spend more and more time in the labs at uni and by mid march with 3 weeks to go we had already rendered out all the footage we required to make the movie. We could have stopped there and handed it in.
instead however i decided that with all that spare time, fully created and finalised assets, light rigs, render settings, animations and with labs of over 30 computers not being used during the night. It was almost unspoken when we suddenly started turning ourselves nocturnal in order to maximise the oppertunity we had infront of us. with 15 scenes already banked in there were only gains that could be made from working more.
In the last 2 weeks of march every single aspect of the movie was overhauled, perfected and re rendered, new angles were added and new moments were added into the script. Slow motion shots, rethinks of the plot, new effects were all added to the scenes as the presure started to build we just kept putting more and more time and effort in.
Jon finished the first drafts of the DVD menu and its extra features including slideshows and interactive maps.
April 2009.
the university decided to give the year group an extension of two days to make up for the terrible network problems we'd been having all year. fortunatly we didn't need this but we made sure we capitalised on it. with the extra 2 days as backup we played to the original deadline but increased our workload knowing if it all went wrong we'd still be safe. by the time we were done of the original 15 scenes rendered for the final product a month before the deadline, only 2 and a half of those scenes were actually used. over 50 extra shots and angles were rendered and roughly 30 of them made the final cut. this allowed us to be very choosy with the final edit, perfecting it as we went along.
Thursday 9th April 2009 - The New official deadline
I've spent the last two days relaxing with my girlfriend eating good food at a restaurant and sitting in the sun whilst jons been back home to visit family and gone out celebrating.
Over the course of the project we've managed to accumulate:
- 28,000 rendered images
- Over 700 Hours of rendering
- 14 minutes of usable footage
- 8 drafts of the final movie
- 6 DVD's with Donington DVD sleeves, designed by jon
- 2 styles of posters designed by jon
- 2 rigged textured and fully animatable F1 cars
- 1 Scale model of the Donington Park Track as it will be in 2010 ( you can put a satelite image over the top of it and it fits perfectly.
And finally 1 complete final year project handed in 2 days before the deadline with two incredibly worn out student now relaxing knowing that they've produced something to the best of their abilities. I can't wait for the marks
In chronological order from April 2008 -
Started working on the project ideas and a general design brief, we knew that it was going to be something to do with formula one cars that would be driving around a track possibly racing.
I started modelling the F1 car as we knew it would be needed. oddly starting from the front wing seemed to be the easiest place to start.
May - July
Research continued on the brief trying to find a purpose or cause to have the two cars racing, nothing came up.
The car continued to develop along with my Maya skills making the work a lot easier and quicker.
The FIA announce the change from Silverstone to Donington for the British GP in 2010. This suddenly presents us with an awesome opportunity to give our video a purpose. although the idea of using Donington was immensely optimistic it was still possible. Having never modelled an environment with my limited university teaching i started research on how to go about it whilst still finishing off the car.
August - September
The car model is complete and now the hard part of trying to rig the model so it can be animated. This took far longer than initially thought as I had to research everything before anything could be done figuring it out for myself as I went along.
The first draft of the rigged car was made, it looked terrible when animated.
We started to get in contact with Donington in the hope of getting their support. Communication between us and them was very long and sometimes we would wait as long as a month to hear a reply.
October
New university year starts our 3rd and final year.
Donington give us the go ahead along with a few design drawings of their plans in the rebuild. I also manage to find a huge pack of their submitted planning permission forms on their local council website. These forms detailed every modification and rebuild from small things like the types of apex's right up to the designs of each grandstand and major buildings like the new pit complex.
With this new information and permission to use the track not using the track would have been a crime.
I start making the track using their planning permission forms as a close guide to follow.
Jon starts making the buildings to fit onto the track.
I continue with the cars and re rig them using a royalty free rig as a base and modding it to accommodate the f1 car instead of the old Chrysler it came attached to.
November
The cars are still being rigged in a very long tedious process, I switch between the car, track and the texturing of the cars to try and keep my sanity. none of these tasks came naturally to me and so much more research was being done to keep up with each job.
Jon finishes half of the buildings
December
The cars are textured and look awesome
The new rig is modded to include suspension, driver controls, fixed the tyre rolling speeds as best I could and also spent a lot of time researching ways of animating it properly. It looks awesome
The track is finished and looks rubbish, dodgy road edges, impossible to lay proper textures on the surface and a real lack of aesthetic appeal to the track. The day after boxing day I start work on redoing it, this time with new help after much foraging on the internet for a new way of constructing it.
Jon Finishes the buildings but we decide it'd be quicker if i did the texturing.
Jon starts on the DVD menus, sound effects, music, and post processing work.
January
Continue working on the new track layout, its prooving much better looking and far more efficient to construct and texture once i've got the hang of it.
I start working on the storyboarding, This would normally have been an immediate job were this an animation involving characters and different sets however at this point we knew that the track and the cars were the most important and needed the longest time to work on. once these were constructed everything would come easily.
With the new story board completed we knew that we needed two settings, the track and a garage. this is a fairly simple setting and jon managed to set it up fairly quickly.
February
The track is now finished with only one or two bugs to work through, the lighting is put together after a fair amount of research and then the final textures are added to finish it off.
The garage scene lighting is far more difficult as this requires the use of the mental ray renderer to give a far higher quality to the shots making them almost lifelike. James Parsons is owed many thanks for really pushing me to keep working on those scenes and get the looking as good as they can get.
Thanks to a lot of research i'd managed to modify the car rigs to add a lot of flexibility in animating them, this meant i could simply draw a line which i wanted the car to travel on and it would not only follow it but turn the wheels with the corners as well. this meant that the animation which had been sheduled to take 6 weeks ( a shedule which we were now behind ) infact only took 2 afternoons. which catapulted us straight into the rendering phase. as we were now so far ahead of the schedule i decided to put extra time into rendering research. with pleanty of time to do test renders and work out the absolute best settings it saved us many many hours of rendering when the time came.
March
With just over a month to go it was crunch time. me and jon started to spend more and more time in the labs at uni and by mid march with 3 weeks to go we had already rendered out all the footage we required to make the movie. We could have stopped there and handed it in.
instead however i decided that with all that spare time, fully created and finalised assets, light rigs, render settings, animations and with labs of over 30 computers not being used during the night. It was almost unspoken when we suddenly started turning ourselves nocturnal in order to maximise the oppertunity we had infront of us. with 15 scenes already banked in there were only gains that could be made from working more.
In the last 2 weeks of march every single aspect of the movie was overhauled, perfected and re rendered, new angles were added and new moments were added into the script. Slow motion shots, rethinks of the plot, new effects were all added to the scenes as the presure started to build we just kept putting more and more time and effort in.
Jon finished the first drafts of the DVD menu and its extra features including slideshows and interactive maps.
April 2009.
the university decided to give the year group an extension of two days to make up for the terrible network problems we'd been having all year. fortunatly we didn't need this but we made sure we capitalised on it. with the extra 2 days as backup we played to the original deadline but increased our workload knowing if it all went wrong we'd still be safe. by the time we were done of the original 15 scenes rendered for the final product a month before the deadline, only 2 and a half of those scenes were actually used. over 50 extra shots and angles were rendered and roughly 30 of them made the final cut. this allowed us to be very choosy with the final edit, perfecting it as we went along.
Thursday 9th April 2009 - The New official deadline
I've spent the last two days relaxing with my girlfriend eating good food at a restaurant and sitting in the sun whilst jons been back home to visit family and gone out celebrating.
Over the course of the project we've managed to accumulate:
- 28,000 rendered images
- Over 700 Hours of rendering
- 14 minutes of usable footage
- 8 drafts of the final movie
- 6 DVD's with Donington DVD sleeves, designed by jon
- 2 styles of posters designed by jon
- 2 rigged textured and fully animatable F1 cars
- 1 Scale model of the Donington Park Track as it will be in 2010 ( you can put a satelite image over the top of it and it fits perfectly.
And finally 1 complete final year project handed in 2 days before the deadline with two incredibly worn out student now relaxing knowing that they've produced something to the best of their abilities. I can't wait for the marks
Done, Dusted and handed in
The final product was handed in today with all of the accompanying print media having been finished the day before. The DVD was polished to a very high standard and the animation itself is exactly as i'd pictured it in april last year.
We're still waiting on copyright permission from pendulum to post the film on the internet as we've only got the rights to use it for the project at the moment but as soon as its given we'll have it straight on the net.
Now all thats left to do is write a 8,000 word report which shouldn't be a problem and then thats almost uni done with.
I'll add those screenshots before the end of the week, just wanting a little break at the moment.
Alex
We're still waiting on copyright permission from pendulum to post the film on the internet as we've only got the rights to use it for the project at the moment but as soon as its given we'll have it straight on the net.
Now all thats left to do is write a 8,000 word report which shouldn't be a problem and then thats almost uni done with.
I'll add those screenshots before the end of the week, just wanting a little break at the moment.
Alex
Tuesday, 7 April 2009
Project Finished!!! Hopefully
The filan dvd is being burned as i type, hopefully there will be no errors on it and we can proceed to the printing and handing in stage incredibly quickly. Everything looks awesome and has met our expectations of the project.
With the deadline being moved to thursday it'll be handed in 2 days early and because of the moving deadline we managed to give ourselves a lot more work to fill the time by adding nearly 30 extra shots and improving every aspect of the dvd menu. We're both really happy with the final outcome and cannot wait to test the final dvd when it finishes. I'll get some images up soon of the final product and put the full animation on the net after we've handed it in and after we've shown Donington Park.
In the last week we must have been at uni in the labs for roughly 12 hours every day for 2 weeks and not because we were behind but because we wanted to add to what we already had which is definatly a first for me.
starting in early april last year really paid off as its meant that we've had a massive asset base right from the start of rendering allowing us to re-render anything required as well as adding in additional shots.
All in a very stressful and time consuming project but the outcome is thoroughly worth it!
Alex
With the deadline being moved to thursday it'll be handed in 2 days early and because of the moving deadline we managed to give ourselves a lot more work to fill the time by adding nearly 30 extra shots and improving every aspect of the dvd menu. We're both really happy with the final outcome and cannot wait to test the final dvd when it finishes. I'll get some images up soon of the final product and put the full animation on the net after we've handed it in and after we've shown Donington Park.
In the last week we must have been at uni in the labs for roughly 12 hours every day for 2 weeks and not because we were behind but because we wanted to add to what we already had which is definatly a first for me.
starting in early april last year really paid off as its meant that we've had a massive asset base right from the start of rendering allowing us to re-render anything required as well as adding in additional shots.
All in a very stressful and time consuming project but the outcome is thoroughly worth it!
Alex
Sunday, 5 April 2009
The big push
Its 00:16 on a Sunday morning, after 26 hours of being in the lab (with a few naps) Alex and I are finally on the home straight. It has been two weeks of 15 hour days full of coffee, bad food and red eyes but the project is coming together beautifully and we are well on track and on schedule.
An exstension has been given to us so we can hand the work in on Thursday, although this is a good offer we think that it is best to stick to our original schedule and use the last 2 days as an oppertunity to tinker with the final result and make it as perfect as we can. In the last few weeks 28'000 frames have been rendered so we have a mass of footage to play with and use however we feel best. This amount of rendering would have taken one computer 700 hours to do.
As I type this Alex is having a sleep after being awake for 22 hours again but will be back at 2am to continue the push. There is so much footage for you all to see but we just dont have time to compile it and put it on YouTube but we will get round to it eventually and maybe even the full project.
Keep watching everyone
Jon
An exstension has been given to us so we can hand the work in on Thursday, although this is a good offer we think that it is best to stick to our original schedule and use the last 2 days as an oppertunity to tinker with the final result and make it as perfect as we can. In the last few weeks 28'000 frames have been rendered so we have a mass of footage to play with and use however we feel best. This amount of rendering would have taken one computer 700 hours to do.
As I type this Alex is having a sleep after being awake for 22 hours again but will be back at 2am to continue the push. There is so much footage for you all to see but we just dont have time to compile it and put it on YouTube but we will get round to it eventually and maybe even the full project.
Keep watching everyone
Jon
Saturday, 14 March 2009
New Footage, Render settings and general catch up!
The project is now nearing the final run to the end with only 3 weeks to go. We've finally got 8 seconds of the final quality footage rendered which is the bottom video.
The video above is an example of how the track and animation is coming along. This is footage from about a week ago and has since been finalised with a few late nights. I've added the camera shake in post using "adobe aftereffects" to test it out, its a good basic starting point and adds a hell of a lot to the raw Maya footage. Jon's currently working on sounds and music so we can bring it all together for the final work.
The video above is a collection of the first final quality rendered footage from the garage scene. These shots use the mental ray renderer which gives a much better quality but take a fair bit longer to render out. The garage scene file is just being finished off today and so hopefully provided there's no more spanners in the works all assets should be finished by the end of the day. Leaving just the rendering, editing and DVD authoring left. 3 weeks left is going to be very, very tight but luckily we have 24 hour access in the labs at uni and i have a feeling we're going to need it!
The video above is an example of how the track and animation is coming along. This is footage from about a week ago and has since been finalised with a few late nights. I've added the camera shake in post using "adobe aftereffects" to test it out, its a good basic starting point and adds a hell of a lot to the raw Maya footage. Jon's currently working on sounds and music so we can bring it all together for the final work.
The video above is a collection of the first final quality rendered footage from the garage scene. These shots use the mental ray renderer which gives a much better quality but take a fair bit longer to render out. The garage scene file is just being finished off today and so hopefully provided there's no more spanners in the works all assets should be finished by the end of the day. Leaving just the rendering, editing and DVD authoring left. 3 weeks left is going to be very, very tight but luckily we have 24 hour access in the labs at uni and i have a feeling we're going to need it!
Saturday, 28 February 2009
Jon - Health
Just an update
I recently had some very minor surgery which unfortunately brought about a brief worry about whether or not i would be able to continue with the project and even the rest of the final year, mainly due to the fact I am unable to transport myself to campus and find it very difficult to sit down for extended periods of time.
This being said after some time to think and consider my choices, retaking the year is not an option im will to take, so stating officially:
I agree to continue with the project and the rest of my final year to the best of my abilities. The University of Kent - Electronics Department have given me a list of possibilities in regards to whether I am well enough to complete the academic year, and it is my choice alone to continue. It is to my understanding that the UKC - Electronics Department support my decision, and will offer aid me in future should my condition deteriorate.
Now.... Onto Graduation
Jon Wall
I recently had some very minor surgery which unfortunately brought about a brief worry about whether or not i would be able to continue with the project and even the rest of the final year, mainly due to the fact I am unable to transport myself to campus and find it very difficult to sit down for extended periods of time.
This being said after some time to think and consider my choices, retaking the year is not an option im will to take, so stating officially:
I agree to continue with the project and the rest of my final year to the best of my abilities. The University of Kent - Electronics Department have given me a list of possibilities in regards to whether I am well enough to complete the academic year, and it is my choice alone to continue. It is to my understanding that the UKC - Electronics Department support my decision, and will offer aid me in future should my condition deteriorate.
Now.... Onto Graduation
Jon Wall
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