Evaluation

After all the blood, sweat and tears over this project, i can finally say that it is complete!! I have never worked so hard to try and fix rendering problems! From the last post i put talking about how i was happy after being able to render something after nine long hours of fixing problems. Well, that was not the last of it, it then carried on for another day. I was so disappointed when i came into university the next day to see that most of the layers had failed and the ones that had worked had images missing. To make things worse, three of the six computers we took for the night were switched off which means we lost most of the work. I badly started to worry and just did not see how we could resolve this with out having the teacher Alex to help. I thought we were going to have a play blast to hand in which would have actually made me cry (even though it shouldn't come to such lengths).

But i can happily say that James saved the day, he found something on maya which told him all the problems wrong with our piece. And we amazing had thirty one problems and he solved them all apart from three. With this solved we put the work we hadn't done on the render farm and it done it within about an hour. We did not have time to solve the other layers so we only had the colour and shadow layer working, which is better than nothing.

We went to put everything onto after effects but it could not read the file type, which i thought was rather odd, so powering through, we just went straight to premiere which meant that we could not put any special effect into our scene. With premiere working we were mainly trying to place the music in. I know we do not get marked on this but i think this really helps to capture the scene and with our friendly rat all alone, the song was pretty much perfect. We added other sound effects but we also had to leave some out. This was mainly the sound of the rat as we thought that this would crowd the music and we did not want to many diff rent noises that it would make it a little hard on the ears. We added a dissolve at the beginning of the shadow layer as we had a few images missing, so we completely took the first few out and added a dissolve where the rat looks up to the cave.

Even though we were not able to complete everything i am still pretty happy with the result. Plus with all the time and effect we put in to solve all the problems, it makes it all worth while!
Now, i have watched our final movie quite a few times and there are a lot of things that we wrong with our piece, but we did not have the time to solve any of them.
The first thing i noticed was that the camera goes through the bin which is laying on the floor. This is one of my main issues with the piece. I do not know how we did not notice this before, we done play blasts and we never saw the problem. Somehow our texture for the broken bridge spread over to other items, such as the broken glass and outer cube. I can only guess that when we were deleting some textures, we may have deleted a few too many, but how does that make this still spread to them, wouldn't they just not show a texture at all?
Due to only having two layers out of five, all the windows look black, this isn't all that much of a problem as it kind of looks as though all the lights were off.
If you notice, one of the street lamps are actually going through the fountain.....
The sound effects are a little too loud for the piece especially the creaky door.
I think there are a few more but it just shows that we had a few things to solve but for our first try, i think we done a good job.

If i were to do this project again, i would make my buildings more detailed, as Jared said before they are a little to square. I watched the Disney Pixar film UP the other day and i must say that if i had seen this before, it would have been my inspiration to have made my buildings more detailed. There was lots of detail to the main house that they could just add plan colours and it would look great, where as i have a brick texture to try and make up for it, which i have now realised is a bit of a no no. But again i am pleased that i am realising this as i go along. I would also go out for the day and do some actual sketches of buildings instead of taking pictures. This would have made me look deeper into detail and this would have shown through my drawings.

As a group i think we could have worked a little harder to try and understand what it would actually be like to be in a cave. Even though we did go to Chistlehurst caves, i did not really think to myself what it would actually be like if i were to live here for a week. I think we also needed people to speak out more instead of me doing most of it. I must say though that i really enjoyed being a team leader, it is something that i had never done before, because i was always the shy one, but i think this has been brought me out a little more. I would love to be a team leader again in the future and it made me realise to myself that i do have ideas i just need to get them out to people. I think overall our main issue was research, but we also needed to think about it deeper for it to be more meaningful.

As a team, i think we worked great. I loved the people i worked with and i would love to work with them all again. Each person had a different strength which was great, and we worked as an actual team and not just go and do our own thing without talking about it as a group first. We had many group meetings, at least two a week and was talking everyday through facebook about ideas and what people had done and what we could do to try and make it better. It was fun as well as it just being all about work. We bonded!
The only thing i would say is that Yuki needed to come in on time, most of the time she would be two hours late which would delay everyone else, and she was always the first to leave.
Apart from that i have no complaints. I want to do this project all over again. This has been the most enjoyable project i have done since being at Ravensbourne as well as been the most stressful, but i guess that is just the way things go.

Great work team S.T.A.R.S!!!

There is our final piece of work we all slaved other, and i am really pleased with the result even though it needs some work. Enjoy!