Uploaded Video

I've embedded the final video onto the group blog here

Final Animation

I've seen the final thing now, with Richard's intro speech and the sounds which are cool. Also, whoever picked the music... nice choice :)

There are a few minor things I wouldve changed in the animation, but I'm being picky and its great overall. I'm happy with our planning as well, kinda glad we were set deadlines for models/maps/animations because I'm sure if we didn't, we probably would've fell way behind schedule.

Well done everyone.

Congrats!

Well, I've just seen a large file on humyo called BOT.avi, which I'm guessing is the final animation. I'm downloading it right now, can't wait to see it!

It's been great working with you guys, you all made a great team, both your work, and team skills were excellent. Thanks to Sam for keeping this whole thing together and not letting us get too sidetracked! and to Jo for picking a fun topic :D

I'm pretty sure I spent way too long modeling and mapping my head, but hey... at least it got used in the animation. 7 times apparently!? Someone send me that nelson model, theres fun to be had :)

Towards the end of the module I slowed down my blog postings, but I think at that point, we were all communicating a lot more over Instant messages, email and phone, so to be fair, we were still communicating as a team. So well done everyone, I'd be happy to work with
any of you again. Remember how you all thought I was blogger crazy... well look! you all posted more than me! Seriously though, blogging was a good idea, maybe we shouldve just used one blog with all of us as users like towards the end, but it still worked anyway. Cheers for the feedback on my posts.

Well, thats all folks, I'll post again once I've seen the final thing.

Ouch, splinters

To carry on from the last blog post when I mentioned the scene of the mast being shot down, I'll just finish what I started. I took the material Tim supplied of the wood, and cut out a shard in Photoshop, using the lasso tool. I saved this (as a PNG to keep the alpha channel) and loaded it into the material editor in Max, to set the alpha channel as transparency. Then I changed the type to a face map, meaning that the image would be put on every face of the object its applied to.

I used a space warp called "Mesh Bomb" which shatters objects into its separate faces, and applies an animation which looks like an explosion similar to particle effects. I think in the final animation it'll be too small to see very well so I included a rendering below, so my efforts weren't to waste :P

Me and Panos worked on this scene together, I supplied these effects, while Panos' used his animation skills on the mast pieces, rigging and sails. (which were incredible)

Ball scale problem

Well heres an odd problem. The mast was made from the detailed plans of the trinidad, and the cannonball was a rough estimate from the size of the holes that the cannons fire out from. If the ball was much bigger it wouldnt fit out the window, let alone get in the cannon! But still it looks puny in comparison, and the amount of damage it does... argh. I need advice.

Should I just make the cannonball bigger for this scene and hope noone notices the inconsistency?

Let me know what you think. I'n the mean time I'm working on getting splinters to fly off when it cracks. I'm trying out the 'Bomb' space warp to do that at the moment, but i'm thinking a particle system would be better. Perhaps someone can help me out on friday with that.