diagrams

UML

Lowman

I did not have time to RE-DO my low man what I did since my files got corrupted  and were deleted. I had two other Finals I had to study for and just never got around to re-doing it. I unfortunately  did not take any screen shots of it either so I don't have anything to post from that one. I talked to you about this during the class before the final. So what I will be doing is posting something I did quickly with the Low man after the day of the final, and than also talk about what I did for my previous Low man that got deleted.

For this I tried to make the rig take off and start off to fly. I tried making an anticipation before the Low man took off to start flying.  So before he takes off he backs up than takes off. Although my previous animation I did with the Low man was much better and I spent a lot more time on it. For my fist animation with the Low man I made him take two steps and than lean down into a pushup position. Than he did 3 pushups and than got back up and stood straight up. With that one I ran into a couple of problems. It was difficult to get the rig to smoothly go from standing up to the pushup position. but after setting in a lot of key frames I was able to get it looking ok. Another Problem I ran into that I talked to you in class about was that when the Low man went down to do his push up his hands would spin before he would push back up to finish the push up. And we came up with the conclusion that it was because I was using the "s" key to set the keyframes instead of right clicking and setting the keyframe that way. Although before I was able to fix that I found out that my file had become corrupted.

Story Board

STORY BOARD

Individual steps from the story Board.

(in case you cant read the text ill type out what I wrote for each one under each picture.)

1) Point of view shot of the Break. Have pool stick hit cue ball into other balls.

2) Balls dispersed after cue ball hits them. 

3) Make more balls in and stay a point of view shot.

4) Continue to make the rest of the balls in the holes holes. stay with point of view shot.

5) Hit the last and final ball in the hole (8 Ball).

6) After all the balls are made, move camera to full shot of pool table and all the lights. 

Self Evaluation

Overall I felt like I did a really good job on this assignment. I learned a lot and did things I couldn't have imagined doing when I first walked into this class. In this project I spent a lot of times trying to do the same thing a bunch of different ways and even though I only used the way that I found to work the best for my project I learned a lot and know now now a lot of different ways to go about the same task.

This was the first time I used camera angles to view my animation and not just view it through the perspective view. This allowed me to do weird things that were not in the camera view(ex: when moving the pool cue around it would float under the pool table or over the table to where it had to be next or I would use another pool cue entirely) and I was able to do all that off the camera view so in the camera view everything looked normal and smooth. It allowed me to make it all "smoke and mirrors." For my video though if I had more time I would spend some time on looking for and putting in some sounds. And even though we had many days missed from the snow days and our class this semester was only 3 hours per class instead of 4 hours per class I still have learned enough as a good base in all 3 categories, modeling, cinematography, and animation.

I now have a good enough understating of all three of them now to know which one my interests lye in. Overall I would this project and this semester was a success and I plan on continue to mess around with animation in my free time and continue to get better at it.

Final Animation-Pool Table

Final Animation

Problems/ Troubles I encountered

While animating  this form the final I ran into a couple of problems that took some time for me to figure out a way to solve. My first problem was that I worked in a playback speed of 10 frames per second so that when I then looked at my animation in real speed it was very fast. So I had to pretty much deleted all the key frames I had and to redo them but this time I made sure to work in 24 frames per second which is a lot closer to a real time render. Another problem I encountered was that the balls would sometimes spin to much or not enough, and would make the ball look like it was skidding instead of rolling on the pool table. My third and last major problem I encountered was that since I used the same pool cue for most of the animation it eventually became really weird to move since it was rotated and moved so many times that when I pulled it back it would pull back with a curve to it. So the way I fixed that was that I use several pool cues throughout the animation. But I did it so that through the camera's view you cannot tell that I use more than one pool cue throughout the animation. The way I did that was that I have the visibility for the pool cues that I was not using set to off and only the pool cue that I was using had the visibility set to on. and I made sure that when I made the switch it happened off camera so that it would not interfere with the animation.