ANI210 - Week 13 - Final

Last week of term and the focus was to complete the Unreal room and final assignment and build and finalise my end of Tri showreel (as well as this final blog post).

The Unreal room has taken us all by surprise and Blake has put in an enormous amount of work trying to understand the program and put everything together. One of the contributing issues to the madness was the fact that Unreal could really only be used by one person to work on our scene as a whole. One of the advantages of working in a team is that people can splinter off and work autonomously on different components and pool the resources together. Once we had all completed our rooms and submitted them to Blake who was in charge of Unreal (a position I'm not sure he actually ever wanted, but he took the onus upon himself to do so) the individual benefit we provided started to diminish. I tried to help in any way that I could, but the best I could do was sit with Blake and see if there was anything I could troubleshoot and help get to him. There were some additional issues that unfortunately befall to him as well, particularly with some of the other rooms where there were complex errors with topology or textures and Blake worked through those on top of the Unreal component. This was an unfortunate yet almost inevitable part of team projects - I hope that when marking this is taken into consideration and Blake is awarded appropriately.

As of last night, Blake and I were in the labs trying to finalise the lighting in our scene - this turned out to be an incredibly frustrating as we hadn't any experience with lighting inside Unreal before and there is considerable render time involved in building the lighting

Additionally, and much to our detriment, Jody originally said that Unreal's view port is representative of what's rendered, however this doesn't seem to be true for lighting. Once we built the actual lighting (and after an hour) our entire scene was almost pitch black. My room and Simmons rooms (which were enclosed) were entirely black. While the holes in Blake's room allowed minimal sunlight in. The only room unaffected, was Mick's, which was of course outside. So we basically upped the lights and clicked render again. Waiting again and failed again. After a few attempts at this, it was 11:30 and we were wstill at campus and had to leave because we would have missed our last trains home.

I'm back in class now waiting for Blake and we'll attempt to finish and submit the Unreal room today.

Now for the show reel. So my showreel doesn't exist anymore. Well, at least the AE file. I tried opening it on this computer and I get this message :

Yup, so that happened. I'm not sure why, i can only imagine it's because my project was saved locally to the machine I was using yesterday?

But that's ridiculous, because I remember saving it to my HDD. I mean look, it's right here!

See! Ok so here's the spoiler alert: The MOVIE that I rendered out still exists, so I can still submit and prove my work. However the big issue for me here, is that I wasn't satisfied with my show reel in terms of the way it was presented. I feel that it's a little basic and boring to look at (which I did speak with Jody about and he said that the transitions and effects wouldn't make a difference on the grade), but I got to thinking and realised that for me personally, I was proud of some of the work that I did. Not all of it, and to be honest I'd probably leave some of it out, however there were a couple of things I'd like to keep using and I felt that what little I did learn with AE yesterday and the AE file I'd built was a great starting point to keep working from to refine and use for myself in the future and next TRI. But now, I don't have it anymore. I'm going to the other class room today to see if it was saved locally there, however there's a class in there atm and they're using my PC.

THere's the log file for the render though? So there's the record that it saved to my HDD?

OK so there's an hour between the last log write and the time the file was accessed. It's possible that I changed the location for the last few renders (I did about a half a dozen). But even then the last written file should open? Even if it wasn't the latest one?

Look, the point is, Blake will come in soon and we'll submit the room one way or another - and I'm going to upload my Show reel as it is now based on the last rendered movie I have and that'll be that. I might add to this later, but I might not.

Jody, if you have read these, then goddamn, good for you. This was some mind regurgitated nonsense most of the time, I feel.

Cheers,

Ryan.