Week 10

Before the start of this final week and the Hand In for Unit 7 which included all my work for the Specialism project on my chosen film Stardust and the projection mapped animation that I was currently in the middle of trying to complete, I began creating the path to animate the walkthrough on. The way this was done on Vectorworks was fairly straightforward. I created a singular path from a nurb that I extended holding down the four points used to change the shape of the line in any form by curving it.

process of checking and reapplying textures

This was a quick way to add speed to the animation by creating a sharp curve that held an incline higher than the ground plane which allowed for the camera to follow in a sort of a rollercoaster effect. The tricky part around this was that I had to be careful of the shape I created which would greatly affect the speed it went at.

process of creating walkthrough from nurbs

The first line animation I completed went way too fast and after I joined my nurbs by composing them I was not able to decompose them to edit the path or extend it to create a better sequence. This meant I had to create a fresh walkthrough and start again by creating each nurb and then extending it to meet the points of the last nurb in order to compose it again. This process was a bit tedious and took a day.

process of fixing visibility of textures

After I was satisfied with the walkthrough I went ahead and focused on the problem with the textures. This was an issue I had a hard time solving on my own and thankfully by Monday had answers and a way out with the help of Theatre lecturer, David. He figured a way around disabling certain materials that were added over the colour of the buildings and were overlapping the tungsten metal texture I had repeatedly applied on each building. This fix made the process much simpler but unfortunately led to multiple crashes of the program because of the file size and processing time it took for each change that had to be made on the individual buildings.

still frame from final animation

still frame from final animation

Adobe After Effects

The first shot was a still frame where the water effect needed to be animated and I did this on five separate shape layers and followed the method I had practiced earlier. For the second shot I had to work with what I had in Vectorworks and adding any effects was not possible because it was a very fast moving sequences that flew over the buildings.

process of creating water in the first shot

For the third frame I worked over a still image I had exported of the model in vectorworks by placing the camera between a few buildings and street lamps and then edited that image on photoshop adding signage and a car that I then brought alive on After effects by flickering the light sources since this would be the flood effect that mirrored the shot upside down and flowed like a water current.

process of creating the reflected flood in the third shot

The final animation including the soundtrack from the motion picture 'Us'