Its a Small Small World | |||||||||||||||||||
| Introduction | |||||||||||||||||||
| This animation project is about a scientist entering an atom through a microscope and discovering a new universe. Entering the new dimension, the scientist came upon a strange planet. On the planet, the scientist saw many bizarre and wonderful things like flying pigs and snowmen playing football. The pig examines the camera very closely, it seems to be very curious about the strange ?thing? in front of it. All of a sudden, the pig rushed out of the scene and dozens of pigs followed. After the pigs, the scientist accidentally fall into the sea and witness a butterfly being chased by a mouse, which is in turn chased by a dog. The chase ended when a monstrous spider blocked their way and ate the butterfly. The scientist wandered under the seabed and was surprised to find a plug. He pulled it out of its hole and the whole sea flowed down the hole. After the sea is dry, igloos begin sprouting from the ground, and out came snowmen. The snowmen decided to have a game of football, and the scientist stayed to watch. They spent some time on the soccer game when clouds suddenly gathered above them. The scientist thought there would a rain but the clouds started dropping fire balls. The scientist is knocked unconscious and the story ends. | ||||||||||||||||||
| Process | |||||||||||||||||||
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First, we have to think of our story line. After confirming the story line, we listed down all the models we have to make and all the scenes we have to model. When we finished our modeling, we then started to create the textures suitable for our models. Next, we started to combine the models with the scenes, adding lights and cameras. Then comes the most important step, animating. Our animation is not based on real life, it is cartoon like, so we don?t really need magnificent models (except the landscapes), but we need good character animation to make our work interesting. Animating is the most important and also the hardest part of our animation: 1.) Some things cannot go too fast (e.g. like the final kick), or too slowly (e.g. The pigs cannot flap three times an hour). 2.) The characters cannot not freeze at any point of time (e.g. the snowmen shaking their hands). 3.) The characters must come into the scene from specific directions so the viewer can see what?s happening. 4.) The ball must fly out once the snowman kicks it, and the ball must come in contact with the snowman when he kick it. 5.) The characters do not slide across the ground all of the time, they jump. While animating is the hardest part, rendering is the most tedious part. 3D Studio Max has to render our animation pixel by pixel, frame by frame. 76800 pixels make up one of our frames and some parts of the animation have more than 900 frames. The next step will not be in 3D Studio Max any more, it will be in Adobe Premiere. In Adobe Premiere, we put different parts of our animation together and added the soundtrack. Then, our animation is considered finished except from some touch ups and exporting. | ||||||||||||||||||
| Problems we faced | |||||||||||||||||||
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About a week after we started doing this project, Wenxiao?s desktop crashed, so every model saved in his computer have to be redone and for a while he couldn?t do anything. Then we had another problem, Wenxiao?s desktop automatically restarts when he run 3D Studio Max for about 15 minutes. He had nearly rendered the whole scene when the computer restarts. Wenxiao had no choice but to buy another computer. But we faced yet another problem, my (Zhonghong?s) laptop, where most of the work is stored, became unstable. Unlike Wenxiao, my computer doesn?t restart, it shuts down and I have to wait for two hours before I can start again. It was weeks before JinYi, a member of another group, notice a crack in my laptop, he forced the crack close and my computer return to normal. After this incident, I quickly store everything in a computer in the Art Lab, afraid to lose my work. Enough about hardware, let?s talk about software. As other groups are doing indoor scene, we are doing outdoor scenes which created a lot of problem. The viewer must not see the edge of the mountain, nor must he see the edge of the ocean. We solved this problem by stretching the models very very big. One of the scene have a lot of trees, but my computer is not fast enough to handle so much polygons. So I solved this problem using cellular maps. Then comes to the football scene, I hav eto animate the snowman one by on and prevent them from colliding into each other. The sky is also a problem, we cannot create an environment map(which is the easy way that others used) we mapped an image of clouds on a sphere which must cover the whole scene. | ||||||||||||||||||
| Special Thanks | |||||||||||||||||||
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| Thanks to the Judges. | ||||||||||||||||||
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