Over the course of the synoptic project there have been many times that things did and didn't go well.
During the Pre-Production I gathered relative information for the synoptic project by researching different animations of a similar narrative and observing the structure of their narratives.
This then led to the three of us deciding on a series of events the story would follow. Once the structure and flow of the story was agreed upon, as a group we began creating different concept arts for each of the anticipated scenes. These scenes accumulated as a forest, field of flowers, play-park, autumn forest, snow forest and a misty deforested area; these areas were then merged together to create the storyboard. The storyboard was created by me while I was instructed by my team on what the events should look like. However, the storyboard was expanded upon later due to some aspects being changed due to the time left and the difficulty of making certain items (eg: the dog).
Meanwhile, across the entirety of the synoptic project, our group used both a shared Google Drive and Trello table in order to maintain connection between each of us and to connect our work effort together for efficiency purposes. This then allowed us to each edit and compile all the work needed, proving to be extremely useful.
The Trello table was used to give each team member tasks as well as maintain an order of task completion and to record what did and didn't need to be completed.
The Google Drive was also used as a way of maintaining order of tasks alongside data sharing, however not to the same extent.
During the Production phase I made the trees including alternate varieties. I also created each of the scene set-ups (positioning). I made most of the textures including all of the flowers. I optimized the positioning of backgrounds and planes. I edited it to add bumps, sticks, grass etc to add to the realistic appearance of some scenes. Also during the production phase, we had issues with attempting to create seamless textures however we did well because we eventually did manage to get detailed textures that were seamless (despite some flaws) and managed to incorporate them successfully.
We also created bump mappings for each texture and added them to the video.
Once the modelling and texturing was mostly complete, I began working on efficiency. For example, previously I had modeled all the flowers, trees etc and this slowed the program down, so we decide to take each type of tree into another scene and render it. Then we turned that render into a texture, we added it to a collection of single poly planes and added an alpha to each one. I also reduced the number of flowers because they were slowing the scene down, making rendering more difficult. We made some backgrounds into planes, for example the snow scene has a large plane as a mountain background, rather than making a mountain, which would have been to time consuming and would have slowed the scene down.
If I could improve the modelling further I would remove more of the models and replace them with more planes, this is because it would make it much easier to render and allow our group to create a more stylized approach.
We had issues with the lighting exposure and getting lighting on scenes to be a similar or look the same way. Lighting went well because we managed to fix the exposure errors and maintain a directional light setting. Also we used god rays to show the light narrowly piercing through the trees.
During the post-production I was assigned to do most, if not all, of the post production work on the synoptic project. I worked on all the sound and was the one to piece the video together. Unfortunately my team mates gave me the files needed later than expected. This forced me to be unable to add sound to the a majority of the video and forced me to use non-rendered play-blasts in the video.
Things didn't go entirely well with the post-production. However, midway through creating the video the computer I was using crashed without a recent save. This has taught me to always save regularly. The video was eventually completed but at a lower quality than I would have liked.
While at this point in time the video is not finalized I believe that the video is good. However, it could be improved with more time and would end up looking much better than it's previous version.
When the video is completely finished I would like the sound and rendering, at least, to be completed.
In the future, I would like to learn how to animate more effectively and how to rig models in Maya. This would be exponentially helpful and would allow me to do better on future projects.
In conclusion, I believe that we did well on our synoptic project because of the effort and animations created. If I could improve upon the synoptic project I would edited my animations to be more fluent and to make the lighting of different scenes that lead into each-other into the same form of lighting.
The Animation can be found at
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