the final thing all together

problems, corrections and final thoughts.

there were a number of problems that occurred during the project;

the first, as previously mentioned was with the people drinking. the glasses just wouldn't not match the hands. and after trying to move the glass in nearly every frame, i decided to just delete them. originally the scene was much darker and it was very difficult to see them any way.

another problem, was with the cocktail maker, as this seemed to move without the man being there, so this was just a case of moving the key frame down the line a little.

it was a shame about the man in the picture, as we had originally decided to have question marks, but only one member of the group put them on which made it impossible at the end to correct.

the biggest problem i had was with reactor. i had done a trial on a separate document which seemed to work fine, i then followed the same process on the actual document and it didn't seem to work the same. to over come this problem, the only thing i could do was to merge the trial version onto the actual document. this meant that i had to delete two of the lanes and tv, and just adjust the width of them to make them fit.

BIG PROBLEM occured during the trial of putting everything together, it appeared that everyone else's camera was moving from right to left, and mine left to right. although it appeared to look fine going into the next scene, it looked bad going into my scene. the only thing i could think of doing is an alternative (included in the hand in), which doesn't look so good, for the sake of the whole thing.

the lack of communication in the group made things not work out in the best possible way. this is sad, as the project could have been better if we'd worked better together. but all the same, the project looks good, and has been fairly successul.

knocking down the pins

to make the pins fall down i had to use reactor.

first of all i had to select the alley, pins and ball. i then went onto the reactor tab at the top and went into create object - rigid body collection. in here, it is important to make sure that all of the parts selected were added to the box, and if not it possible to go on the add tab and select another object. selecting each of the three parts in turn, i went back onto the reactor tab, and selected open property editor. here, i selected a mas of 0 for the ball, 20 for the alley, and 10 for the pins. i then selected bounding box for the alley and pins, and bounding sphere for the ball.

the only thing that i had left to do was to animate the ball so it looks like something is knocking them down. i did this by making sure the auto key was on and simply moved it to the last frame.

i had a slight problem that the ball wasn't moving fast enough, so it would get there after the pins were knocked down. there is still that problem on the actual clip, but not on the trial above.

man walking

i added in a man behind the bar, i wanted to make it look like the man was walking towards two people that were added on the side of the bar. for this, i used the footsteps, which can be found on the animation section of the toolbar to the right. this is a really simple tool to use. i simply clicked on the biped, then the foot print tool, i then selected the appropriate settings (including the amount of prints). i then positioned in the correct place,rotated them and scaled them. i done a trial before adding it to the scene as seen above. it was during this time that i found the problem with the eve lopes of the man previously made. so this was something that i had to change.
i found the footsteps tool effective, i did find it quite limiting. in that the key frames could not be moved, and as a result, the man had to walk at the beginning. it also wasn't possible to move the limbs when the footsteps was used.

man drinking

one of the first things that i decided to animate in the scene was the person drinking. at first i had glasses in the scene so it looked like they were drinking from the glass. the only problem that i had was that the glasses didn't stay where the person's hands were. i decided that the glasses were barely seen so they were deleted out of the scene. i later copied the people sitting on the sofe three more times, so that the room didn't look so empty.

Camera Trial

in this clip i used only 52 frames, just to have an idea about camera positioning. this just isn't enough frames, and moved round the room far too quickly.

the new man

after discovering that the previous man we made had problems when we moved the limbs, we had no choice but to start again. this was because we thought it would be quicker to start again then try to sort the problems with the previous person.

from the pictures above it is possible to see that the problem no longer exists, so the man should be able to move freely.