Personal Evaluation-Mantas Karciauskas

Personal Evaluation 

I have learnt a lot from this project, it has truly taught me how to be more efficient in the ways that the workload was being distributed to the group members. At the beginning of this project we had a very solid foundation to work of, however in a very short period of time everything was torn apart as I started facing a very rough patch concerning my personal life. Dominantly, leaving Artis and Ahmed to work more on the film whilst I took a back seat, but keeping good communication in regards to the production. 

At this stage, I found it very difficult to participate in the group work as I had so much happening  outside of university, never the less I managed to write the script for the main character, finalize Animatic, model few ideas for the spacecraft of which Ahmed could start working of, model city blocks, which also included some concept art work and assisted Artis with character development as this was initially intended to be my role; I sculpted a rough idea in Zbrush of what it could look like. 

Through summer time, everyone had their own priorities, but this did not stop me from continuing to work on the FMP even if it was just few hours in the evenings as I had to be working full time in order to financially support myself and the family. The work ranged from rigging and painting skin weights for Artis' version of the main character, UV mapping all of the Arena, which was made of dozens of polygons, this had taken me half a week to complete. I then worked on the textures and soon realized that the 3D model could be improved in terms of its efficiency, so I took on the task of remodeling the new arena based of Artis' concept and UV mapped and textured all of it after completion. Furthermore, following to the completion of the arena, we had all agreed that the character should also be remodeled as the sculpted version of Artis' had terrible geometry, was high poly and yet looked very plain and boring. The final version of the character was modeled by me, UVmapped, rigged, painted skin weights and textured with mental ray materials. 

Animation was a huge role of this project, I worked from start to finish on all of the characters animations, as well as animating the render camera. As a whole animation had been worked and reworked on more than just several occasions, yet it still looks sloppy in some areas; feet sinking into the floor and some parts would benefit with secondary actions. I found it challenging to animate the characters movements that would fit in with the slow script, without making everything look slow motion like. overall I have gained valuable skills and definitely will have better and easier approaches next time I intend to animate a human like character. 

Overall I think this project came out well and met the groups standards and more importantly I had the privilege to lead this project, on the downside I didn’t really have the time to catch up with the workshop assignments as I was preoccupied with the workload on the FMP due to other group members being less able to take part in work. The work done is as follows;Modeling - Drone, Characters, Arena. UV mapping, texturing, concept artwork, animations/camera shots, animatic, script,character rigging/skin weights,lighting the scene,rendering,editing and compositing the film with the help from Ahmed and of course lots of research and experimentation's.                                             

                                                                                                                        

Mantas Karciauskas  M00461849                                                                                                                                

Final Film-Mantas Karciauskas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsgXCRWg55s&feature=youtu.be

Project Evaluation - Ahmed Bhutta

Ahmed Bhutta

M00364067

Project Evaluation

Having completed this project, I feel this has been a challenging journey and not only due to the workload we had accepted but also due to the personal limitations I was having in my life, outside of university. I feel that undergoing this project has allowed me to become more resilient in regards to my work. Coming into the project, everyone in the group had a very positive attitude and to my belief, I feel we all merged well together. At the start of this project, I feel we got off to a very good start in terms of moral compass, communication and collaboration as a group. I personally developed and benefitted a lot from being in a group with two more experienced 3D artists and was able to feed off of both Mantas and Artis. This in turn allowed for a better outcome in my 3D and production work.

At the start of the project I feel we all collaborated well, with each person agreeing to being assigned different tasks. This was shown in our first crit when Artis had done the research, Mantas had written the monologue and I had gone through several recordings to get the perfect feel of the monologue. Due to my situation outside of university and with my level of experience in 3D design in regards to the rest of my groups, I felt at times that I had some catching up to do in relation to work load. My situation outside of university didn’t help me much either. But nevertheless, I kept on pushing forward managing to take on board ideas from Mantis on the ship, to rework and develop them further. For each part of the ship, I had individual references that I referred to and some concepts that I had put together from a visit to the RAF museum.

Going forward with the project, I took on the responsibility of developing the storyboard for shots and putting together the animatic. I had gone through many stages with different shots but unfortunately we couldn’t get the right feel in the shots from the monologue that Mantis had put together. Initially Mantas was going to take on the animatic but due to circumstances, he instead completed the final animatic, after I sent him all of my development processes to look at along with the storyboard.

Being given a deferral, midway through the project and with still issues going on and having picked up a 30 hours a week job to support myself, I found days off and times in the evening to push on with the work load. As we had a definitive storyline and clear vision, I focused on improving the ship to fit in with the remodeling and development of the arena. I had gone through many modeling stages before I had the ship fit in perfectly with the rest of the scene. I found it quite challenging to model to the degree the rest of my group was modeling at and felt I needed to spend more time on the ship for it to fit in well with the rest of the scene. I feel that my group expected a certain standard as I could tell from their constant suggestions and I did not want to let them down which is why I feel it took me a little longer to produce the finished version. Due to the workload of the FMP and how much we needed to do, I had little time to work on my modules, as the FMP was my main focus.

Coming towards the end of the project, I feel I got a lot more done for the group to get our film together. I feel as if my work during some of the project on modeling and 3D workflows was a bit of a learning curve where I was developing to match up with the rest of the group. I was able to accommodate larger work in a smaller time frame due to this, which included animations for the arena, drone, elevator and ship, texturing the ship, UV mapping the ship, sound re-recording, sound effects recording, sound editing and development, working with mantas on compositing and the final look of the film (post production) and rendering.

Compositing, sound development, research, production and sound editing - Ahmed Bhutta

After having rendered all the frames for the film, me and Mantas finalised a few shots that we wanted to change and took out a few shots that we believed slowed down the progression of the story telling. As a team we worked on the compositing and final look of the film, editing frames in photoshop to make them less pixilated and to increase the black boarders giving the film a more cinematic look. Mantas was left to do the remainder of the few hundred frames before he sent me the film for me to include sound to complete the film.

I had recorded various sounds for different parts of the film in and around university, finding many objects to create sounds with. I had downloaded some sounds as I couldn't find the exact sounds I needed for certain parts of the film. For example, for the helicopter landing, I found an industrial fan in the product design room at university and turned it on and off to attempt to create a sound of propellers slowing down. Unfortunately, it did not come out the way I wanted after several attempts and so I had to download a sound from youtube.

The links for the sound I recorded for the propeller blades are below:

https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/ship-propellers-2

https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/ship-propellers-3

https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/ship-propellers-4


The links for the propeller sound I downloaded are below:

https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/helicopters-landing-sound

I had cut the sound to where the helicopter was slowing down and added fade ins and fade out effects to add into where the Heli-Ship was landing.

I had attempted to create different sounds for footsteps for different parts of the film, for when the gladiator tripped at the beginning to when there was a close up to his walk through the hallway. The different clips are in the links below. I had done the trip with my barefoot and had chopped it and added it in twice to be coherent with the trip in the film. With the hallways footsteps, I wore my shoes to give it the creak in the shoes that was needed.

The links for the trips:

https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/trip-barefoot

https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/trip-barefoot-2

The links for the hallway walk:

https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/footsteps

https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/footsteps-2

I had stood outside of the 2D dimensional room to gather some wind sounds. I wanted to gather different kinds of wind sounds for different parts of the film. For example, at the top where the main arena is, I imagined a more gusty wind sequence, than in the hallway where a more whistle wind was suitable. I recorded several different versions before I decided which version was the best to use. They are listed below in the links. Please give them a listen.

The links for the whistle wind sound:

https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/wind-whistling

https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/wind-whistle-2

https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/subtle-wind-whistle-recording_2

The links for the gusty wind sound:

https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/gusty-wind-with-whistle

I had attempted to create an individual sound clip for natural breathing for the character but I felt that importance to the monologue shouldn't be over crowded with too may sound affects, as everyone else in the group agreed. Therefore sound affects were kept to a medium so that focus wasn't lifted away from the monologue. I had again re-recorded the monologue several times before I had gotten the timing right in line with the animation. Slight adjustments had to be made to the script to keep with the timing of the animation. I recorded it several times making sure I kept in-line with frame timings. Below are some of the 7 recordings of the monolouge I had done:

Monolouge re-recording 1: https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/final-sample-recording-1

Monolouge re-recording 2: https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/final-recording-sample-2

Monolouge re-recording Final: https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/fmp_audio_monolouge

For the soundtrack, I had researched for something which would fit into our film well. I looked at examples of Spartacus and 300 and found that a soundtrack from the film 300 fit in really well. I downloaded it and used "300: Rise of an Empire - History of Artemisia", cutting and chopping it for 2 minutes where it fit in really well with our film. I had used fade ins and fade outs for a gradual build up and played around with the decibel levels on all 12 sound layers to make sure the soundtrack was just beneath the monologue.

When I went out to collect sounds, I had collected for more than just what was used in the film, but due to the group's decision on the focus being upon the monologue, we didn't use all the sound. Although I feel, there would be some room for more sound effects to be used to make the film become that much more real. Some of the sounds I had recorded are in links below:

Armour Rustling: https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/armour-rustling

Breathing clip 1: https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/breathing

Breathing clip 2: https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/breathing-2

Breathing clip 3: https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/breathing-3

Countdown Sound Effect: https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/countdown-noise --> I thought this could be used at the time when the gladiator was walking towards the arena doors as a suspenseful countdown to his "death" as it were. We didn't include this as the soundtrack added a nice substitution to this sound effect instead and it doesn't take away from the monologue. We feared that adding more would take away from the monologue and the story telling structure.

Arena doors opening: https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/door-opening

Arena doors opening: https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/door-opening-1

Ship landing: https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/ship-landing

Ship landing 2: https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/ship-landing-2

Ship landing 3: https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/ship-landing-3

Ship Noises: https://soundcloud.com/ahmed-bhutta-1/ship-arena-noises

These were all the sounds I did not get to add into our film. Some of the sounds didn't really go with what we wanted it to and some we just rejected. On the monologue I had added a Bandpass sound effect which suppressed the background noise and gave the monologue a feeling where it seemed as if the gladiator was actually thinking his thoughts. On some of the wind effect sound clips, I added a volume sound effect to amplify the whistle in the hallway. I added constant gains and exponential games to all the sound clips so they merged well together and flowed into one sound.

If I was able to, I'd put each sound through a professional recording application such as Audacity, which I did try to do but unfortunately, I did not have the hardware equipment to carry out the edits I wanted to. i would tweak the frequencies of the sound in order to get a crisper and clearer sound. For example, on the footsteps where the gladiator trips, I would have tweaked the frequency where it was at its highest.

Overall, I feel the sounds fitted in well with our film and synced in with all the animation in our film.

Texturing, UV Mapping the ship and final render - Ahmed Bhutta

After having completed the animations, I UV mapped parts of the ship and added a mental ray material which is called a Mia material and had then added a chrome effect giving it matte look. I had used the same material mantas had used for the arena and of the guards body armour as we wanted everything to be consistent and to collaborate well. We had a theme of matte black and gold with red glass for the state, which we collectively made evident in the guards body armour and the ship. Below is the final render for the ship and parts of my UV layout which I had done individually:

Animation for the Ship, Drone, Elevator and Arena Doors - Ahmed Bhutta

After having completed the ship, I want onto animating it. At first I found some trouble as whenever I had keyed a frames in, the propeller blades would come apart in the in-betweens and so I worked through the graph editor to give a smooth curve for the slowing down of the blades.

We had as a group initially decided to have a few shots of the gladiator and guards walking out of the ship through the back door but having no interior, we decided to not incorporate this and instead be economically smart and through the use of sound have the ship already landed with the gladiator already being walked out. This allowed me to focus on other secondary animation within the film for it to have a more natural feel and for it to come to life.

We wanted some other secondary animation in the hallway, in the same way we did in the main arena where the gladiator is lifted by the elevator, which I had worked on, but unfortunately we didn't include it as we were worried that the focus would have been lifted from the main character. We did not want too much going on in the hallway as our central focus was around the emotions of the gladiator.

Getting the timing right for the renders was a bit of an issue as me and mantas were changing a few shots in post production and taking some out to make the film times shorter and so we had to change the frames in which the animation would play in order for it to be seen in the shots we had in place.

Below is the animation for the drone in the hallway which we did not include. Please click the link:

https://youtu.be/fOdaPlL3kJA

Design Progression Screen Grabs - Ahmed Bhutta

These are some screen grabs I took whilst progressing on the ship. Please note that these are not in any particular order. 

Design Progression and finalisation - Ahmed Bhutta

So, through the summer months, I continued to develop and build on ideas as the arena was being reworked. I felt that the ship needed to give the futuristic feel in the same way that the arena did. Working from references and feedback from the group, I had came up with this:

I still wasn't happy with the outcome and it didn't seem to fit in with the rest of the scene. I had attempted to make a rotationally mechanism for the jets, but the jets just didn't seem to go with the ship any longer. I had created landing gear for the ship with hydraulics to give the impression of futurism. My references for it was a tutorial I saw on digital tutors on a futuristic ship they were doing of their own. I had watched it to gain a better understanding of the mechanism.

I developed the weapon housing further and added a missile to the guns along with bolts to the wings so that the engineering of the ship would make sense. I got the idea for the missile from the earlier photo manipulation concept I did in photoshop from the photos I took at the RAF museum. I think it fits in with the restive the ship appropriately.

Being not totally satisfied with the outcome and taking suggestions form the rest of my group, I continued with the ship to get a better look. I ended up with the following:

So I added a few intricate details to the ship and a bit more shape to make it less boxy and for it to have more of a natural flowing line to it. I went back to my RAF Museum photos, blogged earlier on, and decided to incorporate the back end of a helicopter I had taken a photo of. I thought the ship was taking its place within the scene a lot more now but still decided to make some final adjustments to it for it to have its final look and feel. I again referred back to the photos I had taken and this is the outcome:

After all of my development, this is my final ship that I had come up with. I decided to chuck the Jets as it just didn't seem to fit into the ship any longer and after going through some more of my photos and looking at Deviant Art, I decided to add propellers at the top of the ship to create a Heli-Ship. before embarking on this design, I had done a rough sketch outlining my idea as I knew exactly what I wanted it to look like. I had added some shape to the wing as when they were straight, it didn't seem streamlined at all and just came across very boxy and un-natural. I had added guns to the nose of the ship adding detail overall and two on the back with a dome camera as before the area seemed quite empty.  added a back door with hydraulics and I rounded off the top panel of the body which before was squared off. Finally I added panels on the weapon housing and smoothed the whole ship to give it a cleaner look.

I researched how propeller wings actually worked so that when I built them, it made sense and so they would work appropriately when it came to animating them also. The link which I looked at is below:

http://www.explainthatstuff.com/helicopter.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJb1EZtnzFk

Below is also some references I was looking at when deciding the overall look of the ship:

I also took into account what Mantas had sent me which was a preliminary idea for the tail of the ship. I took this on board also.

Animatic development - Ahmed Bhutta

So after having received feedback from the presentation crit, I had reworked the animatic and developed it further before handing it over to Mantas to get the final animatic for us. I tried to feed off of the advice given which was to show less of the whole scene and some more close ups as it is a quite intense monologue and the close ups give a stronger and more emotional feel to the story. Below are just some of the animatics I had come up with. Please click the links:


Animatic Development 1: https://youtu.be/p2M6P8r6Co8

Animatic Development 2: https://youtu.be/KzLI1p9nXQI

Final Animatic Development: https://youtu.be/lYBdc9f1RlQ

These were developed and built off the storyboarding I had done, before I finally passed it onto Mantas to have a final look and finalise the animatic for our story telling direction.

Animations, Rendering, Compositing and Editing in Adobe premier - Mantas Karciauskas

Animations:

Characters

Animating three characters with interactions on my own was very challenging, I struggled for the most part to create a very slow paced movements without having everything look slow motion like. Thus already this being a huge task and working on my own I looked for ways to cut down on the Animation; setting up pathways was one of them and looping the three different walk cycle animations. Each individual characters has their own way of walking and I thought that this was vital for the film in order to achieve a dynamic feel.

I wanted the main character to have facial animations, as we were having lots of mid-close up shots due to the monologue being so personal and there is no better way to depict what the character is going through than by the expressions on his face. For the characters facial expressions I used morphs, eyes and eyelids were animated too.


Camera

I also animated all the camera shots and movements of the camera. I found it to be fairly difficult especially with the tracking shots, as characters walked they also had up and down movement, which had to be implemented into the camera animation, as otherwise the focus of the shot would have been lost.

Rendering:

When rendering you always want to keep the render times to its lowers without compromising too much of a quality lost. I worked on the render settings and optimizing the scene. Rendering times started at four minutes per frame and I knew that this was too much, so I started messing around with Mental Ray materials, Deleting all the unwanted history, any meshes that will not be in the scene, running render diagnostics for errors and playing around with mental ray settings and decreasing screen resolution to  1440x612 which is 25% lower than 1920x816 which is used for the wide screen. Rendering already cropped out frame meant that some work will need to be carried out in Adobe Premiere.

For the most part the actual rendering took place at University, with I and Ahmed being present to set up all the computers and monitor the machines in case it was to crash.


Compositing and Editing in Adobe Premiere

Once everything was rendered, I

Final Film - Mantas Karciauskas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsgXCRWg55s&feature=youtu.be

Texture ideas for Artis' version of the arena - Mantas Karciauskas