What I Found Difficult

I think that I struggled most in this project with the skinning and boning aspect of preparing the models for animation. I spent probably most of my time on this module actually trying to get the movement of the characters to look realistic than any other aspect of the module. I found it very difficult coming to terms with the correct phase of weights on the skins of the models, meaning that in some cases I would have some very unnatural looking lumps and bumps appearing on the characters. I endeavoured to iron out of all of these problems, but admit that some of them still remain (Will go into more detail in another post.)

I also had problems with morphing the characters faces to allow for movement of the mouth and eyes. In the end I suffered with morphing so much that I did not include it at all, I decided that I could achieve a better level of work if I just had the characters head moving in such a way that would look if they were talking in a very cartoony way.As I was going for a very cartoony story, I feel it may have helped towards the theme.

The organisation of my files was also something that I struggled with in this project. Because of using many computers to produce the work, my files were scattered around everywhere, meaning that collating them to be put onto a disc was very difficult to do. I have endeavoured to put all of the files onto the disc so that they can be viewed, but am fearful that I may have missed one or two smaller files which may have been used in the scenes.

Other problems I encountered were seemingly not faults of my own, but faults of the 3Ds Max application itself. Whenever I attempted to load biped animation for the old man, the program would proceed to crash, making it impossible for me to load the information I needed, also, when I attempted to save my scene after I added rendering information to it such as the type of compiler to use, it would refuse to reopen at a later date, making it completely redundant.