27/10/2003 - 10/11/2003
I concentrated on the animating the battle scene. I mostly used "forward kinematic" as the method of animating them because inverse kinematic tend to have more restriction in the movement of my characters, thus causing the distortion within the shape, for example the causing the arm to bend in opposite direction thus making the character looks as if he has a broken arm.
Because the detail in each scene was highly detail, composed with several polygons that I used for creating the urban scenery, I have to use of method of rendering the city scene and then put them as background image, thus allowing the rendering time to go a lot faster (from 4 minutes in each frame is now able to render 1-2 minutes or even less for each frame). Nevertheless, using the image background still make the restriction within the position of the characters that they will not be able to reach the boundary of the area and the camera is not able to be animated otherwise the characters will be in different area that is not match with the background.
With the final scene for the explosion effect, I used the combination between hypervoxel and lense flare. In process of making this effect, the lenseflare is placed within the hypervoxel area but I set the envelope for flare intensity at a higher level in the first frame (or at the zero level, depend on what you like) just to hide that unnecessary partile part. Then reducing the intensity level as the partile are bursting out. To make an effective flame effect, the texture for the particle will be in gradient as it started with black colour follow by yellow or orange just to create the flaming effect. Then to the certain keyframe, the flare intensity will be increasing, making the lighting effect to the explosive area just to make the explsion look illuminated before it ended along with the particle in the final frame (to make the hypervoxel of the particle disspaear in final frame, adjust the "particle size" envelope , located in.
Despite the time consuming rendering the Lightwave 3D program, the running time for each frame still remain 2 - 3 seconds and that even make the scene become to short that eventually cause the audiences to have a diffuculty in viewing each scene. So I have to expand the length of the film to be running a little bit longer by reducing the running speed of each clip. But if the clip is running too long, this could cause the result of making a unnecessary slow motion effect.
In additional of making a sound effect, a audio program, "Sound Forge 5.0" (school licence) is used to add the certain effect like echo or distortion to the particular sound effect. Because I am new to this program, I simply did the basic stuff with each sound like cutting or even add the effect.
Most of the sound effect that
I acquired are from the website flashkit
and sounddogs,
the 2 good sites that contains
free sound effects.
Apart from the website, I also
received a free sound effect CD from Brad Whilliance,
my class mate and also a free sound effect CD called "BBC sound effect",
an item that I got from the geelong library.
I have done little change with the audio effect to each sound for example a sound of lion roar is distorted into the sound of a monster by adding echo effect and also extending the amplify audio. With most of the sounds, they are still remain in original state (no distortion at all).