Animation and Rendering

The last part for me to do, was animation and rendering. I was thinking about animation since the beginning of the project. I knew from the beginning what the group was looking for, we even made a simple storyboard so it was easier to me to choose proper animation tools and techniques to deliver final animation (shots).
We wanted our animation to look like one long animation, without any cut scenes and so on. However, we divided our animation into 3 parts: part one was the introduction, part two was the actual demonstration of the engine, and part three was the ending of the animation (presentation). Also I suggested rendering everything in PAL (24fm/s) rather than in NTSC (30fm/s). (PAL is European standard)
For the first part we wanted to have as we called ‘wire frame effect’. I made a simple try animation of that effect much before: in the first assignment when I animated my head. I did it to show to my group if they liked the idea and I am happy that they agreed with me. This could bring some fresh into animation and also it was a good start. ‘Wire frame’ (that’s how we called this part) scene was actually easy to do. I copied the engine and for the clone one I added the ‘wire’ material. Then I added ‘slice’ modificator to both models. From the options I chose ‘Remove Bottom’ and I moved the slice plane up (just above the engine). I clicked ‘Auto Key’ and simply moved the plane again to the bottom. So the ‘wire engine’ could appear. I used the same method for the second engine although it started a little bit later.
Just to give some more motion to the animation I animated the camera. When the engine begins to appear the camera is moving around, in the same time.

The most difficult, of course, was the second part of the animation.
To ‘cut’ the engine into the half I again used the slice tool. Now the most boring part of animation :) that was the part the group was most afraid of. We wanted to show cycles occurring inside the engine...The first thought was to animate the piston. The only problem was that the piston shaft did not match the cam. We actually got stuck for some time :) Mike found out the problem was with the key frames so they were out of place. After a few adjustments the problem was solved. It’s actually quite funny because this was a very basic issue and I don’t know how I could miss that the key frames were out of place :)
To animate the cycles inside the engine (e.g. air, smoke, fire) I decided to use ‘planes’ with textures. Again I used ‘slice’ for animation. This really saved our time. Thanks for this we avoided any problems with animation, we didn’t have to use any additional software (we thought initially this part should be done in flash). We could concentrate only on the timing. The timing was the only problem we had (e.g. when the fire should happen, for how long, what next, after this and so on). So the timing was the only challenge here. I wanted to create just one cycle so Mike could edit this later and create loop. Mike thought it was important to show reaction on spark plug. So I added glow option to spark plug and I animated the intensity value. In ‘Curve Editor’ I placed key frames in proper place.

The third will be finished on Friday (I hope so). For this part Kiel will create the environment when Eleine creates mower.
As for the rendering. Everything is or will be rendered in PAL format. As for the rendering type I kept the ‘Scanline Render’. I was thinking about Mental Ray but Scanline satisfied my group members so I decided to stick with the Scanline