What i have learnt

there have been many different things i have learnt this semester that have vastly improved my skills within 3ds max, some have helped to increase render times and others to reduce :P

a lot of the new things have been hard to grasp but once i understood them fully they have helped to improve my animations, and help other group memebers with problems they have been having.

new modifiers i have learnt:

FFD - enables you to deform an object for animation.

bend - enables you to bend an object along different axis and angles to a required amount.

attribute holder - enables you to add variables to an object which you can use to vary animation

pathdeform (WSM) - enables you to deform an object along a path/spline

modeling techniques:

spline modeling - i used this for to animate object, cameras, lights. and for creating the visit essex logo.

helpers - i used these extensively for the car rig. they also come in helpful when animating to allow u to target cameras to and be able to quickly unlink if its not what u wanted.

PArray - not so much modeling but automates the creation of objects to reduce custom modeling amount.

IK Solvers - used to reduce the amount of movement on an object when slight movements have large effects.

photometric light - these lights enabled our group to produce the very realistic shadows on the scene to create our cartoon/realistic effect. they are very complicated to configure to get the required effect but they give the effect we were after.

Animation:

i learnt many new animation effect and techniques that reduced the amount of time it took to create my animations.

Constraints - i used many different types of constraints. LookAt, orientation, position and path.

the title of each gives away what they are used for and enable the animator to focus on the small details by automating the rest of the in-between stuff.

Link tool - through the car rig tutorial i learnt the importance of using the link tool. if i need to move 2 objects in the same direction or rotation, before i would animate them independently this would take a while for one and would produce jerky results using the link tool moves the linked item for you and follows the other object perfectly, reducing the amount of time to animate and the smoothness of the animation.

it creates a hierarchy where different objects have reliance on others.

align tool - i used the align tool extensively to get objects to animate to the correct position in relation to other objects.

Other:

network rendering - this saved me and a lot of other people vast amounts of time, it enabled us to render whole animations in a matter of hours rather than days. so we could test animations and redo sections that otherwise would have been left due to time constraints. and the main thing was that it was soooooo easy to set up.

i used premier pro and sonar to edit the final videos and sound track. i used a number of transition effects to get the video to flow well. fade effects on the audio to reduce the time of the sound file to the desired length.