Final... It's all over.... (Horror Stories Of The Aftermath)

[Baden3DMAX13]

After the longest weekend of my entire life, me and my friend finally finished our animation for the first time EVER, we managed to actually have a full 24 hours to render and work on getting everything together... It all started on friday morning, got up went to school, just like any normal day, but then when I got home... it all started... Tim and I worked on the animaton from about 7pm to about 4:30am when we had to go to work, when we got home at 2:30pm ish we worked until the next morning at 5:30am when we had to go to work. Once done at work we came home I slept for about 4hours. At around 6:30 I got up and started working once again. Monster energy drinks were our friends this weekend(no Bawls around here, no pun intended). To make a long story short we were up until about 12 yesterday uploading our animation.... oh fun story on that, Streamline was all filled up at one point yesterday, nothing could be put on, so yah, but they got it fixed and we uploaded it and now it's on and working... so yah.... but yah, check out the animation on streamline, 393 all the way. If you have any horror stories to tell, share.

[dlavery]

The SHORT VERSION of the story is here. I will let Steven and Tristan fill in the details.

-dave

[Salik Syed]

Nice... i had the same dilemma last year however this year when Global illumination tried to persuade me i just said " FORGET you Global illumination , i don't need you, i want you but ... i just don't have the time right now!" and it all worked out okay....
last year i was trying to render the first frame w/ a 2 million polygon car + 1mil poly tree + 1 mil poly building + grass +outdoors....! = 1 hour per frame not good..

this year i kinda ghettofied the animation to make it easier since junior year is harder than soph etc...

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Phewww... glad its over. I was the only animator and I worked on it for five weeks. Probably many grey hairs. High blood pressure a possibility. And a great animation to show for it. Besides it was my first time. No training no nothing. Installed 3DS Max and went at it.

It all started when I wanted to make a chalkboard with moving arm/chalk along with drawing. Anyways, it wouldn't work and I didn't know how to do it. The easiest scene was scene two and looks the best. The second I wanted to animate our robot and it didn't work right... parts were flying all over the place. Anyways, my mom ended up buying me a fan for my laptop to cool it while I rendered although the render times were very quick and simple. Hrmmm. I wonder why. The longest was just over 1 hour in scene two because of the Inventor file for the robot.

Anywho... I'm satisfied with the final product and so is our team compared to last years which was total disgrace and no one had seen it until we recieved the compilation dvd from Autodesk.

[Ryan Dognaux]

Originally Posted by dlavery

The SHORT VERSION of the story is here. I will let Steven and Tristan fill in the details.

-dave

Amazing. I feel fortunate to have the opportunities we have at our school now... pretty much letting us stay for as long as we want to.

[rowe]

Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux

Amazing. I feel fortunate to have the opportunities we have at our school now... pretty much letting us stay for as long as we want to.

I'll second that, our school let us use the math lab for the entire weekend, as late as we wanted. I feel very fortunate.

[geeknerd99]

The reason why you don't start on the final weekend:

We pushed it all the way to 4 AM on Tuesday Morning. We had 3 2-man teams going. A friend and I worked on all the little 3 second scenes, where another team worked on the main city-flythough. Everything went on a portable hard drive that went around, and eventually we all ended up crowded around a seriously underpowered Mac and made the final product in iMovie. Before we knew it, it was 4 AM. And we had school that day.

It all boiled down to 17 hours, about 2 liters of Mello Yellow for each person, 2 computers stolen from the Drafting classroom, and one G4 that everything depended on. I'm known as the animation zombie now.

Next year, we're starting on Kickoff day.

[bombadier337]

Well, we had designed and cadded out an arm design about the second week of the build. We thought we had made it fairly simple, so we sent it off to be machined. It took us a while for the shop to actually get it, and they had to special order the metal to make it out of. Basically, we were supposed to get it on Wednesday, about 6 days before the ship date. Well, due to some problems we didn't get it, and we realized there was no way we could use that arm. We got really stressed out since we REALLY did not want to be a box on wheels. We thought for a couple hours, and came up with a different design. We had thought about the old design a lot(which in hindsight was a terrible design), and developed an entirely new system for picking up tetras. We went off to Lowe's and spent about $200 on generic pieces of metal. We started building our new, much more basic, design for the arm. That same night, a guy who worked the machine shop said we could go over there anytime we wanted, to get the arm pieces welded, etc. So we ended up really pulling together as a team, and designing, building, and modifying our arm design in about three days. It ended up working really well, and the simplicity of the design enabled us to keep an extremely low center of gravity. It was really incredible to watch our team work like we did, every single person on the team knew what we had to get done, and not a single person was left with nothing to do.

[syntaxers]

We had our storyline completed 1.5 weeks before due date. After much fooling around and working out kinks, the last 4 days before the weekend before the shipdate were used to create the animation from scratch. I spent basically all the time I had from after school to about 12 everyday and rendered and edited/animated on the go.
(since I had one computer that was really fast, but was lacking a competent graphics card and one super slow computer with a great graphics card) So I would ride across the room in a office chair animating, rendering and editing simlutaneously.
Without some prefab drum loop patches in fruityloops, I wouldn't have any music done in time. Being the sole animator on the team, everything was on me, and I had to go to NY for mid-winter break, the week of the ship date, so everyhting had to be done by Friday. Most unfortunate.

[Han Tzu]

For our animation, my friend gave me a model of a mech he had, and I used a model of a warehouse I had done a while ago, and in the three days prior to the deadline I animated at a computer from the school, slower than cold molasses. Overnight success. The original final product looked pretty good, however they asked us to resubmit it, so I had to redo the final combination, which didnt look so great.

[DinkyDogg]

My partner was animator and I was modeller, texturer, lighter, etc. and we were way behind schedule. It was about 3:00 in the morning before the animation was due, and we about to start rendering the last scene. Before he rendered, I checked it over, and I noticed that he had moved some of the walls of the scene a couple feet. I moved them back... with autokey on. When the animation finished rendering 2 and a half hours later, the walls were moving around and it looked freaky. And the worst part was my partner had forgotten to save the scene. We ended up just doing a very simple animation for that scene. (it's the laboratory scene in Team 114's animation on streamline.)