Here is our animation hosted on a server that isn’t slow and won’t go down like our prior ones. Check it out and leave us your comments.
BLARG!! Why won’t anyone respond with comments. Pretty please?
Hey Sunny, great animation this year 
Thanks for putting it up on the web so that others like myself could view it. 
hey sunny i wrote, the animation is tight, and i’m darn glad you ain’t a rookie team or my teams chances would of just walked out the dorr, oh yhea did i say IT’S the best in my opinion?
Hey Sunny, I was looking at older posts and found this. Thanks for the link. Obviously I’d seen this before- because you got some recognition for it.
I thought this was a great anim and had both a great story and a creative way of communicating it. I was wondering if you could point out different aspects of the anim that you’d like to talk about. Also, where you used imagemaps in your backgrounds. I want to show this to my team and dont want to assume incorrectly. Image maps/background images are a great way to create an environment and if I’m correct, you used them extremely well and very wisely here. If im wrong and this is 100% 3D, then you have an increadable future as a modeler. Some people think bg image maps are cheating, but sometimes thats the actual assignment. Add 3D to an existing scene, and that takes talent too, sometimes more.
Great Job!
Thanks SteveK. I am actually going to create a postmortem some time soon so I will send that to you if you wish. The image maps are really images of a friend’s backyard but instead of just rendering with them on as a background and trying to match up items correctly, we decided to use a thing called camera match. What we had to do was measure everything in the backyard, real and soon to be modeled, and we had to compare that to the camera’s position. It was not a fun job and I am glad I wasn’t one of the backyard measurers. Anyway, once you use camera match you can basically set your modeled objects anywhere in the scene according to one view and in every other view it will look perfect with the background. Working within 2D space using 3D objects is by far one of the hardest things you can do. There is almost no room for error and though it may look easy enough to implement them, there are still small things that you must learn on your own such as mattes and such. If you need help with anything be sure to ask.
I actually know most of what your talking about. I never played with the camera match. I’m looking at getting better at 3d Max for the sake of helping the team more. I am more proficient at Lightwave from Newtek. I like it beter, but I’v been using it for 8-9 yrs so I’m bias. They are both the same quality of program - which I classify as mid level professional- high end would be something like Maya which is 2-3times the price. There’s really nothing in between so they are still extremely good. then there’s the High end cosumer and those low end shareware versions of stuff.
I figured everything was 2D-but wanted to make sure. Mattes are great for seperating the elements of the image. you can create objects pass behind the trees an in front of the buildings. simply create mattes and apply it to an object then animate the scene, ie bird fly through. you can get pretty complex using these techniques. that really keeps people guessing. Id love to see your writeup. I plan on our team doing the same thing. theres a lot of complex ideas passing by in our piece that probably went unnoticed. thanks again.
Speaking of Maya, their educational version of Maya Complete will now be free for the public. They want more people to be interested in their products and since they make so much money off of Maya Unlimited they might as well have a free version. Maya Complete Educational is a fully functional version of Maya Complete so you should check it out some time. But back to the topic… I think if you are comfortable with Lightwave, you should stick with it. Lightwave, for most people, is easier to use when modeling and since Max and Lightwave mix together so well there is no point just using one or the other.
Yeah, mattes really add to the realism of the animation and usually unnoticed things do aide in giving a more convincing natural animation. Such things as birds flying or robotic dogs falling off a ball (I hope someone saw that on our animation) just raise the bar for competition. I’ll draft up a PDF sometime soon and maybe you should do the same with yours. I am submitting mine to Robby who has plans to increase the popularity of animation at FIRST so it would be helpful for such masters as you guys send one as well.