Evaluation Of Group and Final Piece

As we come to the end of this project, all except the presentation done, I felt that as a group we worked well. We didn’t actually organise that many meetings between us but the few we had set out very clearly what we were to do and obviously we talked whilst in the scheduled lecture every week.

In our final meeting a voice-over was created by Adam for our presentation to explain our video. I was not present for this stage of the meeting due to having a presentation in another module, however once I had finished there I joined the group and we set about organising the animation in video format so that this sound clip could be added. All went smoothly and we even managed to prepare for our presentation by stating who would talk about what and the order we would speak in.

To recap the roles of the group members here is a list:
Craig – Modelling the ‘left’ or ‘small’ side of the pump and main research into pump workings due to having contact details of museum staff.

Adam – Modelling the environment/room that the boiler pump would be featured in.

Steven – Modelling and animating the centre of the pump (pistons)…Steven’s role also led into fixing the whole scene together due to having 3ds max 2009, a newer version of the program than even the Uni Labs had. This was unfortunate as with most programs the files are not backwards compatible.

Ryan (me) – The ‘right’ or ‘large’ side of the pump and fire/connections for power input. My role also extended into creating the camera for the final product.

Looking at the final product I can say that I’m not 100% pleased. Although I still believe that the final animation has come out in an acceptable standard it is not to the quality I would have liked. This is primarily due to rendering times, and the unfortunate circumstances that it all had to be rendered by Steven on his laptop due to having too new a version of the program. The predicted length of render when all materials were set to their original settings from our modelling was in excess of 36hours to my belief. Steven had to remove several material maps and even objects within the scene to cut this down.

The objects removed were:
My fire emitter and material, Adam’s bump map on the flooring and Adam’s Water Tank. I also believe that the lighting had to be adjusted to a lower level.

Although I can’t say I was pleased by this, I can understand why they happened. In hindsight if we had known that Steven’s version of 3ds was newer and not compatible with the Uni system, we would have agreed to work solely on the Uni computers so that we could split the rendering to several different machines and not have to compromise the quality of our final piece.