Work Placement Progress 4

Finished up the scenes with the gun. A couple of new scenes were requested, but weren't difficult to do. Jon and I went back to the sword and demonstrated it going through a knight. I assisted with the animation and the authenticity of the damag it would have dealt.
I've been asked to continue working with M5 for about a week after my workterm is completed, and only require getting the ftp the the maccommon I believe. I've had issues with it before, so let's see how this turns out.

Work Placement Progress 3

I made some adjustments to the gun coming together. A spring was missing, but it fortunatly didn't affect any previous renders. Crytal and I worked out a ropelike texture as well containing transparency and coil to make a realistic wick. Once the bugs with the camera are worked out, the rendered images will be passed to SFX.

Work Placement Progress 2

2nd week: Continued to put in some final details on the firearm. There was an effect I wanted to try where it looks like the wood of the weapon is being whittled away to reveal a gun stock. It wasn't hard once I figured out I wasn't using the same texture as the stock.
I finished the construction animation with the help of a professor. I also noticed that I had overlooked a tiny piece of equipment inside the gun. It isn't an issue, though, as the piece in question wouldn't be visible in any other segments of animation.
I went the the archery range with a classmate to help set things up for filming, and we were also going to shoot the bows that had been made. Learned a lot about archery that day.

Work placement progress

1st week: Met with everyone on Monday. We discussed our strengths and abilities so we could divid work accordingly. I'm modeling the weapons specially this time around. Crystal gaave me an model she built for me to work with, but I wasn't satisfied with the quality of it, opting to build my own in it's place. (Kept the original for backup though)
Over the next couple of days, I refined my model and began work on the internal machinery of the object. I found various blueprints, but none that fit the weapon I was working with. I was then provided a video of the construction of the weapon I was working from. It was of great assistance, but a couple of details were still obscure. I presented some theories I had about the hidden parts, and one turned out to be correct.
Work carried on without a problem until Friday after Crystal and Hal had rearranged the file structure to make it more streamlined. An apparently common glitch in Maya (that I had not encountered before) led me to believe the files had become corrupted. The issue is now resolved, work continued, and some final products were produced today. (I hope)

Finished Product

Here is the finished ad. The various pieces of it are below.

These are the pieces:

Attack Sequence

Villian in Fire

Energy Sword

Finally, some stills of the models used:

Problem

The file for my main 3D model became corrupted and all the data in it was lost. I had made a backup recently, so it isn't such a disaster.

Video test

A test video was made. I tried fixing the stutter in the opening sequence, but it would have very difficult and time consuming with the amount of layers and keyframes involved in the Flash. I'll try hiding them with the camera cuts.

I've also done a rough test of the binding of the 3D models, and they are working well. Here is an image of how the the main model did:

The knee, thigh, shoulder, forearm, and elbow are either bent or twist to test how motion will affect the model. The shoulder had grabbed points of hair, and the heels didn't seem to attach to anything, but that isn't difficult to fix.

Model cleanup, 2D animation

The replaced scene is finished, and one of the character models has been cleaned-up. Sound has been put in the animation, and it dimensions are set for hi-def viewing.

Here is the cleaned model.