Quarter I Project - Overall

Creating an entire city from scratch was not as easy as I thought it might be. I didn't expect it to be easy, by any means, but I didn't anticipate how much work would go into everything once the city was sculpted.

Conception

The purpose behind the animation was to initially take a major city (i.e. Detroit or St. Louis or Milwaukee etc.) and find a way to make it unique. That plan fell through soon enough as I realized how hard it was to take an entire city and build it up. It didn't take long to just take several buildings from cities and other small, generic details from other cities and build them up into one city. A few buildings I modeled, for example, was the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center from Detroit, Freedom Tower from New York, and Willis Tower from Chicago.

Planning

I didn't do a ton of planning. I think this is where my plan fell apart from the building. I just laid down the streets and started sculpting immediately.

Creation

Creation of such a big project was definitely overwhelming. I decided to start at the very center of the city and work my way outwards. I began with the GM Building from Detroit to serve as the city's tallest building and centerpiece. Simply creating most of the buildings took roughly a month (including texturing). Then I had to worry about lights and settings. I deemed a mountain bowl would be suitable for the city. In reality, building a city in the middle of a mountain depression would be a very bad idea, but this is animation, where anything is possible. After that, I took another week and a half adjusting lights. The final few days I spent attempting to render everything out. Maya is not very receptive when it comes to rendering projects with a lot of frames, as you can see below.

Self-Critique

Rendering was not a dear friend to me. At first, I had a plan to let a camera run through most of the city to see almost every detail. That worked for about three days before I started to mess with its home key. When I set the home aside from the middle of the camera to the middle of the city (to get a 360 shot of it), I thought by setting keyframes, the axis would be unaffected. I was very wrong. When I tampered with the home axis of the camera, it inflicted devastation across the entire project. Instead of going back and trying to save the dying horse, I did the quick thing and added a new camera that moved slower and had much less detailing. It works so I can turn something in and still meet my deadline (don't get me wrong, it's still good camerawork), but it's not exactly what I had anticipated. Then the rendering process turned out to be very slow. On top of a slow render, I returned to school from my absence in which I left my project to render, I found that only about 1,150 frames had rendered. This is under a fourth of my entire project. I thought I'd try again to render everything out in Maya. Maya wasn't on the same page; Maya and its renderers would act like they were going to work, but in reality, they simply quit working, as shown above. In general, I never got to self-critique my final result because there was no final result. This also goes for the class-critique.

If I were to do this project again, I would definitely account for everything in my timetable. I would've rearranged a couple deadlines and moved different deadlines to different days etc. I didn't even think about how long the camerawork would be and how long it would take to render at all. That was merely poor planning on my part.

Upon next quarter, maybe, I'll be able to redo the last portion of it as I saved some 86 different files in different times in case something like this happened.

Overall, it was a great introduction to true, free-willed animation. I can't wait to do this over the next 7 quarters and hopefully in college, too.