Project
5 : Your Favorite Part
Assigned: Tuesday, November 26
Models Due: Thursday, November 28
In Class Critique: Friday, December 13
Final Turnin: Tuesday, December 17
Overview
The final project this quarter is going to be much more collaborative than it has been in the past. This is to help get you used to (1) working with each other, (2) the power of a group to help facilitate a finished product, and (3) the issues that develop when working in a group.
The basic skeleton of the project will be based on the board game Mousetrap which should be (and should remain) in the lab at all times.
You will be broken up into groups of two students each, and all the groups will have to work together as a class to finish the project. The group designations can be found here under Final Project Groups.
FIRST: Each group will receive a modeling assignment of a couple portions of the game. These objects are to be modeled accurately and quickly – as EVERYONE in the class will be waiting for their completion to continue the project. The assigned objects (which have been assigned randomly) will also appear on the Final Project Groups page. Feel free to get a head start on modeling these whenever you have time as they will be due two days after the assignment: November 28. Unfortunately, this is Thanksgiving, so there will be no in-class critique of these objects. We will review the objects with the group in charge of getting them all placed in the scene to make sure that they are in fact useable.
NEXT: All the objects will be placed in a scene together as they are in the fully setup boardgame. One group has been assigned this as their responsibility. That is to say that they are responsible for getting it done... not necessarily for doing it themselves. Remember, people need to work together, but someone has to be responsible for making things happen.
THEN: Each group will have to develop a story idea about why the mousetrap is going off and what happens when it does. This will include THREE CHARACTERS. You will have just about complete freedom when it comes to these three characters. You may (1) model your own, (2) use existing models from previous years (remember that these will take time to learn how to use), and/or (3) use models/objects you find elsewhere.
The first character is whoever is turning the crank (i.e., YOU in the original game) that starts the mousetrap in motion. You will need to develop a motivation behind this character for the story as well as what happens with this character later on.
The second character is the "little green man" who gets (i.e., in the original game) launched off the see-saw into the bucket. Again... motivation and result.
The third character is the mouse (i.e., in the original game) who gets trapped. Motivation and result.
Remember that these characters can be anything from – a mouse, man, and person – to – a plasma cloud, force of nature, and the object being affected come to life. Be creative, but remember things must make sense in your story.
Also, you are to use the models as they are given to you, BUT you may modify them with blend shapes, deformers, animated geometry, etc.. Just make sure that at the beginning, your board looks like everyone else's board.
THEN: Each group will implement their story with their models. One member of the team will act as the lead animator, and the other member of the team will act as the lead technical director (TD). This means that one person is mainly responsible for the animation and the other for shading and lighting. Of course you can both do some of each role's jobs, but we will be looking at the final project with the idea that one was animation and one was TD. You will also be asked to explain your involvements in your writeup, so we will have a better idea about who did what.
Remember to think about composition, anticipation, result, and all the other aspects of visual story telling. We really want you to develop a good story around these objects. Think about how you will use the camera angles... perhaps an animated camera!... to construct your story and the feeling that the viewer will be left with.
You will eventually be using (at least) Premier to put your scenes together. While this can be very basic, it can also be very complex. (We'll be doing some kind of demo later to get you started on using Premier... don't worry, it's not too difficult to get used to...) Decide early on what kind of compositing ideas you may want to use. For example, you may decide to use a split screen motif to tell your story. You may want to use different transitions or multiple layers of partially transparent images to tell your story better. This is all up to you and we will be helping you individually figure out how to implement these ideas. Premier and After Effects are VERY powerful programs, and if you can think of it, you can probably do it with them.
FINALLY: If there's time, we may additionally take pieces of each group's story and put it all together into a class story. For example, we may use group 1's crank turning, group 2's foot kicking the bucket, group 3's ball rolling down the ramp, etc.... This will take some real collaboration on the part of the class as you decide which ones to use and then get them working together.
Hopefully we will be able to do this portion without a lot of re-rendering, in which case it should be feasible in the time given as it will be just a lot of basic editing. As this is a bit of a wild-card, this part of the final project will be of last priority and will not be considered in the grading. But it should be a lot of fun!!!
SOME
THOUGHTS ON TIME
As TIME is one of the main issues you will be dealing with in this project, I ask that you DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE TIME NEEDED. This is an ambitious, but very doable project. The fact that you will be working TOGETHER is probably the most difficult part. Everyone has different schedules and meeting/delegating will be your first hurdle.
RENDERING is also a HUGE time issue. Rendering final scenes can take days. Do not forget this. It can be particularly helpful to you if... when leaving for the night... IF there is a free computer, you set a render off every night. Then when you come back, you at least have something... so if you run out of time (or resources) at the end, you at least will have something to show.
Doing this early on can help guarantee that you finish.
Also, it is very common to not get your final touches into the final product. This is to be expected. The process is extremely iterative as you know, and you will find that with your final iterations, you may run out of time. SO MAKE SURE YOU THINK ABOUT THIS.
What we're looking for
·
Your best work, period.
· Quality rather than quantity. Don't try to do too many things. We want to see a story – well integrated characters and motion. Be careful not to get too carried away with tricks and fancy stuff. This may risk you not finishing or... almost worse yet... this may just make the entire project's quality suffer.
· Remember that you can use VERY simple objects for your characters and keep your animation to a minimum if you want. The overall effect and story are more important than a lot of animation and/or complicated models. We are giving you simple objects to start with so that you can concentrate on the story and getting the whole thing to work together.
·
It might help to think of this project as a job
application for spring quarter. Your performance on this project will help us
decide who will be placed on certain teams--and who will lead them-- in the
spring.
Turn in
Turn in may vary depending on your final project, but for all projects include
binary files used and the final composited, rendered sequence. In the off
chance that you can't finish, you should include enough things for us to evaluate
what you did. For example, if you can't get things rendered in time, include a
playblast of the animation.
All turnin files should be placed in x:/cse458_au02/<username>/TURN_IN/proj5/
by 11:59pm on Tuesday, Dec. 17.