Final Evaluation

Overall I am pleased with what I have produced in this past 12 or so weeks.

Having not used 3ds Max prior to the module, I feel I have come quite a long way with it, not only to produce 3 models, but also a 30 second animation, which in my opinion came out rather well.  If I were to change anything, if I had the time would have been make another animation for the last shot. Originally I had planned for the TIE to fly off into the distant looping as he went.  But when using 3ds Max when I was trying to create the loop, I kept finding that the program would try to work out the TIE's orientation that led to some odd results, and when I tried to intervene and add rotational key frames, it got even stranger.  Due being pushed for time I decided to abandon this idea, as if I had eventually worked out the problem and it did not look pleasing, it would have been time wasted.

Whilst I like how the animation ended, it could have been smoother, the transition from the 1st TIE animation to the 2nd weren't quite as smooth as I'd hoped, but I feel it does close the video nicely as it's a good way to fade to black once the TIE fills the screen.

The video itself didn't take overly long to make, once I had all my shots I could edit them in After Effects and then shoot them into Premiere with no troubles at all.  What did a long time was rendering from 3ds Max, at least 2 of my renders were 6+ hours, and unfortunately due to time constraints, I had to render one shot in draft settings, hopefully nobody will notice which shot it is...! To speed up render time I did however render 1 object at a time for example, just the X-Wing, and then just the TIE.  I feel this took less time as there was less in the shot for the renderer to have to rerender, and less calculations to make at one time, as 3ds Max will use 100% of available CPU power, so the more power it has for a simpler task, the quicker it will be.

I feel the techniques I used cover a wide range of different animation techniques, although I feel had I used 3ds Max more so for animation I would have had a harder time.  With my prior knowledge of After Effects I knew exactly what to do to achieve my chosen results, to do the same, or at least similar, 3ds Max would have left me stumped.