Animating the scene and characters

After completing the environments and all the assets for the scene. I began animating it, using my storyboard as a guide on where cameras should go and what movements need to be done by the characters. I also imported the sound file given by the competition into 3Ds Max which gave me a soundwave on the timeline to look at. This was very helpful with matching up the voice acting with lipsyncing that I did later and also for timing the movements correctly so that they moved at a realistic speed.

The first thing I started animating was the movements of the character's body. I found this easy as the rig I was given has simple to manipulate body parts and sections. After completing this part of the animating I moved onto creating the facial expressions of the two characters, which I found to be easier now since I could time them with the body movements more effectively. However, for the eyebrows I had to replace them with my own eyebrows I created for the character as the ones that were on the premade rig seemed broken as I couldn't move them with the dummy on the control panel.

The final thing I animated was the lipsyncing, which was interesting to do as ive never tried matching animation up to a soundclip before so accurately. I found it relatively simple however, as the premade rig, with all its controllers, made it easy to move the mouth into the different shapes that the audio clip required.

 I split the animation up this way as it let me focus on different aspects of the animation properly and organize my keyframes in such a way that I knew what movements they performed at a quick glance.

After I had finished I converted the scene into a VRay scene ready to be rendered and added lighting to the scene. I changed and modified the render settings, camera properties and lighting in the scene until I achieved a dark, shadowy room in the render, which was suitable as it was supposed to take place inside of the basement lab.

After the render was completed, I imported the images into premier as an image sequence and made sure the settings allowed for high quality while still keeping the file size low. I also had to match up the audio again, as of course the images will not have retained the sound. After rendering it in premier I imported it into a program called 'Handbrake' which, by using a preset given by the competition, allowed me to convert it into a size, file type and file size that could be uploaded onto the site.

I have now uploaded the clip and am awaiting feedback from the viewers on the site and will write a conclusion based on that feedback and my own opinion of the project.