www.raveanimation.co.uk/theride.html This is a link to our final year film that I worked on.


http://www.raveanimation.co.uk/jc.html This is my showreel link.



http://www.cumuluslondon2009.com/introductions09/interview.php?uid=70&id=3

Now that we come to the end of the year where we handed in our film in on the Friday just gone Ive take some time to reflect on the overall project.

I was very please to be working on Anna’s film with Dan Cripps and Dan Ryan as we all get on very well with each other and know that we can rely and trust one another.
From the very beginning we all new our roles in the film. Me, Anna and Dan Ryan will be doing modelling, texturing, concept art, while Dan Cripps will be animating and rendering. We all decided the camera shot from for the story boards to the block out as we could all discuss and talk about each scene.

The film as a whole has been very enjoyable to work on learning many new things like texturing in Mudbox, using render layers, using the render farm and many other bits. Am very please with the out come of our final film, as it shows off all our skills that we put into the film. Although we still have had our fair share of problems along the way with many things like the rendering farm being stupid, rigging problems and other technical stuff. What it all comes down to is the final animation film at the end and I think this is a good reflection of our 3years at Ravensbourne. There are still a few things that we need to tweak on the film for the RSA degree show as other factors out of our control have stopped us working on parts but this wont be major changes so it won’t take too long.

Am glad that we have finished our film now and that all the hard work has paid off to produce what we have, but on the other hand a little sad that we wont be working together anymore on a project and seeing other people as much from our class.

Our only other thing to consider is entering our film into different animation festivals and to win as many as possible. :D

Heres a time plan for Easter and the third term.

The other terms time plans can be found on Annas blog page here:

http://therideproject.blogspot.com/2009/06/aims-for-last-two-weeks.html

This is scene one shot seven that I have compositied together and graded to show the different layer involved in making up this scene.
In the image there is a character layer, an enivronement layer, a sky layer, paint effects layer and a shadow layer.
I thought this would be a good way of showing people the different layers in this video below.

The ride scene 1 shot 7 from Jake Childs on Vimeo.

Now we have a render farm one may think that everything would go soo smoothly with rendering and things would be rendered a lot quick then rendering from one pc machine. This is the common thought most people had in our class. Over the last couple of weeks we have had many issues with the farm like;

• Only using one CPU out of 128 which makes it useless. (This was resolved)
• Maya jobs keep failing.
• Simple renders taking ages to render out.
• Getting stuck on one frame making the whole job fail.
• Rendering the frames out saying that its done but only to find the images are blank.
• Finding missing frames when its says its complete.

If there's lots of different jobs going at once and more pending then it WILL be quicker to render on a local machine then sending it to the render farm. The old way seems to be more reliable and less hassle providing that we have computers to work on..

This term is probably the most intensive use that the render farm has been put under. There was always going to be some problems as being one of the first to use this. But hopefully issues can be resolved for the next time.

Here are some screen shots of the cave where you can see inside from the out side.

Forth cave
Third caveSecond cave
First cave

Some more screen shots of the cave in wireframe mode.

Most of this week we all have been compositing together the images that have been rendered out. There has been a few problems with some of the layers where some things in the scene have been left out which means they have to be rendered out again, wasting more time.
But now we have got most of the scene all rendered out and composited, its just a few little things to clean up here and there, so I think its going ok.