Final Thaughts.

As the project has now been completed, and a presentation prepared, an it is now a good place to sum up the experience.
The groups were assigned in week 1 after which minimal progress was made due to the creation of a 3d head. In this period of time a visit was made to the museum of power, and a short group meeting was arranged to decided from which of the models we should look into taking further.
The model was chosen, and research into it was made over the next few weeks. Once the 3d head had been created, all work switched to the model.
Within the group, we all found that we had different areas of expertise. In my case, I was best at animation, cameras, lighting, and as the member with the newest version of the software and the most power (64-Bit) rendering.
In agreement with the rest of the group we all worked on different areas, which in my situation, I worked on the wheel to go onto the model, followed by animating the model, adding in lights, and then finally rendering it.
Further tasks in addition to this set also included a further low key spinning version of the model, and also part of the final presentation.
During the work on this project I learned several new skills, firstly, how effective group work can be, when everyone knows their strengths and weakness. Also, i picked up several new skills regarding how to build models using proboolean effectivly, and in animation, with my extensive use of the curve editor tool with the animation.
As the group worked so effectively, we were left with plenty of time to render, which is why a 14 hour render did not cause any problems with our time scale. This gave us plenty of time to add in a narration track, and to edit the video footage in Premiere to make sure we had the files which we needed.
Later on small problems with the animations timing were discovered, and whilst it would be possible to fix the issue, because of its minor importance and low visibility as well as then extensive rendering time, it was decided that there would not be enough time or reason to go back almost 3 weeks to fix such a small issue.
Overall, I am pleased with both the work that we have outputted as a group with this project, and also I am pleased with the input to the model that I had, and that I learned new skills.

Another Render.

After creating the final product, a group decision was made that in order to make the presentation of the product to the client more enjoyable; that a untextured rotating un-animated version of the model needed to be created.
The meant opening a previous version, and then removing any animation from it in order to create a greyed out un-animated model.
To make the model rotate, once again, the curve editor was used. In this situation, the model was grouped, and key frames added for it at 0 degrees, 180 degrees and 359 degrees (the 1 degree missing is to avoid a slight delay caused by the same angle being used twice when looping). Then, using the curve editors out of range editor, a simple loop animation was created.
After an initial one frame render, it was decided that the model needed a little mor elighting, so a couple of omni lights were added. The intensity of these lights was too high initially, whoever once they were lowered to 0.4, it was about the right intensity. Shadows were then applied to one light using the advanced shadows setting.
The model was then rendered for 600 frames, giving 20 seconds of animation, which will then be looped for use in the presentation. Unlike the previous render, this version only took 35 minutes.