Editing pt 2 and final animation

The final part of editing and cleaning up requires me to add in any audio that the animation needs. The sound effects and dialogue was all created by myself using Audacity to record the sounds. The dialogue was pretty straight forward however the sound effects were a little bit more difficult.

One of the sound effects that i used was ambient noise such as people talking and a vehicle passing by. These were recorded by using a Noise machine which is designed to help you sleep.
The other sound effect that i created were the laser pistol sounds and the can rebounding off of the wall. The pistol sound was created by saying 'Pew' into the microphone and then adding reverb and changing the pitch to be more high pitched. This was then slowed down and put into reverse for when the Main character first uses the pistol as the laser chargin up.

The other sound that i created was the can sound that was used when the can hit each wall. This sound was created by slamming an empty can down on my desk and then changing the pitch to be lower. This sound was also used in the scene where the main character knocks on a metal door.


To add a bit of atmosphere to the animation, i used 3 pieces of music throughout. These are Royalty free pieces of music created by Kevin MacLeod available on incompetech.com. These pieces of music were used to also fill in the empty spaces when there is not any dialogue as well as being an underlying sountrack in the scenes.

The three pieces of music used are called Hard Boiled, Spyglass and Volatile reaction.

Hard Boiled

Hard Boiled Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

 Spyglass

 Spy Glass Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Volatile reaction

Volatile Reaction Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

After the final editing check, the animation is finally ready to be viewed and is available below

Editing

Now that all four scenes of my animation have been rendered, there is only one more step that needs to be completed to finish the animation and that is editing the scenes together and making any changes such as area that go on too long and any other effects.

To edit the scenes together used a piece of software called Vegas pro 15. This sofware is generally used for more complex video editing however this worked fine for my needs.

Once the scenes are put together one of the first things that needed to be done was to remove the green screens in big chief's office. Initially i made the monitors have a green screen as it made it much easier to add in a video after the scene was rendered.  However when applying a chroma key effect, other green objects in the scene would also be made transparent. To combat this, i used a technic called masking which allowed me to designate specific areas so that were to be removed. I learnt more about the technique in the video below created by youtube user Tech Dive. Once this was done, i could move onto the next edit.

The next edit that was made was to add in text to the end of scene 1 and the teh beginning of scene 2. During these parts of the scene it involves a first person perspective of the main character shutting down and rebooting. By default, the text that can be added as an overlay has no special propeties and can only have basic effects such as tranformations and transitions be added to it. However i wanted these sequences to function more how an old computer would in the command line or a typewriter where each character is typed out individually. To do this i followed the video below created by youtube user timetokickit on which allowed me to use an effect called ProType which allowed me to do this.

The result of this makes the text added on to the scenes look much more dynamic and much more exciting to look at.

Another important edit that needed to be made is the ajustment of brightness and contrast. Some scenes such as Big chief's office and the Greasy Can exterior where fine in terms of brightness. However The city street scene was much too bright and the Greasy Can interior was much too dark. To fix this i added a brightness filter which allowed me to increase or decrease the brightness to the desired level. This edit fixed a problem which i was having when trying to get the scene lighting right much earlier in the project development.

Scene 4 Rendered

Much like the previous scenes, the video was exporte using Vegas Pro 15 and was initially rendered as many Jpeg images.

Scene 3 Rendered

Much like scene 1 and 2 i rendered the scene using Jpegs and imported them into Vegas Pro 15.

Below is the Raw video file unedited.

Scene 2 Rendered

To render Scene 2 i followed the same steps outlined in the scene 1 render.

Below is the Raw video file for scene 2

Scene 1 Rendered

There are several ways of rendering movies in maya such as exporting to Avi files or .iif files. However these have a drawback, when exporting to avi, if there is anyproblem in the animation that causes it to stop rendering, the whole video file would be ruined. This also means that if i wanted to change anything in certain frames, i would have to re render the whole video. Rendering to .iff files which is the default was also not an option as i dont have any software that supports them. Therefore i decided to render the scene into Jpeg images. This helped to keep the file size low since jpegs are compressed images. 

Once the 1000+ images were rendered, i selected them all and placed them into Vegas Pro 15. This then set them in order at the framerate of 25 frames. I then exported the selection of files into an MP4 video. this then changed the video from being roughly 2 GB images to being just 52MB. 

Below is the Raw rendered file with no editing or sound

Villain robots

The villainous mafia robots, are designed to be the bad guys of the animation. My original intent was to have a larger group of them attacking Vendo and the Main character however, decided that the having one larger and more imposing 'hitman' was fit the role better.

This character was originall going to be Grease gun kelly which was outlined in my initial story ideas. However i decided to change the story to what happens within the storyboards and this character which was Greasgun kelly was no longer needed. Instead this robot is now going to be the mafia hitman that ambushes Vendo and MC when they are in the bar.



The character model for the robot stated with an sketch much like all of the others, the above image was imported into maya and was used to model the character around. The general shape and appearance of the character stayed, however, the finished model is much more smoothed and doesnt have extending arms like it is mentioned in the sketch.

Once the modelling was complete, colours and a skeleton was applied. This character did not need a skeleton, however to get the arms to bend, a skeleton was bound to the mesh . This then allowed me to move the arms and have control over the fingers.

In the scene this robot is designed to have a laser pistol in its right hand which he uses to shoot at Vendo and MC