Premier Pro

To stitch together the various scenes of my animation, I used Adobe Premier Pro. This was a steep learning curve as I have never used this software before. I firstly imported all 8 scenes into the program. I then moved them in order onto the time line. I rendered the uncompressed files to make sure that they were in the correct order and they were rendered properly. It was at this point I was able to add my sound, the introduction to the animation and the end credits.

The Render Setup

Rendering was a little harder then expected. Not only did the system take a lot of time to render it also tended to go wrong several times. The settings required to render the project were very tight, thus requiring me to re-render 3 scenes that were required to be uncompressed (where as I had them set up to compress). The settings for the render were as follows:

• The render was to be in HDTV 720x1280
• The file was to be uncompressed
• The file needed to be saved as an .avi

Render Setup



Lights, Camera, Action

For my animation I have used 7 different cameras to get various different angles of my animation. This means there will be 8 different scenes (as I have split the last render into 2). The cameras I have used have been target cameras as I have found they are easier to use and are good for filming the action I wanted in my animation. To focus the camera and zoom in and out of my various different objects I have used the set key, as I found out earlier on in my animation, less can go wrong with the set key.

Camera Setup

I have also decided to use the daylight system lighting, which I have set to Rome (to give my animation that authentic Italian feel). I have also included one omni light in front of the target as this was an area that rendered very dark, due to the target facing away from the daylight system.

Daylight system settings

Rendering Issues

I am currently having a few teething problems with the final scene of my animation. It seems that the render will not go past 9 seconds. I am going to try and split the render up into smaller chuncks of frames. Hopefully this will fix the problem.


Update 04/04/2012 11:50
Unfortunately the problem can't be rectified and as such the animation will be missing a second. It seems that the render will not get any bigger then 0.99GB

Smoke Signals

Following on from the tutorial I posted on my attempt at spray particles and smoke, I have now learnt the art of adding material to the smoke. To start off with I opened up the material editor, I then went down to maps, click on diffuse colour and then none. Once I got to the drop down menu I clickd on particle age.

Options for the particle ages

I changed th colour options within this and went back to the parent. I also removed the glossiness on the material becuase as well all know smoke it not shiny!!

I then changed the opacity, another option found in the maps tab. I again clicked on none and chose mask from the menu. For the map choice I used noise. And for the second choice (mask), I clicked on gradient, and left the settings as they were.

I am hoping to import this smoke with materials into my animation.

Finished smoke with materials

A Trail of Smoke

As I progress with my animation, I am thinking more about what kind of extras I can add that will give it a more realistic feeling. I have been thinking about adding smoke but I wouldn't know where to start. Thanks to the useful tutorial on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azn8i81pAm0). I am now just about able to do it, with a few minor issues here and there. The particle system I have used to create the test smoke below is the Super Spray, which has been set to the fireworks setting. I started off by dragging the particle system onto the stage. I then chose the preset firework and clicked load.

I plan to adjust the various settings until I get a smoke like system that will look it has come from the cannon. I am going to edit the start and end time, as well as the density, size and shapes of the particles.

Morphing The Face

Todays tutorial featured the morpher tool. This was something that I found very interesting and something that I found out will come very handy when working with characters (next year in 3D character modelling). We were provided with a basic face to which we created three instances. To these three faces, different emotions (jaw drop, blinking and eye brow raising).

Polygon selecter tool was used to raise the eyebrows of the far right face, and make the face in the middle blink. The grow tool was used to extend the mouth of the face on the left. Once this was all done, I clicked on the original face and went to the modify tab. I then went to the drop down menu and clicked on morph. When the channels menu poped up, I right clicked and chose add morph from scene and chose a model. I repeated this processes for the rest of the models. This gave the orginal face the traits of all the edited replicas. To finish off the process the orginal face was turbo smoothed and the three morphers hidden from view.