Wednesday, November 29, 2006

3D-izzy

Being really busy with my 3D assignment lately, even though the final exam for my MA in Multimedia draws near (actually I'll be sitting for two papers tomorrow. Wuhhhuh~). I'm in front of the PC monitor for about 6 hours now fixing the A3 sized 'posters' for a giant booklet, which is part of the final hand-up.

This subject, formally called 3D Animation & Special Effects has no paper-based exams, but the assignment loads are pretty scary: four phases altogether, so if you slacked off a bit during one of the phases, then there's a hell lot to make up for. So, even though there’s no final exam, there’s still quite a bit of pressure of the coming presentation and the hand-up of one-semester project.

Plus, a 30-second animation is required, which is a pain in the a** to produce. 30 seconds is very short when viewed, but the production can take a few days. Here's the Math: if you have a lot of textures and image mapping for you models, one frame (one still image) will probably takes 11 minutes to render (that's my scenario). For PAL-video standard, there are 25 frames in one second, that's 25 X 11 minutes of crunch time to produce one second of animation (which is like nothing to our eyes). So, 30 seconds? You need 8,250 minutes = 137.5 hours = 5 days and 17 hours of heart-pumping prayer session to do (pray that the entire stuff goes well).

Of course, there's safer way to do things: break up the animation sequence into pieces, so that you only render a few seconds now, and another few parts of the work on another day. This will help your computer to rest a bit in between those rendering processes as well.

When this is over, my computer would probably send me nightmares for what I’ve made it suffered all these days!

Stage 3_Items copy_s Stage 3_Lighting copy_s
Some of the modeling work done by me ^o^

CD-Box_Cropped
The CD Box cover design for the final hand-up. No no, my project is not a horror story anymore, and yes yes, the kid sitting is me when I was 4