And so we've come.....to the eeeeend of the road.....

Well not quite. We still have the last hurrah to do tomorrow and that is handing in a video. We spent the whole day trying to render out our main room scenes. We tried absolutely everything, we even had to sacrifice the chandalier in the end as it was making the file just too big. Overall the file size was around the 230,000 MB mark. This proved to be the renedering problem as to why the scene was not being rendered. The file proved to be just too much for the college render system to handle in large batches. We tried rendering 10 frames out on a machine on a low res which has worked. Then Ash sent a batch of 250 frames to the render farm with lower res settings and in maya software, whereas we were using mental ray before. This was working but then I had to leave earlier than the other guys. I feel dissappointed not being there and for leaving them to work later for a few nights last week too as I really wanted to be part of the climax to the project.

Looking back at it all now that its almost finished, I can see how far I have come personally and as a group as explained on the group blog. It has been a fantastic experience and one that I am so happy to have been part of. I have loved every single minute of this term and working with Josh, Ash and Spencer. We have worked so successfully as a group that I would always consider working with them again. We have planned our project time out well, apart from the last weeks, we kind of underestimated the render time. This all builds up experience which everyone needs and it has proven to be good experience at that. Maybe a tip for future is not to make the maya scene so damn big!

Josh is a fantastic guy. I have never worked with him before on a project but he has been a very valuable asset to us. He always gives ideas of what we can do to a scene, willingly recieves and gives advice on how to make things better. It was originally his idea to base our environment on the resident evil mansion, and so knew the layout of the main room very well. He has been motivated throughout. I love his sense of homour and I dont know what Ravensbourne would be like without him. He always likes to have a laugh even when things werent going well for us.

I think the saying goes something like; great things come in small bunches. This is Ashley. Like with Josh, I've never worked with him before on a project and barely said a few words to him in the first year. I am so glad to have worked with him on this project and have found just how hard he works for a team. He oversaw most of the production of the study. His time and dedication to this shows because the room is superb. As I said at the formative, He was our team medic. If we ever had a problem he would more often than not know how to fix it. I have really enjoyed working with him and feel a good freindship has been made through this project.

Spencer is one of the hardest working people around. He is always working on a project even out of college hours. Like Ash with Josh, Spencer has been there with me since the foundation diploma so we know each other pretty well, like our strengths and weaknesses and over the years we have become really good friends. He is a fantastic artist and knows his colours too well. He put most of the colour tints in the lights which makes our scene look better. I have worked with him on a few projects before and I think this is our best one to date.

From a personal view of the outcome, I will always be willing to work with these guys again and hope to do so in the future. I think we set ourselves a good standard to aim for and has turned out better than we were expecting. Although it is dissappointing not being able to render out the mansion scene to its full capacity, it still looks amazing and I think it will be a great addition to our show reel. I feel that I have had a good input to the project and I am more than happy that they gave me the responsibility of animating the camera as animation is my main interest. I feel that I have pulled it off well. Yeah some areas could have been better but as a whole I am happy with it. Also, that they let me take most of the control over the production of the basement. I am a huge fan of horror and I think I have incorporated this well into the basement scene. I would describe to them how I wanted it to look and with Spencer's help I achieved what I visioned it to be and that it is easily seen that my influences came from the saw films to those that have seen the films. I feel that this project expresses our individual personalities as well as we are all huge fans of games and our graphical look to the animation is reminicant to that of a horror video game, such as Condemned. I was always asking their opinion of progress I was making with anything i was doing such as the camera, modelling and texturing and I feel that I responded well to criticism, mostly when animating the camera to show certain bits of the environment.

Anyway I've blabbed on enough now i think. I hope the guys feel that I have been a worthwhile team member and we can build on the good friendships we have made together and take it into the new year. I would love to work with them again if the opportunity comes.

Merry Xmas and ill see you all in the new year xx