First thoughts on almost final render

Saw the animation being pieced together today. I am really impressed with some of the scenes within the animation, and I think it's clear that people have put a lot of effort into their work. I think that some of the scenes could have benefited from some better camera work though to liven them up a bit, but the animation is looking quite good so far. I like the choice of music, though I think that it definitely needs to liven up a little bit when all of the action kicks in. Can't wait to see the final version.

I am also really annoyed and also very sorry for my scene not being rendered by today. The scene was just too much for my computer to render. Also, when I set up 6 computers to render the scene at uni today, 5 out of the 6 crashed. So the last option I have left is to leave it to Tim to see if his powerful computer can handle it. Fingers crossed...

Not going too well

Ok, so I have been trying to render the gun deck scene all damn weekend with no success. To sum it up, my computer comes up with an error and closes whenever I try to render the scene. I have managed to render 1 frame out of a total 350. I also tried getting into the computer rooms today to set them rendering but found that everything upstairs in the sawyers building was locked. My only hope of rending this scene is to get in tomorrow and set this thing up on a lot of computers and hope that it renders. Failing that, give it to Tim to render and then see if I can slot the scene into the final animation some time in the week, as I really want this scene to be included as it isn't just my work that went into making it. :/

Gun deck

Ok so I am really underway with animating this scene now. I have the camera follwing a path to the cannon. One of the enemy ships then goes past the hole and the cannon shoots. I just need the final sea (not sure if the one I downloaded of humyo is the final one), the sky, the crew and some smoke effects (mine are a little shabby).

The other thing is that I'm not sure if I will be able to have the lamps swinging as I originally hoped, as the rendering is pretty harsh because of all of the effects. I'm not sure if Tim's super computer will be able to handle this, but the ones at uni and my computer here are not up to it. :/

First preview of the gun deck

Ok so this is the gun deck that sadigh made. The cannons are from James Ticket and I've added in the lights, the rammer and sponge and then temporary background. The floor in this picture is also temporary, and is being made by Tim.

Bucket

Just a simple bucket with a slightly less simple rope handle.

Bowl

Just a simple bowl.

I love lamp

Been working on this lamp tonight. If you have looked around at all of the pictures from inside HMS Victory then you would have seen this lamp everywhere. Anyway, the lamp didn't take all that long to model, but the lighting is a different matter. I have spent the majority of the night just playing with all of the lighting settings to get this to look right. Changing the advanced effects like the volume lighting and the lens effects to get the right look. I don't think its too far off at the moment. In these few pictures the light is in a fairly dark environment, but I don't think I will need to worry too much about this in the final animation as it all happened in daylight. So it's not like these lights will need to be lighting everything up inside the ship.
This is just the lamp thrown into a scene with my barrels. The lighting effects on this image were the original ones. The previous image is the result of a few more hours of tweaking. To be honest though, a lot of the time I didn't actually know what was doing what. The things that worked one moment decided to stop working another. Very confusing stuff.

I do realise that on the modelling front, things are going a little slowly. But at the same time I am also mapping things and playing about with lighting and animation. :)

P.s. I realise that the mapping of the walls in the background is pants, but I just slapped it on because I needed some walls. So don't be worried that the walls look crap. ;)