PICTURES!

Here are pictures of some of the things we've managed to create so far.
















This is a picture of one of the ships we made, turbosmooth applied.















This ship is a more realistic one.

















Our attempt at making a torso...
















And here's the ship on the sea! Or at least, what looks like a sea.

Fruity Fish

Another fruitless RE period. After two hours and lunch, we actually only made a fish! It is actually quite a task to complete the modelling of an object so I guess it wasn't as fruitless after all. We also decided to start researching on how buildings look like so we can model them realistically. We would take photos of buildings to refer to when modelling over the next week by the next RE period. Our RE period won't be fruitless then! We have realised that we are not very organised and do not have a plan or timeline to follow. Hopefully, we would know what we are heading for. What we have completed seems very little but considering that we have never used this program before, what we have done so far is quite commendable. We think that the cause of our slow progress is because none of us do anything work at home.

IMPORTANT: WE HAVE TO COME UP WITH A TIMELINE SOON (when soon? I don't know, we don't have a timeline to tell us when to come up with a timeline)!

We do not seem to be in any rush, and I am afraid we would not be able to finish our product in time.

We hope to organise everything after the exams and tests and do more of the work at home so we are not limited to the time slot of RE periods.

BE MORE POSITIVE!

The hill only gets steeper...

Spending time infront of the screen with befuddling commands and lingo is seriously depressing. There are just so many controls and buttons and functions and terms we need to grasp, in order to create something reasonable. At least we managed to animate a simple wave, which still looks like a piece of rubber flexing.

We've been creating simple stuff, like wave, beach, in order to make the environment we would be working with during the animation. And now that we have the BOOK, in our hands, hopefully progress would be faster, with a guide to lead us through the complexities of the program.

Progress at the end of these two weeks is meagre, but progress is still progress.

Creating a beach is so hard

Animation isn't as easy as we thought, especially since there's no way to create objects by freehand drawing. Instead, everything has to be a modification of their models, boxes, cones, etc. The tutorials are misleading, we took close to 3 hours to complete a 45 minutes tutorial... We decided to create the beach first, but even something that looks as simple as that was more difficult than we thought. To create the slope of the beach, we had to fiddle around with the slice modifier for like... 1 hour +? Oh, but we're still learning!

Storyboarding

Looks like the notebook idea was useless... (Only the first page was used) Anyways, Ms. Tay gave our proposal the thumbs up, and we began on our storyboard.

Shi Kang had this really melodramatic idea for the introduction, with the camera zooming from the Earth, to Japan, to the coast. Then Lawrence added on by saying that we could add a dialogue between two people before that, to give the viewer a bit of background knowledge first. And from there, we expanded on the process of the creation of a tsunami, and thus we finished our storyboard!

Proposal drafted

Didn't know there were so many things to tsunamis. Luckily we all take Physics, and two of us take Geography as well... All those waves, calculations, formulas are simply so confusing. Many things to remember, and so we bought a notebook to keep notes!

We've decided to make this as an educational animation, for those people who either want to get introduced to the workings of a tsunami, or those who have a morbid fascination.

Brainstorming... DONE!

We spent quite a few hours brainstorming on a good topic to animate using the 3d Studio Max program. There were quite a few good ideas; tour of a building (e.g. pyramids), volcanoes, river systems, buildings and architecture of Venice, animated short stories, geometryand many others. After much discussion, where we weighed the pros and cons of each topic, for example, whether we had background knowledge of the topic, whether will making the animation in 3d Studio Max is feasible, and whether the program can truly show movement and depth, otherwise, there would not be any need to use the program to animate.

Finally, we decided on tsunamis. (Worst topic ever, but oh well...) There weren't many pros, but there weren't many cons either. It was the only topic we could all settle on and one of the few which were acceptable.