Overall, this project has been a fun and enjoyable experience that has presented challenge and obstacles to overcome. I feel choosing to work with a piece of software that I had no prior knowledge of like Cinema 4D (C4D) was the best choice. Initially, when considering my options, I came to the realisation that working with Adobe Muse wouldn’t have benefited me as greatly as working with C4D as I had already used the software in Semester B. Also feel that pushing myself into something unknown has further developed my ability to conduct effective research. As I didn’t know how to operate C4D, I had to find information that would tell me how to use the software and how to achieve certain results. A good example of this was finding a video by Greyscalegorilla, explaining his 3 favourite modifiers within x-particles, a lot of this information what highly useful in my own project.
Along with this journey, I faced a lot of difficulties. As my project was unique, it was very difficult to find direct solutions to my problems, and because of this, I ended up conducting a lot of research online, specifically on YouTube to find hints as to what might be wrong. Additionally, not all of my problems where technical, some of them were subjective as I would work on one aspect of my project for a long time and would constantly go back to refine the settings, e.g. I could spend hours changing the colour of the cube to try and make it complementary with the other colours within the scene.
One of the main and most challenging problems I faced when creating my animation was the displacement map. Discussed above, the edges of the cube didn’t align properly and produced holes on the vertices, this meant that I had to conduct further research on the issue and I found myself looking on a lot of forums. Fortunately, I was able to find cheat to solving this issue with a bevel deformer, however, this didn’t actually solve the issue, it was more of a mask for the problem. Furthermore, I also experience frustrating problems of C4D crashing after rendering. One instance of this involved the programme crashing after rendering the first shot for 30+ hours, this was a difficult issue to comprehend and forced to learn the hard way about specifying a save location before starting renders.
When approaching future projects like this one, I would allow myself more time to render. Within my Gantt chart, I highly underestimated the amount of time I would need to render, and I quickly came to the realisation that it wouldn’t finish before the deadline. Subsequently, there were ways around this, however, it meant that the rendering quality had to be dropped, producing a low-resolution image. In addition, I would also select an output location before rendering, this would prevent any loss any of rendered material if the programme crashed.
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