The Process

Animation

I was unsure of what to do at first. I asked a friend if he had any ideas and he told me to make a fish watching a cat that is in a fish tank. A little weird, I thought but I decided to try to do it. I ended up making a model of a cat, fish, table, and fish tank. Then when looking up the best way to do water, I came across Reactor. Reactor is a physics engine built into 3D Studio Max. I started playing around with it and thought it would be neat to do an animation of a chain of events using Reactor.

I did everything pretty much in the order you see them in the video. I pretty much just added one object at a time with a lot of trial and error to make it work. For every object you must specify a weight, friction, and elasticity. I was having a problem though. Every time I added a new object, it was screwing up what I had done previous. The outcome would be different. By default Reactor uses the Havok 1 engine for the physics. However, it also has the newer Havok 3 engine as well. I had to switch to Havok 3 to get consistent results. The problem with Havok 3 though, is that it only supports Rigid Bodies. I originally wanted to have stuff like a conveyor belt and a trampoline. That became impossible because that would have needed Soft Bodies or Cloth which couldn't be done using Havok 3. Knowing those limitations I had to come up with some different ideas. You see those ideas in the animation. It took a ton of trial and error before I got everything working.

Everything you see in the animation was modeled by me. The textures were also all done by me as well except for the floor and wall textures. A transparency (or opacity) map was used for the net. All the other textures were done with stuff built into 3D Studio Max. Such as the wood, marble, and metal textures. I used Raytrace for everything.

With modeling, texturing, and animation done, I just had to set up the cameras. I set up the camera for each shot one by one. I used a target camera for each shot. I rendered each shot individually. After I had them all rendered, I used Adobe Premiere to combine them into one movie. I also added the credit screen with it.

I then began looking for some music to add to it. After trying to find a song, I decided to just quickly make my own. Using FL Studio, Realstrat, and Guitar Rig I came up with an alright short simple melody. I added a bass with Vanguard and just used some drums built into FL Studio.

I made sure nothing was compressed until the very end to ensure a fairly high quality in video and sound.