Assignment 2: The Animation - First Impressions

So, models more or less completed, maybe a few tweaks to do. The task which befalls me now is to use them by putting them into an animation, using 3DS Max. Sounds easy enough, famous last words I know.

To Do List:

• Texture the models 
• find/create textures for each model.
• edit the textures in photoshop if needed.
• apply textures to their respective models.

• Create the animation scene - started.
• Create the skybox(Geosphere was the suggested shape to use for this, in a task during the lecture) - The Geosphere has to be quite large to fit the scale of the models, and how much they need to move, I decided on an initial size of 10,000 by 10,000 units, may increase or decrease this over time...
• Find Texture for said Geo-Sphere. I'm finding this difficult since the animation is set on Tatooine instead of in space, so a suitable sky texture would be needed to account for Tatooine's two suns. I have a few textures which I'm considering for this, but none are quite right in my opinion. I may just go with one of them for now, and then change it later once the animation has made more progress.
• Create the plane which will be the floor that the models move on, easy enough, it's a flat plane with the same dimensions on the X and Y axis as the Geosphere used for the sky. The slightly tougher part is finding a suitable sand texture, I have one or two in mind..
• Insert the finished models into the animation scene. I did this already before the models were finished, to get a scale of how big the area needs to be.

• Apply Lighting to the scene
• Not as easy as I thought, and having to constantly re-render the scene in a separate window to check the lighting every time I change something, or want to get a different view of the models, is incredibly annoying. This was after I spent ages trying to figure out how to show the lighting on the perspective view in real time. This would be so I could freely rotate and change them to see how the light reacts. From what I've found, it seems you can't do this, which makes it harder to work with for me.

• Start Animating!
• I'll start this once the models are finished, since they're integral to how the animation will be created, and I can't replace the models once the animation has started to take form.
• I don't expect the animation itself will be too difficult, since I have a good idea of what I want for the animation from the storyboard, the difficult part of the animation in my opinion will probably be figuring out the tools to control the camera, and getting it into the right place.