Chapter 9
Conclusion
Egypt
BC (Before Composition)
The sheer amount of music that was
auditioned for this project was incredible. The first
piece, ‘Desert Rose’ from the album ‘Brand New Day’
by Sting was in actual fact the original inspiration
for the project. The piece is a type of duet where Sting
sings of an impossible love and Cheb Mami echoes the
song in an Arabic style. This conjured ideas as to what
could really be an impossible love, what boundary could
not be crossed, and after a long deliberation the idea
of ‘time’ seemed to fit. The original project was to
place the story between two time zones, Ancient Egypt
and 1920’s Egypt, where a young archaeologist is tortured
in his dreams by the desire for a particular ancient
Egyptian Princess, which he has fallen in love with.
The idea was to have him eventually travel back in time
in order to save her from her fate.
The timescale needed to complete
this was outside the projects’ capabilities; however
as the piece was to be set in the Amarna period the
project would be used to create part of the staging
needed for the larger animation. As a result of this,
the animation created for the project can be likened
to a production showcase.
It is allways good practice to take
a good look at your work and pull it to bits to find
the weak points - not only in the project - but in yourself
- this will help you to improve. [And there's allways
room for improvement]
There were many things that went
wrong during this project, the following is a brief,
and my no means complete, summary.
More research needs to go into the
artwork of the Amarna period, and this artwork needs
to be reflected in the buildings & textures around
the city.
The city needs to be completed. There
are still a large amount of buildings that need to be
constructed, especially along the riverside as this
is where most of the city’s industrial sector was. This
area had various different types of building and this
would obviously add to the realism of the city.
Although the river has two boats
afloat, the Nile was full of many different types, mostly
small fishing boats. There needs to be more of these
built and spread along the riverside.
The foliage needs a complete overhaul.
A large proportion of the trees are not optimised for
distance rendering, making the scene quite polygon intensive.
Further research needs to be done in this area to see
if there are other, better, solutions for plant life.
The trees also need to be planted better, with a tree
base texture on the ground plane.
Image motion blur was used throughout
the project as real 3d object motion blur would have
increased the render times by a factor of around 10-12,
which was totally unrealistic for this timescale. However,
image motion blur is not a very accurate method and
does not work well with transparent objects or objects
in front of each other. Although this does not hurt
the project for the most part, it certainly did not
work very well for the bug sequence as can be seen by
the strange motion of the wings.
The animation of the priestess needs
more work to smooth out odd glitches in the walk.
This project was undertaken for a
number of reasons. One of these was to experiment with
the various methods of animation available to the 3d
artist today. Although the methods were known, actually
using each one for a particular sequence meant gaining
further experience in areas not normally visited by
the author. The project has also enabled the author
to research and develop models and scenes for further
expansion, and to gain a deeper insight into a fascinating
period in the history of the world.
This has been a very enjoyable and
rewarding project - but it's not finished yet!
Paul
Docherty 2002
