Over the past seven weeks, my group and I have recreated a steam powered coal pump featured in the 'Museum Of Power', Maldon. The idea was the create the engine from the ground up and show the mechanisms working in an educational and also interesting light. Furthermore we had to show the steam pump being used in the sort of environment it would have been used in decades ago.
Following a visit to the museum and deciding which steam pump we were going to concentrate on, we then decided to assign responsibilities to each group member. So each member of the group could all be working on the project together at the same time, we each designated parts of the steam pumps parts to a member. This allowed us to build the model in less time and as each member was competent modeling the objects we ran into few issues. One important idea we had to take into consideration before creating the objects was to make sure each group member was working to the right measurements. This made it much easier when bringing everything together into one file.
The texturing stage also went mostly without incident. Some of the textures used were created within 'Photoshop', others changed slightly to our requirements, and some others were used from sources on the internet. Creating our own textures allowed us much more flexibility when figuring out what was needed of the materials and how they would be assigned.
The animation stage was probably the most difficult area the group faced in this project. Many of the mechanisms the steam pump uses move at different times, odd angles and at complicated rhythms. One section that turned out to be a lot more complicated than first anticipated was the wheel, and after some hours of experimenting with keyframes, 'Euler X Y Z' and the curve editor we managed a good animation for the wheel. Then after many more hours the animation for the mechanisms were complete, though not exactly how we would of liked them. A couple of the mechanisms were very difficult to join and animate at the exact same time and rate. Also when the loop feature was used to repeat the movements, the mechanisms would get more and more out of position which we couldn't seem to rectify completely. However the animation stage was completed to the best possible standard within the time frame as we couldn't afford to get behind schedule as rendering and post production are very time consuming aspects of the project.
The quickest stage of the project was adding the lights and cameras to the scene. With the environment built and the steam pump now fully complete, it was time to prepare the scene for rendering. Omni lights allowed to light up selected areas as we wished around the scene and created a nice effect on the environment around the main building as the light comes from inside, through the windows and shadows the outside ground. A camera on a path constraint circles around the main building setting the scene, whilst two others inside focused entirely on the steam pump, one remained static as an all encompassing shot and the other zooms in and out whilst circling the engine. The three camera view points were rendered as 'Quicktime' movie files for greater compatibility with mac's. The resolution at 1280 by 768.
With the renders complete, Tom and I used 'Adobe Premier Pro' to build the video for the presentation, along with Stuarts narration and some static images. The Video was exported and then imported into 'Cakewalk Sonar 6' where it was easy to add audio effects prepared by Tom. From here the movie was exported out as an .avi file, running stable and without issue in 'Quicktime' player.
Working within the group environment has been a great experience and has a massive feeling of triumph associated with the project when seeing the whole picture come together. The scene is more technical and has greater scope because of the team effort.
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