Client Meeting Minutes

Lambert Construction – Meeting Minutes:

Monday 19^th November 2012

8:30 – 9:00 Royston:

Meeting Participants: Mark and Client

1.)    Opening: I met with my client, and took a look at their business to understand what will be required.

2.)    Client would like to have a video made displaying these houses, alongside rendered images to be used in future offices, leaflets and a website.

3.)    Closing:  4 different house plans were handed to me to model. It will be down to me how I texture these homes once they’ve been agreed to then can start the animation.

 

 

Monday 3^rd December 2012

9:00 – 9:20 Phone:

Meeting Participants: Mark and Client

1.)    After having a tutorial with my lecturers, it was recommended that I make a deal with my client and meet half way in which we both require.

 

2.)    After getting in touch with my client, we decided that I was to design 2 of the houses and keep 2 of the original plans.

3.)    The animation is now going to be more promotional and involve better use of animation where I will show a house sliced in parts. I’ll also use effects with the subtitles.

 

Saturday 26^th January 2013

13:30 – 14:00 Phone:

Meeting Participants: Mark and Client

 

1.)    Opening: After emailing my client images of the completed models, we spoke on the phone and discussed texturing.

2.)    He was happy with my house design textures and asked to make them as realistic as possible. I showed him the experimentation textures I used for House 3 and he wanted me to make the walls using sawn feather edge wood textures and use barn house style tiled roofing.

3.)    Closing: I’ll work on the textures and wait for my client’s approval before continuing onto the animation.

 

Monday 18^th February 2013

10:30 – 11:00 Shepreth:

Meeting Participants: Mark and Client

1.)    Opening: I showed my client images of my better textured houses which he was happy with.

2.)    We spoke about what Lambert construction does as a business to help write the script for the promotional animation. This was written up and agreed to be used.

3.)    Closing: I will begin working on the animation and will show my client once its ready with rendered images included.

 

Tuesday 12^th March 2013

15:25 – 15:40 Royston:

Meeting Participants: Mark and Client

 

1.)    Opening: I met up with my client in Royston town and provided a disc with the video and image files for them to use. I also brought a laptop to demonstrate the completed work.

2.)    Closing: My client was pleased with what I had created and completed the contract giving feedback.

The Final Images & Video

Final Video:

 

 

Final Images:

 

 

 

These are the Completed Images & The Final Promotional video that I handed to my client.

The Animation Stage

After completing the modelling and texturing, it was time to animate the promotional video. I decided to save my computer from crashing that I would keep each house on a separate file and only import another house to go alongside, depending on the camera view.

 

For the type of animation I was making, I only needed to animate the camera majorly, to achieve the results i wanted. Before beginning, I created a flash animation displaying, just the subtitles as a reference guide for how long these scenes needed to last for.

 

 

House 1 has the most active camera movement and it is also the first house to be seen in the video. Initially I planned to have it compare with a photograph, but decided not to as I felt it would take away some of the professionalism I wanted within the video.

 

 

House 2 at the modelling stage was prepared upfront, by being sectioned off in groups so I could simply select the group and drag them across to make the house split nicely when animating it.

 

The camera was animated to start off moving away from the balcony to highlight its features to then give an overall view of the house to show its large scale. To then flip into a birds eye view and show the house in compartments.

 

I wanted to have neighbouring houses initially, but I didn't want them to collide with the houses walls once they were separated and take away the focus. So I decided to leave it as it was.

 

 

 

I was unsure about the camera animation for this house. I wanted the movement to be slow and relaxing, the lights that I placed inside the house I animated to come on towards the end of the scene to demonstrate electricity. If I went back to change things, I would perhaps give the camera more life and make the lights brighter so it was more obvious what was happening.

 

 

 

House 4 was complicated to get a decent angle of camera movement with and I also needed to time it well to work with the subtitles. I animated the door to swing back and reveal a bright light. To make this, I extruded the walls from the door way and at the far wall, textured with 100% white luminance and glow to make it impossible to see anything within the house. Which can then transition to the flash animated sequence.

 

 

For an intro, I wanted to create a cinematic style for the subtitles. I used Adobe After Effects to create the text with a dark blue & black gradient radial background. Copied the text twice, selected the back layer and added the effects Glow, CC Radial Fast Blur & 4 Color Gradient set to a tone of blues. I experimented in using an additional effect to making the text randomise as if its being typed in. But I didn't feel this worked well with the back glow. In the end I made the text scale smaller and changed the opacity to fade in & out, achieving a much more desirable effect.

 

  

For the last scene, I decided to use Flash to create a simple but professional display of the company logo, address and number. I used blur effects, opacity transitions and a fade to black at the end to finish the promotional video.

 

 

 

After completing all the main scenes, I merged them together in Adobe premiere and then imported that into After Effects to add the subtitles.

Modelling & Texturing The Houses

 I modelled the houses in Cinema 4D, because it has a nice user interface for texturing and I knew that was going to play a major role in this project. I looked at the plans provided carefully and did my best to be as accurate as possible.

Modelling & Texturing House 1:

 

House 1 was originally going to be the house from the plan below, however my client said that they were currently building an extension on a house in Shepreth which they thought would be good If I created a model of that to show the completed version. I visted this house and took a number of reference photos So i could check if there was anything I missed out in my modelling and texturing.

Because the plans I was working on were preposed, There were some differences for the actual front doorway with the windows. So I had to go back and change this.

I feel more critical with this house model as it has quite a scrambled shape and before seeing the actual house itself I kept feeling as though I was looking at the plannings incorrectly. But having photographs, I could compare my model with them to improve accuracy.
 

Newly given plan

Discarded plan

 

Modelling & Texturing House 2:

 

House 2 was the first one designed by myself, I wanted to create a grand looking house which featured a balcony and allowed alot of light to pass through, having the middle part majorly glass.

I struggled initially with what to do for the beams section of the balcony as I wanted this to be glass without cutting through the ceiling. To do this, I had to use planes to act as ceilings and cover the roof textures from inside. This house took the longest to create as I wanted to make it as detailed as possible, whilst not completely over powering the other house models.

 

This is the only house to feature furniture in each room as I knew this would be highly noticed without since the windows are so large.

Modelling & Texturing House 3:

 

House 3, after having corrected the textures became my favorite modeled house. It's got a real cosy look to it, which my client was very happy with. The modelling tasks on this house itself was perhaps the easiest out of the 4 models to do aswell.

 

I really learnt that it doesn't matter how complicated 3D models are made, if the texturing is to a high standard, it can greatly improve the attractiveness.

Modelling & Texturing House 4:

 

House 4 is the other one designed by me. I wanted to make a suburban looking house. It was relatively simple to model. My client wanted the house colour schemes to be separated from the top and bottom sections. Personally I prefer the wall texuring in the previous version as I feel it looks more natural. But in the end I used a standard brick texture for the bottom half.
 

To save time, I used objects such as furniture and Trees from Cinema 4D's pre-bundled browser rather than modelling them from scratch. I felt they didn't have enough relevance for this project for me to make them myself. 

 

In a previous project I used a downloaded plug-in for Cinema 4D called Ivy Generator. This allows you to place a point on an object and it generates ivy splines and creates leaves. It produces nice results however can be very intensive on the memory as well as increase the render times a great deal. I decided to only use these for the image renders but to save time for the animation, I created basic blocks textured with a bush shrub.

Designing My Houses

Since my task is to design 2 houses. I first looked across the internet for photos to give me inspiration:

 

Here are some designs that I drew up after looking at some examples of previously built glamarous houses:

 

 

After taking into account of realistic builds that Lambert Construction would make, I made my 2 final designs which I will be using. One is a grand looking home which features a balcony on the front, whilst the second home design is a more suburbian generalised build.

 

 

 

Storyboards & Animatic

 

 

The original plan was to create a panning animation of the 3D Visualisations which would loop and could be the used for the office screen. However felt this would be too basic. So I disscussed this with my client and It was decided that I would produce a Promotional video instead.

 

This is my final storyboard which is now for a promotional video. It's much stronger than what I had previously planned & there's going to be some use of motiongraphics within this.

 

Below, I created an Animatic to plan the timing effectively.

 

What makes a good Promo Video?

A promotional video can be very effective in expanding awareness of a business. To make sure I was going to cover what I need to take into consideration, I looked at various Promotional videos.

 

 

An effective promo video should be kept short as posible. After 60 seconds, the number of viewers decrease quickly, so it's important I keep the video length under a minute with concise messages. Colours and graphics need to be vibrant and eye catching also to gain the intial interest of the video. The use of motion graphics will also be useful to present the text in best way possible