This week I needed to finalise my animation and render it out.
I started on working with the UV editor to perfect my textures, as some of them looked stretched out. I scaled the UV shells to line up with the texture, and this enabled them to look much more realistic on the pipes, and created consistancy on all the pipes in the animation.
I then perfected the texturing on the gears themselves too on the UV maps, and some minor colour correction.
Next, I noticed my animation didn’t have the perfect loop. Being that the textures were so detailed, you could tell the switch when the video ended to when it started due to the placement of the textures changing. I decided to avoid this I needed to make the gears turn a full 360 degrees so that the texture would arrive back in it’s original starting place at the end. I had to increase the animation to 160 frames to enable this as the animation was too fast if it was only 80 frames. I had to sync up all the gears to turn 360 degrees exactly, or 360 degrees plus 180/360 each round for the smaller gears. I then made sure the teeth linked together by editing the offest at the start and adding it on the the final translation at the end of the animation.
Being that my animation was longer now I needed to add more balls dropping and keep the ring turning. I duplicated the balls and animated them falling at the right time again. I also updated the ring animation to keep turing for the whole duration.
I was then ready to render my animation. After it was rendered I went into nuke to colour correct as it had rendered out lighter than anticipated.