Reflection on Tempus trailer by team Lazer Baby

Here is the final trailer for Tempus, created by team Lazer Baby.

Here is a link to the trailer for Resident Evil 4, which is the kind of trailer that we were aiming for; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ORc25vZo54

The final version of our team trailer didn’t completely match our original intentions because of complications in our team’s communication, which caused some team members to create extra scenes which weren’t in the original plans and other team members to create very little. Even though our final trailer only matched the original plans by a small amount, I believe that what we created in the end turned out better than the planning that we created. Below is an image of the storyboard that our team agreed to follow but didn’t really stick to.

I believe that the end trailer that we created is appropriate for our intended audience, which was aimed for people of both genders who are aged 12 and above. Our trailer was supposed to be for an 18+ game but we made sure the trailer contained nothing inappropriate as it was being shown at the digital showcase. The trailer is also friendly for people of all races and contains no offensive images such as knives, guns etc.

Our final team trailer contained three of my environments that I created in 3DS Max using a wide variety of different techniques. I created my mountain environment by using a displacement map that I had first created in Photoshop myself so that I could get the shape of the mountains to be the way I wanted them to be rather than mountains that look randomly generated. After I had the displacement strength at what I wanted, I had to tweak the vertices to make it smoother and get the mesh to fit better. To make the village environment I first added a displacement map to a plane using a noise texture from the material editor, which I then added a texture to make it look like snow. After I did this I merged my house that I box modelled, unwrapped and textured into this scene so that it would look like a village but I had to duplicate the house a number of times and place them the way I wanted so it would be more village like. The trees in the environment are 3ds max’s pre-made leaves and branches that have been put onto a branch that I have modelled and textured myself. Next I made a skybox with a tileable night sky texture on it, added an Omni light and lowered the intensity to make it look like it was night time, added a fog effect to a set area using a box gizmo and finally used a blizzard particle system to simulate the blizzard that is raging in my scene. I kept the animation for the camera straight forward and just had it go from one side of the environment to the other. Before I started making these environments, I first had to plan them out on paper, which I scanned on to computer to allow me to add colour in Photoshop. This was so I could get a general idea about what colours I was going to have the textures in the environments, which helped me out a lot. I would say that creating environments in 3DS Max is my biggest strength but there is still a lot I can do to improve on this and my biggest weakness is my drawing ability, specifically the drawing of characters.



The environments that I created for the team trailer are quite dark and gloomy because I felt that this style would fit the psychological horror game genre that we were aiming for. My original intention was to base some of the 3D environment models on medieval architecture and monastery style buildings but I never followed through with this plan and just made some things what I personally think should go in a horror game, which are dark forests, creepy ‘abandoned’ villages and dimly lit corridors where you can only just see what's there. On my mountain environment I did model a building that was based on the medieval style, which I am quite happy with. This made me think that I should have made more buildings in this style for my environments and if I had the choice to do this project again, I would model more. There was quite a few problems that I encountered during this project, one of which was the render times of some of my 3ds max models. These large render times were mainly because of the large poly count that some of my models had and also the realistic mental ray water effect that I used one of my models, which greatly increased render time by around 4-5 hours. I solved this problem by reducing the poly count of my models as much as I could and also by using the mental ray water as little as possible. Another problem that I have encountered are team mates who haven't contributing to the trailer as much as they should have. Me and Ethan have been doing a large majority of the work for the team trailer while Nat and Jack spend a lot of time off task looking at videos on YouTube or deviant art when they should be working on something for the trailer. I haven’t really been able to solve this problem because if they aren’t in a mood to work, I can’t change that. From this experience I have learnt to work and communicate in a team a lot better, I have learnt how to create even more realistic 3D models in 3DS max and I have learnt that not everything will go to plan when working on a project like this so I now know how to prepare for various problems that may occur. My skills in 3DS Max have increased dramatically throughout the course of this project, I have learned how make the textures look more realistic, use various types of lighting and effects like spotlights and fog to create more of an atmosphere to my environment. We only just met the deadline for this project because of different problems we had encountered throughout the project. The main problems which caused our team to finish the trailer one day before the showcase was the lack of communication between the team and two of the team members getting their renders done at the last second when they should have been done weeks ago. We would have finished the trailer weeks before the showcase if we had better time keeping but because of the various issues in the team, such as some members not doing their fair share of work, we had poor time keeping which almost caused us to miss the deadline.

I found working in a team quite enjoyable for the most part but it was hard working in a team with people who disagreed with each others ideas most of the time and who didn't contribute a fair amount of work to the trailers development. I think we would have been able to work alot better as a team if we communicated with each other more and contributed an equal amount of work to the project.

I am quite pleased with the final trailer that our team created but if I had the opportunity to do the project again, I would do a lot of things differently. The main change I would make to the project would be the choosing of the game genre because we chose a genre that we didn’t know a great deal about, the psychological horror genre. I personally believe that we should have chosen the fantasy genre because you are only limited by your imagination and our team has quite a wild imagination. I asked the other members of the team what they thought about the final trailer and their opinions of it were almost exactly the same as mine, “its ok but a lot can be done to improve it”. I asked our team to vote on which trailer they would choose, excluding our own trailer, the votes were three for Zero G by team 42 and one vote for Dark Shock by team Paradox.