Collaboration
For the collaboration I did all of the binaural mixing whereas Natalie made the individual audio clips to insert into Adobe Audition.
During the modelling/concept design stage we would have regular meetings where we talked about progress and I showed screenshots or renders of the assets as and when I made them. Doing this gave her an idea of what the world will look like as I made it and gave her creative input into the designs. From the feedback she gave me I could then change and improve my models as I made them.
Timings
To help Natalie plan her audio she requested timings of different actions as I didn’t have any rendered footage at the time. Using the timings she could roughly plan out the audio without any visuals.
Below is what I originally produced as timings for the Rubik’s cube, giving timings for when a side would rotate and how many times it rotated within that time frame.
Seconds Rotations
0-1 1R
1-3 1R
3-5 1R
3-6 3R
6-7 1R
7-8 1R
8-9 2R
9-10 1R
10-11 2R
11-12 1R
11-12 1R
12-13 3R
12-13 2R
13-14 2R
14-14.5 2R
14.5-15 1R
15-16 1R
15-16 2R
16-17 1R
17-18 2R
Video reference
As visuals make syncing the audio a lot easier I ended up using OBS to record Maya’s perspective view as it played the animation in the viewport and sent her the video as reference.
Later on I rendered out the whole video in 2k so that it wasn’t too high resolution to work with but still had a good amount of detail to sync the sounds to.
Ideas that were not implemented
Working through the project I had to cut a few things out of production due to time constraints and the time required to produce some things wouldn’t have been worth the output. Below are a few things that I wanted to include but never got implemented:
Starry Floor
I originally wanted to have a sort of liquid sky under the tiles, a dark black moving surface with lots of shining stars within it.
Particle based portals
Instead of the white light portals I found multiple tutorials to make a portal similar to that of the ones from Dr. Strange; a circle of orange sparks spinning around rapidly, which I would have done with a particle system.
Physics based plates and saucers
I tried to use the existing models and apply physics to have them float into the air and around the viewer in a kind of vortex. While it was possible to do with different physics effectors, there were issues with mesh collisions and it was taking too long for it to be worth it.
Longer animation
There were some sections within my animation that could have benefitted from being extended somewhat such as the teapot animation. When testing render times I got worried that it would take too long and if for some reason Viper didn’t work I wouldn’t be able to render it in time on my own computer.