Client Brief Helicopter Animation

After I had rigged the helicopter I began to animate it, in the end I had around 700 frames of animation at 25 frames per second.  Our brief said that our total animation (which also had included still shots and close-ups of certain areas of the helicopter) should be a minimum of 50 seconds and we already had a 10 second introduction featuring an animation which involved the CGFX company logo, so I cut out the first 200 or so frames of our animation so that it wouldn't go on too long (render times were also also something I was concerned about).  Once the animation was complete, I started experimenting with the rener settings - now, I feel as though I have to mention that this was on Tuesday evening and we had to make our presentation (which still hadn't been written) on Thursday, I knew we'd finish on time but I was unsure about how good the video quality would be (I was adament that we needed to include motion blur to really sell our animation).  Thankfully 3ds Max's QuickSilver renderer came to the rescue, allowing us to render at 720p and have really nice glossy reflections, AO, indirect illuination and motion blur with each frame only took approximately two and a half minutes to render.

In total, there were four memebers of the team working on this brief and I had positioned four cameras in the scene, so I saved scenes containing each individual camera and set the timeline to read the frames that the camera had to render and the next day distributed them among my other teammates and got the animation rendered out in a couple of hours.  Another member of the team, Aaron, was also rendering out the helicopter in the HDRI environment with mental ray and the close-ups, which included clay, wireframe and diffuse, with Vray.  After he had rendered out everything, I composited everything together in After Effects and since I was the only one who knew how to use Prezi, I created our presentation which included a lot of rendered stills.

The brief was a lot of fun, but I found communicating and sharing files over the internet to be quite challenging and looking back, we didn't give ourselves any room for error - distributing the scenes for individual rendering worked great but it would've been hard to get it all rendered if all four of us hadn't been doing it.

You can see the final animation here: https://vimeo.com/42083546
Below is a frame from the final composition.