Software Skills for Media

For this piece of coursework we were tasked with one of three possible real-world projects, set by clients. The project I chose was for an American client doing research into anxiety and fear of heights.

You can view the full specifications for the unit, and for the specific client in these two .pdf files.

• Unit Specification
• Client Specification

.pdf files copyright of University of Portsmouth

3D Environment

This environment was made in 3D Studio Max and took me roughly 50-60 hours. It is very high detail, and the poly count is high too, but I thought that for a virtual reality environment, it is important to become immersed, so I tried to go for as much realism as possible.

Stills

Here are a few stills of the city, you can see the two beams between the buildings in most of them. The footbridge in the 3rd picture was just for decoration.

Animations

These are the two final renders showing the viewpoints of people walking over the beams. Each of these took about 50 hours to render, but it was worth it for the final quality. Unfortunately, due to file size restrictions on Google Video, I have had to lower the quality of these videos substantially. They still show the environment well though.

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Promotional Poster

The promotional poster was made using Photoshop. 2D art and Photoshop in general doesn't come easily to me, but this project helped improve my skills quite a lot with the software.

Promotional Video Showreel

Lastly, here is the promotional showreel. This was made using Adobe Premiere. Video editing is something I had never even attempted before, so this was quite a challenge. Before I could make anything useful I had to learn the program. The video, once I started properly, took me about 12 hours to complete. It uses clips from other short animations I rendered out from 3D Studio Max. In total, I used about 7 different renders from Max to cut together this showreel.

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The final mark I received for this unit was 70%.