Software used in creationg of animation

• Shade 8 - Shade is a 3D modeling program which we used to create our own models. It is made by the same company which makes Poser, therefore Shade and Poser have a good level of integration as they are designed to work together. Thats why we used Shade instead of other software to work with Poser.
  
  You might have thought that if we are only using Shade for modeling, then other software can do the job at no less better than Shade, since eventually, the model have to be converted to WAVEFRONT OBJ format for poser to use. However, our original plans for shade wasn't just creating models, we had actually thought of doing the rendering in shade too, since it was much faster, and poser files can be directly imported into Shade for rendering. Our plan for shade failed when we imported a poser file into shade, and find out that the camera movement done in Poser wasn't imported at all, though the rendering look much different, nicer in someway, and faster. So we fall back to plan B, do it in Poser, after finding creating and matching the timing of new cameras to the previous camera movements were extremely difficult and time consuming. Shade can be found at http://www.e-frontier.com .



• Poser 6 - Poser is a powerfull software for creation of character animation, however it takes a bit of time to get used to it. Poser can be found at http://www.e-frontier.com .



• Movie Maker 2 - used to join the pieces of movies together, and add sound. The video clips rendered directly from poser was of greater quality, but after they are joined, we find that the video quality got degraded quite a bit. Yes, we did actually try to save our video as raw uncompressed file, but the quality still stays the same, and it takes up a whooping ~780mb, which was undesirable to hand in for the project. The highest video quality of Windows Media Format was also tried, but no different.
  
  The Windows Media Profile editor was conjunctively used to make a custome profile of different video size and quality.
  
  Movie Maker 2 can be found at www.microsoft.com .



• Adobe Photoshop - to make the texture maps and displacement maps for the animation.
  Photoshop can be found at www.photoshop.com
  
  
  
  

Refereneces

• Tutorial for making custom profiles for Movie Maker 2 http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/expert/customprofile.mspx



• Space sky image
  http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/pix/yale8.tif



• "Starring" the sky photoshop tutorial
  http://gallery.artofgregmartin.com/tuts_arts/making_a_star_field.html



• Moon surface photoshop tutorial
  http://www.greycobra.com/forums/index.php?s=a40252bed60867c42f0b41fe64ed5150&showtopic=3817



• Robot templates
  http://side7.gundam.com/rgz/image/image.html



• Asteroid image
  http://www.zula.com/teachers/imageLib.html



• Texture sources for the gun blast
  http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/texture_colour/fire/
  http://www.grsites.com/textures/