Final Design
How did you incorporate Tufte's five theories into your work?
Following on from the Last Post i was able to achieve most of the incorporations for Tufte’s theories, allowing me to have hopefully achieved a visually engaging animation that conveys its purpose accordingly while still maintaining the metamorphosis transition from 2D to 3D.
In order to taylor my animation to his theory of Small Multiples I panned the camera across the different valves showing the timings and explosions for each piston activation, these in turn spun the crankshaft further keeping its momentum for the next revolution.
When it came to Layering and separation I cut down on my initial idea Only splitting the engine into 2 parts having the casing and valves fall from above onto the engine around half way through the animation to allow the viewer to understand the piston and crankshaft setup before the valves and casing in order to declutter and make it easier to understand the information.
When it came down to his theory on micro and macro readings, i built off what was already in place zooming in further on the actual components in order to look at them from a different perspective, allowing the viewer to better understand what component goes where and the role it plays, I also decided to add in the captions at this point just simple titles to very briefly explain what the parts are and their function in order to emphasise this point.
When it came to Incorporating colour into the design i ended up scrapping the idea of using it to highlight objects as in practice it took away from the realism effect significantly which would have undermined my point about his space and time theory. Despite this i still incorporated colour into my work as i used it to highlight the passage of time and the combustions caused by the engine in order to give more weight to their power and how it drives the engine onward.
In order to tailor to his space and time theory as i mentioned i used lighting to symbolise the passage of time through the animation, this also had the effect of making the animation more realistic when i added the metallic sheen material to the objects in the animation. This allowed it to progressively get more realistic as was intended to do in hopes it would help to illustrate the passage of time for the engine as it revolved.
Final Thoughts
After Completing this assignment I believe I have to some degree incorporated all of Tufte’s theories into my work allowing it to convey its purpose to the viewer in the most accurate form in the short 30 second timespan. During this project I also learned a lot more about engines and how they work and therefore if I were to do this again i would take what i have learned and apply it to get a much more accurate to real life animation of an engine rather than a fictional representation of one.
