Evaluation and reflection of Final Year & Summary

Well my final year of animation is over and its been a long and hard journey through out. Felt quite like a marathon. There are many things that i am going to be taking on board and hopefully it will make me a better animator. Firstly i think working as a team and communicating is so vital and paramount that if you dont have these foundations as a working team then you can easily stray off and the work and team itself would start to collapse. so it is important that as a team you stick together, communicate and meet up as often as you can to discuss the progress of your project and how it could be improved upon.

Secondly i feel as though scheduling has been the backbone of this project. I think planning everything ahead is very useful and efficient because then you can work against time and plan out how long something will take to do. As long as you do that then you can easily meet deadlines but of course you can never avoid problems.

And problems we did have this year on this project. The primary problem was the constant switching over from different types of computers, we were using Mac and Windows at the same time and somewhere along the lines, the files got corrupted which then caused us problems in rendering the work. I think in future it is best to use the same working computer system rather then two or three different ones because then there is no continuity problems.

Sustaining motivation and multi tasking this year has been quite a challenge as i feel as though i haven't been able to put in 100% in some of the projects that i have been assigned to. I felt as though stress and the pressure of working towards a deadline got the better of me and i couldn't cope. But i learnt that organizing and balancing your work as well as scheduling can help you avoid this problem.

Overall my technical skills have improved a lot and i believe that there is a future for me in concepts and compositing. Even though i haven't been able to demonstrate my compositing skills this year, i have been practicising in my spare time and this is an area that does interest me quite alot. Also my drawing skills continue to get better and this is something i will continue to improve upon and get better. My modelling skills and texturing skills are competent and interestingly enough i enjoyed uv mapping quite alot so that is an area i will be looking to strengthen.

final hand in submission

Today was the deadline to hand in the work for final submission. It was really stressful because i had to literally organize my files as you saw in the last post and then i had to burn it on to a DVD. I found out at luckily a few hours early that the animation folder should consist of one whole video that demonstrates your animation skills. I didn't do that initally because all my animation clips were seperate and not as a one whole clip. so what i had to do was take all the clips and name what shots are what and then cut it together in Final Cut Pro. Once that was done i just had to make sure all the work were in the right folders overall. I also had to make sure that i include my blog link as that was going to be very important.

creating my animation folders

For my animation folders to be handed in for submission i had to make sure that out of the three folders consisting of Animation, Artist and Technical, that one of these folders becomes my main folder of skill and holds 50% of my work and the remaining two folders holds 25% each of the work. In this case i have chosen the artist folder to be my main folder as i feel as though i have produced more work in this area and it being my strongest area of skill.

DVD/CD
Artist (Main) - 50%
Animation - 25%
Technical - 25%

deadline looming

The deadline is looming for our hand in final submission and i am worried that i may not have sufficient enough work to hand in. My animation folder is probably the weakest out of all the folders as i havent really spent much time animating. The animating work that i have done so far is very average and quite poor for my standards and i am actually quite bitterly dissapointed. So i'm going to try and see if i can improve upon that and have at least some decent animation work to be handed in.

degree show???

The degree is show is just round the corner and right now i feel as though the work is not good enough purely because its not finished. I would prefer to show a finished piece of work then nothing at all. Rendering the animation has been a problem because some files were corrupted probably due to some bug issues with maya or a virus from a PC.

solution to problems

Rendering is turning out to be a big problem for the team and so we have to use other resources to finish this work. Kirsty and Trish have informed us that rendering in their computers is impossible because the scene somehow keeps crashing. I am able to render the work in my home computer so that isn't problem but the time its taking to render is quite long and i am actually quite surprised about that. Leonard sent me a tutorial that he made on how render using passes in maya and i have found this extremely helpful. The rendering is still quite time consuming but as long as the scene is rendered out then i guess the patience would have been rewarded.

rendering test of final scene