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

reflection on animating

My animation contribution to this project has been quite dissapointing. I feel as though that the model Ash which i have created and rigged worked fine but my skills as an animator was really poor and rusty. I didn't have the time to work on my animation as we were closing towards the deadline and so i had to work fast and do what i could. I refered to an old book i received in my foundation year which is called Richard Williams Animation Survival Kit and i found that the book was always helpful and something to fall back on when you are animating. The book contains animation principles primarily for 2D but which can be applied to 3D.

animating my shots

Quick playblast of the animation shots i have done so far.

Shot 14

Shot 15

Shot 16

Shot 17

Shot 23

Delays & problems

There has been some delays in rendering as we are having problems in getting the animation correct for our scenes. We were falling behind so much that we have given ourselves an uphill task to finish this work put and produce something decent. The maya files have glitches and i tried rendering out scene but its been giving me problems mainly due to the fact it's taking too long and we dont have much time to spare.

animating cameras

Once the environments has been established, i wanted to to position the cameras in place even though no animation has been done yet. This is so that i can get a good idea of whether the position of the camera shapes up the shot accurately to what was originally envisioned in the storyboard of Knock Out Nutz. There are 4 cameras and i felt as though that it would be enough as i can just re use the same cameras for any additional shots.

Here the cameras along with the view perspective of the camera.

CAMERA 1

CAMERA 2

CAMERA 3

CAMERA 4

assigning and breaking down shots

In order to animate the shots that was required of the team, we had to decide who was going to animate what shots. Me, leonard, Trish and Kirsty met up and had group meeting to discuss how we were going to break down the shots and who was going to animate what shots. There were 24 shots in total for our animation and the running time would be just over 1 minute in total. After a lengthy talk, I have been assigned 5 shots out of the 24 and i have volunteered to animate these shots myself. Here are the shots below.....

Shot 14

Shot 15

Shot 16

Shot 17

Shot 23

setting the final scene up in maya

reflection on lighting

Lighting has been really mixed for me this year. In the beginning of the year i decided to confront some of my weaknesses and try something new. Dan Dalli gave us an experimental unit that allowed us to explore other technical areas which we haven't tired before and so i decided upon lighting. Learning the basics has been helpful but i didn't have much time to go further and learn more lighting when things started piling up. My duties as a modeller and rigger took over most of the time when i was developing my character (Ash) hence that didn't leave me much time to explore further in lighting. When it came to lighting the final scene for our final major project, i just used all the basic skills i learnt about in lighting and applied them to our scene. The inital results were good and got positive feedback but i missed some areas that i didn't light up probably and my colleagues had to point out to me these areas that didn't light up proparly. Lighting is an area that i was intrigued to learn about but comitting the time has been difficult and for that my work suffered. This is an area i will look into when this animation year is over and i will be keen to progress further and learn more about lighting.

problems lighting

There have been some problems in lighting. When i was creating my lights and rendering them, initially everything seemed to look ok but Leonard has told me that some areas have been not lit up correctly so he had to put in additonal lights to help lightnen up certain areas that were too dark.

Lighting environment

Lighting the environments was the next process. i feel as though at this stage since i don't have much time, i am glad that i did practice before a little on lighting through another unit. You can check out the link to that by following this link.... http://shuhelexperiment3rdyear.blogspot.com/

Once the environments was completed by Kirsty and Trish and all the textures were applied, my aim was to keep things simple. As you can see from the pictures below.........

The first light i have put in is the volume light, this lit up the scene a little.

I put in 3 area lights which would light up the main cubicle office as well as the hallway leading to the vending machine.

I also put in additional lights in the hall so it would light up the characters within the scene. This is because the lights above were not enough to reach out to the characters and plus they were facing against the lights. I put in 3 directional lights to help light up the characters more.

Here are some early render test of my lighting within the scene.

The rendered images above that were lightened were ok but i felt as though i needed to go back and re work on the lights because in some areas the light was too strong and also the overall mood of the scene and the colour palette wasn't right. I consulted Leonard as well as Trish and Kirsty and they all agreed that changes had to be made in order to make it look like what the original concepts were envisioned as. So i went back on decreased the intensity of the lights and i also changed the colour of the lights into blue to give it more of a night mood. When i rendered out these latest images below, i think the team were more happy and plus the characters looked fantastic under the lighting.