Evaluation

 My progress through this module has had me at different levels of emotion because it’s something I haven’t done before but it’s also something that I’d like to carry on doing in the future. 3D animation is one of the fields of animation I would like to go in to in the future, so this module has taught me quite a bit in what goes on in making a 3D animation from scratch. This module had also taught me how to communicate between someone because of working with a partner I had to exchange ideas and opinions for the animation we created.

 In the module I had to create a character that was similar to our tutors so that we could get use to the 3D program called Maya. 3D animation being one of the things I’d like to go in to I already knew a few things about Maya, but that didn’t meant that I didn’t make any mistakes whilst working in Maya. I got give some tutorial videos for the demo character I had to create but before I watched the section about modeling I thought I could do it without any help because I modeled a character last year, I was so wrong! I got about half way through and messed up so I had to delete everything and start again and this time I watched the videos I got given. Watching the videos helped a lot and I seemed to get through the modeling stage quite quick, and I didn’t seem to have any complications along the way. This put me in a good mood but the hard part hadn’t even started yet. The hard part was rigging the demo character because this is where I learnt a lot about Maya and how easy it is to mess up and not understand why I’ve messed up. Once I’d got the hang of rigging though it was okay, but one problem it did have was when I was putting IK handles in the legs I wasn’t paying attention and put in the wrong IKs. I feel like I’ve come a long way in Maya now compared to last year because through out this module I’ve been on Maya nearly every day and I’ve leant how to do a lot of things twice because I created another model for the second part of this module.

The main bit of the module was creating a one-minute 3D animation with a partner. Working with Oscar was fun because we are both comedy people and that was the main theme in are animation, however it did take us a long time to think of a good idea for are animation. In my opinion I think that we had a good work ethic and good time management because I created one character, he created the other one, both of which having the same amount of work to do on them. Are time management went well because we modeled our characters in about two weeks, which left us with a week of animating, a week of rendering and a week of post production. In the animation I animated most of my character which the complicated movements like the walk cycle (my characters a spider so that means eight legs the animate), but because my character it in the animation more than Oscars character (he created an Inch Worm) he wanted to animate my spider as well so that the work load is even. During the animation stage I found it entertaining because Maya would do most of the work for my, it was just a matter of posing my character in its key frames and letting Maya do the in-between frames with a bit of tweaking if it didn’t look right. I feel like one of the hardest part of the whole thing was actually texturing me spider character, not because I didn’t know how to but because I didn’t know what my character was going to look like. It took me at least tree weeks just to think of a texture for the character, and it didn’t help that Oscar knew what he was doing because it made me feel like I was going wrong somewhere. I finally figured out the spiders texture and I’m happy about it because it fits the style of are animation, which is in the style of being blocky.

Over all through out this module I feel like I’ve achieved some new skills in Maya and also in communicating with other people and getting confidence in my own work. Doing the demo character helped a lot because it helped sink in the information I needed to create my own model and I will be keeping the tutorial videos for later on if I want to do any future animations in Maya. There is one thing about my character I’d like to change, which is that the spiders’ mouth does not move. I initially made the spider with a working mouth that opened and closed, but I had a problem with my model so I gave it to Matt (our tutor) to have a look at it and he fixed most of it, but when I got it back I couldn’t manipulate the mouth at all. Knowing this I still carried on animating with the spider and I was going to fix the problem later but I never got round to it and plus I forgot. However the animation Oscar and I have created in my opinion is comedic and visually pleasing, I also like the smooth/squishy movements in the inchworm because it adds character to the model and helps the comedy side of the animation. I mainly did the sounds in the animation and Oscar tweaked it up at the end, because he is better at post production than I am but I feel like the sounds add another level of comedy especially the squishy noises because there are multiple sounds layered on top of each other.