At the beginning of this module when I
presented my proposal I intended to have an animation I could market myself
with in a variety of ways and is this evaluation I will look at this and other
goals I had in terms of production and how well I did.
After looking at my final
design I am happy with the way things have ended up looking, the environment I’ve
build serves the purpose perfectly for the sort of animation I’m doing and the
models I have created have been of a good standard. Focusing more on my
modeling I am happy with how I tackled it, using nurbs I was familiar with like
the loft and lathe nurbs but also going on to use new nurbs like the Bezier
nurbs. Learning new skills like this means I can take a real positive away from
the project, as learning new skills in 3D is a big goal of mine. My modeling
skills also improved over the project because building I whole 3D environment meant
I was doing a lot of problem solving, mostly with scale and making things fit
together. The style of my models and the environment itself was quite
realistic, originally I had wanted something more cartoony and exaggerated but
my instinct I suppose took me into a more realistic direction. This outcome
isn’t a disappointment although I would like to go back and try to edit my
environment to make it more childish and out of proportion to get a real kids
cartoon feel to it. Changes I would
definitely make would be to do with how flat the environment is, although I
used a displacer to make the floor not so flat the texturing of it still gave
the impression of a completely flat floor, to get something a bit more hilly I
would have to look at possibly comping my animation into pictures or using
multiple planes that overlap each other. My design worked well as an environment
and I think this is down to the planning behind it, by drawing a simple birds
eye view of what was going to be in my animation, which was guided by my
storyboards, I was able to plan out a route for my character and where the
cameras would face and therefore what parts needed to be focused on when
creating the environment. I also had a checklist of things to model in order to
have my assets ready for animating and this kept me on track and able to know
how much I had left to do.
The colour scheme is something I
had in my mind originally and then really got some inspiration after looking at
gluko and Lennon and then other similar animations. A flat colour scheme was my
goal and I began to tackle it just by using plain colours but in cinema 4D this
still made everything very 3 dimensional whereas the look I wanted was that of
a 2D animation. Eventually after researching how this would be achieved I found
that alpha channels because they gave off light meant that they would appear as
completely flat colours and I began to colour my animation in this way. The
colours then I think worked really well because the animation looked 2D but had
the advantages of being 3D in terms of what I could do with my character. The
only alterations I would make would be to make the colour scheme a little more
complicated and try and use set selection to objects and get a bit more depth
into my animation without making it too 3 dimensional.
Time was definitely an issue
that I faced because although I had a detailed time plan set out I don’t think
it was realistic enough in terms of problems that might slow me down, this
meant I got behind schedule and my animation isn’t where I wanted it to be by
now, at the beginning of this module I set myself the goal to have my animation
ready to be entered into festivals and its not at that point yet so I feel I
have let myself down for that goal. Saying this though my animation is very
close to being completed and edited together which I don’t think will take long
at all so I’m happy with where I am and how many things I’ve overcome to get my
animation to this stage.
The most important part of the
module really was my animation and my slug already had a walk cycle that I was
really happy with so it was other aspects of my characters movement I needed to
tackle in my animation. The way I had my character set up in a rig was simple
and effective and allowed me to move him around the scene exactly how I needed
too and this made the animating really easy to tackle. Making my animation look
human was a goal of mine because my past animations had been too stiff, the
result in this case was a good one, my slug character had human elements like
his eyes and the way he reacted to waking up in the morning but yet still kept
his identity as a slug.
Overall what I have produced of
my animation I feel has been a big success for me and I will continue it in the
same style and manner until its ready to be entered into festivals like my
goals stated. My abilities in 3D software have improved massively again over
the course of this module and my progression into a confidant modeler has been
beneficial to personal work too. My only
let down for the module would be the amount I have produced in terms of final
animation to date but this I feel is a big learning curve again for time
management which is going to be one of the most important factors in industry.
