semester review

When the preproduction started at the beginning of the year my main goal was to do a complete animation including characters. Since i culdnt get my chatacters animated last semester, this year my main objective is to do a complete character animation. Im really happy with my character designs and storyboard this time because I used ryan and marcus’s talent for them. From the beginning i wanted my boy character to be designed by ryan. I loved the unique characteristics of his sketches and i wanted that style for my character. On the other hand marcus has helped me to finalyzed my thumbnails and did the final storyboard as i wanted. I hope that i will not have the timings problem which i had last semester where most of my timings were wrong when it is animated in realtime. Basically that was the biggest problem I had to face during the production of my last project so hopefully this time it would not happen.

This time i would like to do my project according to my production plan and pipeline. Making a production bible basically helped me to catogorise and organise all the work to be done and hope to finish them step by step before the deadlines as i scheduled. I would be happy to finish modelin, rigging and texturing my characters, enviroment and all the props during the holidays then i can work from animating to post production within the next semester. With regards to my maya knowledge this semester was a special semester because now i have the knowledge to do a character animation from start to end. Untill this semester non of us had a clear knowledge of rigging a character but thanx to Jack now many of us could get a character rigged. On the otherhand darren’s visual effects class was really interesting. That was one of the subjects all of us’v been waiting for. The knowledge that i’v got from that class would definitly be helpfull for my future projects. As a 3d lover i hope to get more knowledge and experience in texturing and lighting during the next semester. Lighting and texturing were among the weaknesses in my last project so i’m looking foward to spend more time on those areas.

My inability of drawing has been effective alot during the pre prodution. When designing layouts i culdnt draw the things as i really wanted them to be so i decided to do them digitally. When it came to design the house i made a rough sketch and modeled them directly in maya. It was easy to edit in maya rather than redrawing them in paper. In the mean time i was abel to model most of the props in the kitchen and they were really helpfull to select colour schemes. I had the freedom to apply and see different colours in Maya, specially in to walls and floor inside the house to select colours for layouts. The experience was totally different than the last semester since this time its more organised and had the oppotunity to use other people’s skills and help them out when needed. I will be modeling and texturing the environment for Cara’s project which is an oppotunity for me to improve my skills and be a part of another project. I would like to thank all my teachers for their assistance and hoping to get best results at the end.