Week 14

This week has been more of the same, I've been focusing mainly on doing additional passes for my animation scenes and finishing off the scenes that we need to begin rendering on, which are Tammy's fishing, running, reaction and bow pickup scenes. I've been looking into youtube videos that help with the process, like the use of pre and post infinity for cycling and weighting tangents to produce smoother animation and cleaner key frames. 

Since our animation cameras aren't final i will be looking into some film/action camera techniques to apply to our production. Getting these first few renders will be important so we have an idea of what the finished project will look like but more so to see what we need to adjust for rendering and to also see the amount of time it takes to render our scenes because we've been told that rendering can take a lot longer than you expect.

Post Draft Analysis

Things I've learned so far in the production process:

Team dynamics: Working in a team can have its ups and downs, having a team let each of us work mainly on the aspects of the project we were more suited for and broadened the skill set we had to work with to complete the project, for example Jordan and myself animating and rigging and Amie modelling/texturing.
However, as with any group environment there were problems with things like differences of opinion, getting distracted in class and the occasional mild argument. In future projects it will be important to ensure a team can work well together and have a clear understanding of the production process and that everyone agrees about the direction of the project and its various elements to avoid issues later on and produce a stable working environment.

Time management: Going into the project we seemed to have a clear outline of what needed to be done when and we were pretty confident with the time we had. Once we began production this became another story, we soon found that progression was getting harder and harder every time we encountered a problem. Many of the problems were related to the characters themselves and specifically to their rigs. We had to resolve many problems with rigging over time which really messed with our animation time slot, we even had to do a complete rigging overhaul half way through animation and had a mess of issues with the scale of objects relative to each other. Getting things done a little earlier probably would've helped with this issue, we may have been a little too comfortable in the earlier stages of rigging and simply didn't notice some of the problems that would come back to bite us. In the future when working on a project i will make a concerted effort to making sure things are done right the first time and try harder to get it done earlier, another thing to take into account is that issues will appear in the process of developing a project and taking care of them immediately is important so that you can get back to production as soon as possible.

Animation Techniques: Doing this project has helped with my animation as I've found myself doing things like looking at reference material more, taking criticism and improving on animation, looking into new software and plugins such as Pull Down It which is a physics based destruction system for breaking geometry and doing things like explosion debris effects in Maya. My blocking out animation has gotten better and faster due to mostly working on that and working on polishing and refining animation scenes will help once again in improving my animation skills.

We have three weeks ahead of us and i will be working diligently on this project and completing the work i have that needs to be done. At this time i am optimistic about our animation goal and I'm hoping that what we have to show will be impressive and successful and completed on time.

Week 13

This week i worked on finishing the Dragon fire breathe, Billy reaction and the Tammy landing scenes of our draft animation and also tweaked the Tammy fishing scene so that it is ready for rendering. There was barely enough time to get the scenes we needed for the submission date which was kind of lucky because if we'd had any more problems with rigs or scenes we would've missed the deadline. Even though there was a set schedule for things like rigging, skinning, modeling etc, we didn't account for problems and changes that would need to be made in the future, which really threw a spanner into the works of production.

Week 12

The main focus this week was just doing more animation, did some cleanup on scenes involving the dragon, fixed some issues with the rig, and blocked out Tammy's landing from a tree scene.





On another note I've seen the value in organizing and properly naming all files pertaining to the project, this was due to lots of file clutter that took a while to sort and confusion amongst the team that could have been avoided by simply naming and organizing files in a logical manner, especially when it takes less effort to do it right the first time rather than sifting through hundreds of files afterwards.

Week 11

After looking at some reference material on youtube and vimeo I finished the dragon's drop and fire breathe animations for his entrance scene. Another thing i did this week was continue to work on Billy's blendshapes for scenes which require him to have facial expressions. So far we are working on finishing off these last few animations and effects and to get a draft version of the project rendered and compiled.