Regarding this module, it was pretty fun getting used to Maya and learning how to animate in it in preparation for our weight and emotion animations for the previous assignment, as well as building on the skills we learned from the 3D Digital Literacy module for modelling characters and assets for the 30 second group animation and using our knowledge from the first assignment of this module to tell a narrative to an audience with our 30 second group animation. I surprised myself with how quickly I was able to adapt to working in a 3D production pipeline and making assets different to the treasure chest with dragon I made for the other module and having them turn out fairly good considering my inexperience, as well as realising I’m surprisingly decent at rigging if the victim snail rig is anything to go by as I was able to pick it up fairly quickly. That said it wasn’t all great, due to Maya being on my laptop instead of being on campus because of online learning it made things like rendering my part for the animation very time consuming to do which was not a good thing especially so close to the deadline, but I feel like the module worked fairly well with online learning even if it was a bit of a pain sometimes.
As for the first year in general, I didn’t know what to expect going in with the knowledge that it would be entirely online learning and I was a bit worried about how well I would cope in these strange circumstances, but it honestly wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. The online learning sort of became my new normal for university learning since I have no prior experience of attending university so I feel like I ended up adapting better since I didn’t really experience what university learning was meant to be in the first place so I had nothing to compare it to except my time in secondary school, and even then we were explicitly told university was meant to be different to secondary school. I feel Animation is one of the courses that got off relatively easy with online learning since everything can be done on a laptop instead of trying to organise when people could come into campus for courses that don’t have the benefit of being able to be taught online and require students to be on campus, and I’m fortunate to be one of the few lucky ones who coped fairly well with online learning given how strange of a time this was for everyone.
Although online learning this year was challenging because it was harder to get to know people properly since we couldn’t meet in person, the group projects from the two semesters didn’t suffer from lack of face to face communication as all of the group members were able to keep in touch through Discord, and if anything we all worked harder this year to maintain good results because of how unfamiliar online learning was for us all and we showed we can adapt well to doing the work in a purely online setting. If we had any questions or were unsure of anything, we could just ask the lecturers in class by raising the virtual hand in blackboard or send them an email or ask them in the Discord as they are very easy to get in touch with, and it’s nice to have a community of the class where we can all freely interact with each other virtually and it’ll be great to get to know each other better in person when learning goes back to being on campus. The different studio talks we were given throughout semester 2 were also very informative and it was great they were able to take time out of their busy schedules to talk to us.