I’m pretty impressed with how my skills have developed. 3D animation is so daunting, so to go from knowing nothing to knowing how each stage of production operates, and how to approach a 3D animation is a big improvement. It was funny looking back at our previous conversations and worries in this recent project, the issues we had seem so trivial now and are easily solved. Before deciding on a story, we thought lighting would be a huge issue and decided against certain stories on this basis, it turned out lighting was probably the easiest part in our project.
I’ve barely scratched the surface but I think the final products in both assignments are genuinely impressive. I can now say I’m able to model, UV map, texture, rig and animate, while in week 1 I was still figuring out to traverse a 3D environment. I had a lot of fun with the Animated Short assignment, while at the time some classes seemed kind of slow/irrelevant, everything they covered came up at some point. I found myself looking back over old classes and tutorials a lot during the project, which I guess is just revision but at the time it felt like problem solving. I also like the accountability working in a group gave, you felt as if you couldn’t be slacking because you had people depending on you. I normally find myself cramming last minute with the solo projects so it was a nice change.
I had a lot of fun with my Animation Studies too, it was useful to study both emotion and body mechanics separately. They are both complicated concepts as a complete beginner, so separating them made it easier to learn about. By the time I reached the end of that project, I felt as if I had a pretty solid grasp on both, and hopefully my animations demonstrated this. I also had no idea what a graph editor or dope sheet was at the beginning but now I couldn’t work without them. I felt as working in 3D has improved my 2D work too, I know find it easier to visualise or understand certain things if I think about how it would work in Maya.
Reflecting on the year as a whole, I definitely preferred the second half. Maybe its just because I was more interested in learning the new software and how 3D animation works, or maybe its because it takes some time to settle in, but I definitely had more fun with the later assignments. I feel like it might actually be interesting to look back into 2D animation and design now, with the new knowledge from 3D animation. Not that I didn’t enjoy the first half or anything, I enjoyed the design a world task a lot and was actually very into Yuan’s module, I just felt as if we learnt a lot more animation and got a taste of the industry in the second half of the year, Obviously it’s annoying that we didn’t get to have a first year at Uni experience, and to meet everyone in the class, we’ve definitely missed out on a lot of social opportunities. I’m also annoyed we missed out on the life drawing opportunities too or things like late nights in the computer rooms, but I’m sure we’ll make up for it in 2nd year. We did get some great opportunities online too, which might never have happened if not for Covid, the industry talks were all great and managing to get John Stevenson to not only talk but to come back and ’employ’ students was awesome, it was very cool to see what all these people were up to and the projects they had.
Considering this was all done online, I look forward to seeing what can be achieved in person.