Group animation reflection:
My first year has been a wonderful experience. Starting off as someone who did a foundation year before, I really had no worries or anxiousness about my first year in animation but rather just enthusiasm for learning blender and other 3d software like Unreal Engine and ZBrush which we will not touch until next year. I am very much looking forward to learning them to become a future game dev.
I can easily say that the 3D Literacy class has been my favourite and most challenging class. Starting with the very first task of creating a table and chairs, that I missed due to getting covid so when I came back, I was thrown into two projects having never touched Blender before which was quite overwhelming at the time. I also appreciated the learning style of focused, themed modeling techniques with an incremental difficulty increase with each one because although it was throwing a lot of information at us all at once, it did push us to learn quickly, and I can proudly say I am much better than when I started.
For this module, we were to create an animation of at least 30sec with the given theme “escape”. This gave us a lot of freedom to create what we wanted with the only other parameter being our characters could not possess legs or at least moving legs as this would take too much time and we have not covered walking cycles in class yet.
Our group brainstormed different Ideas and settings for our animation, a few from each person and then narrowed it down to two choices which were mine and Malcolm’s. We took a vote and decided to use mine. It started off as a toy escaping a toy factory then through group input and further development, we fine-tuned it to a brand-new toy bunny escaping a young child’s room that is rather destructive of their toys as the bunny finds out by running into the current toys of the child (the other group members characters), terrified by their condition, the bunny try’s to escape injuring itself along the way. Originally, we thought to go down a horror route inspired by the messed-up toys from the film Toy Story owned by the character Sid and design broken toys for our animation that had similar characteristics, but we opted for something a little lighter like the room being occupied by a much younger child and the toy damage being innocent, child ignorance instead of an evil older kid creating malicious creatures straight from hell.
Our setting meant we had a lot of creative freedom in designing our characters due to the non-restrictive theme of toys, which has a vast variety of options. I really wanted to make a car and because we were to keep the characters simple, I seen it as a good opportunity as I would not have to worry about creating a perfect replicated model. My first immediate problem was I had no idea where to begin making a car and online tutorials were not much help. Seeking help, I asked my lecturer Mike, and he showed me his recommended method of doing it. This was very helpful, and I found it much simpler than the tutorials I had been looking at, so I chose to make my car model this way and I am very happy with how the finished model turned out.
When it came to rigging, I had a little trouble getting the rotation on my wheels to look right and also making sure it only rotated the wheels and not the entire car. When it came to my shape keys, I had to do the left and right eyebrows separately rather than using the copy and paste mirror method. I could not figure out why, but I put it down to just the eyebrows were paired and not actually meshed together. By far the worst and most frustrating problem I had was getting my wheels to rotate with the car. I had planned to do a lot of car movement and I thought that giving my car a transformation restriction allowing the car to act like a real toy as in moving the car would also simultaneously rotate the wheels, all this saving me time because I would not have to manually rotate them for the whole animation. I tried so hard to get it to work watching tutorials and reading forums, but I eventually had to admit defeat and move on because I did not want to waste any more time on it.
Animating my section and then everyone putting their parts together went without a hitch and myself and my group are quite pleased with the final result. We did change some things later after we got feedback from lecturers during our presentation but thankfully there was not anything major to change.
Overall, this year has been educational, it has been challenging but most of all, it has been an enjoyable experience. There are not many things I would change or complain about, but I do wish, if possible, we could always choose our groups like in this module as I honestly feel, it was more productive when everyone is comfortable and more in tune with each other’s work flow.