When I was done with 3D literacy, I was happy to take a break from modelling as it was very stressful but when I found out this course was all about 3D animation, I wasn’t very excited. But I found that we didn’t have to 3D model anything overly complicated and that 3D animation was a lot more straight forward and simple than I thought it would be. I enjoyed using blender a lot more this year than I did last year.
We had to create a 30 second animation. I was in a group with Andrea, Nicolle, Ellen and Aaron. We went through a lot of simple ideas until we thought that a toy escaping from a claw machine would be the most fun as we would get to model toys and arcade props. With the help from the lecturers on our story, they gave some good tips as our first idea was a little complicated but I think our final story is good.
As my mental health wasn’t doing so well after the holidays, I was only doing the bare minimum of my work at first. I realized that it wasn’t fair for my group so I tried pushing myself to get everything up to date, even if it was late. Because of this I wasn’t satisfied with the amount of 3D models I was making as I originally didn’t think there would be that much props in the arcade until I checked out the progress and it was basically completely full at that point so I only sent my models that I thought would fit within the scene without stuff having to be moved around.
I found it really easy to talk to the people within my group as they were all very nice and friendly. We communicated with each other nearly everyday so we didn’t have a time where we were confused on what we were doing. We would vote on designs we liked, had checklists and every time time someone asked a question, it would be answered really quickly. A problem that we ran into was that everyone rigged their characters differently but the way that we solved this was by making short tutorials on how our own rigs worked.
I’m proud with how my final animation turned out and my model but I wish that I put more work into it as compared to everyone else in my group, but apart from that we never really ran into problems and small problems would be solved really quickly. All my team mates were really positive as we got matching keyrings and even had a pizza day when the animation got completed.