Overall, I think this project went the best it could have given the experience and knowledge I had at the time. However, now that I have worked on this project, I know different ways I could go about it.
If I were to start this assignment over again, the first thing I would do would be to make a schedule and make it realistic. I would also make one for the group and one for me to keep myself right. When I made the initial schedule, I was unaware of how long some aspects of the production would take like rigging. In the schedule I said rigging would take two days which it didn’t but now that I have experience with more aspects of the animation pipeline I think I could actually create a realistic schedule.
I would also have suggested weekly group meetings, as a group, we used to be very good at doing this but after easter this fell off so If I were to do this again I’d make sure that after any breaks or holidays we had a group meeting to see what we had done over the break, and then weekly group meetings after as I think they help to make sure everybody is on the same page and nobody is struggling in silence.
A big change I would make is that I would become more experimental throughout the process. I would push textures a bit more by looking at different ways people texture in substance by looking at tutorials, and I would look at different videos on how to shape-key because I think that the way we were shown wasn’t the best for me and there might be other methods which I understand better. I would also experiment with lighting as Marnie handled all of that in the team but I think if I were to do it again I would do my own lighting experiments as well. As I feel with this project I played it very safe because I was extremely cautious of crunching near the deadline as I struggle under pressure so I wanted to give myself plenty of time to get things done, and this came at the cost of being more experimental, which I regret, but I will make up for this over the summer.
I would also steal some ideas from other groups, I saw a group where they drew out potential expressions for their characters, which they would reference when doing their shape-keys, I thought this was a really good idea, so I would love to do that next time.
Overall at the course I really, really enjoyed myself