The last few weeks of class and independent study have been hectic to say the least, mainly because it takes a lot of time and patience to cope with learning how to use new software or new features on previously used softwares, as well as troubleshooting all the issues that come with this, but we finished our animation, finally.
When rigging my model, I found it easier than I expected, as I had had some previous practice using the shortcut for parenting a NURBS shape with an object, and I now understand that rigging is so useful because it allows you to move your mode3l through your sequence, but doesn’t interfere with the mesh (for example, if you moved the whole thing and a leg floated off in the process). Although, since it was my first time rigging for a full length animation segment, it was helpful to have my lecturers tutorial videos to work along with, which also allowed me to experiment using blend shapes for my character’s eye movement.
After finishing the animation, I had to add lighting before starting to render, but unfortunately, that took up a substantial amount of time- much more than I expected it to, and I found the rest of my group to be having similar issues. In retrospect, I would have altered my segment to make it shorter or perhaps rendered in the campus Mac suite from the beginning, as they have faster processors which can speed up the process. As it was, it took a few hours to solve some issues with the lighting exposure in my video (the hive appeared as black whereas the characters were affected by the light normally), and the rendering took about 48 hours in addition. So I would class this assignment as a big learning opportunity for me; I need to work on my time management and anticipate software issues well before they manifest.
Overall, I’m happy with my animation segment, particularly one scene where I have two different coloured spotlights shining down on one of the bee characters. The blue tones coupled with a warm fuchsia from the second spotlight reminded me of the scenes from jazz bars that I’ve seen in films such as Soul or La La Land, and I’d love to experiment more with lighting over the summer, so I can make the entirety of my future animations have more of an emotive atmosphere, rather than just being happy about one specific part.
When I finished rendering, I noticed that there were some issues with the UV textures on the bees in that they appeared metallic or even transparent; which I am baffled by as they were imported as Lambert textures, so I’ll have to look in to that.