Major Animation Project: Summary

Soooooooo... the hardships are finally over. Another leaf in my book of accomplishments has been turned over... in fact its probably one of the very few pages in my book of accomplishment :) But I can say confidently that the successful completion of this project has definitely set the ball rolling for my long road to success and beyond. What did I learn in the last three years you may ask? Well where do I begin. For starters I am what I like to think, more than competent in at least three programs now(Maya, Photoshop, AfterEffects), and have a decent understanding in various other programs such as Premier Pro, Final Cut etc.

Sticking to the subject matter though, I am quite happy with how my major project has turned out overall. Of course, there is areas hear and there I would have loved to have made better like more dynamic animation, a few little extra visual effects here and there, and most definitely above all I would have liked to have had just a bit more time to polish the audio.

All these minor faults aside, I am more than happy with the finished porduct, I feel I expressed my vision quite vividly, and can honestly say in some areas, far exceeded my expectations of how it would look in the end.

It's been a fun ride and it gives me great pleasure to view all that I have achieved....

...I just hope the viewers feel the same way..

Major Animation Project Stage Six: Week Seven

This week I spent time finishing my dvd cover and dvd label, and director's bio for Sheersha and Matthew's class. At this stage they are merely mockups of what my final cover and label will look like, as i have only a limited amount of rendered pics to work with. Im quite happy with what i came up with but when it comes to finalising my cover, im think i will go for a much more minimalistic look,with a lot more negative space and less colour bursting out at every square inch.

Major Animation Project Stage Six: Week Six

This week im still sorting out the cameras (movement, focal length etc) for all my shots, and reassigning some new shaders to the guitar. Originally all the metallic components of the guitar and the microphone and stand, were going to just be a generic silver coloured reflective materal, but i've now upgraded to a much more realistic looking chrome shader (20% gold 80% chrome silver). Seeing as there will be quite a few fairly close shots of the wood on the body of the guitar, ive also updated the wood to a much higher resolution. Parallel to my own project i've also been helping Yen with texturing again. I mapped and textured three different versions of a weathered metal duck, just to give the ducks a little variation and character, insuring also that none of them look generic in any way.

Major Animation Project Stage Six: Week Five

This week i completed a milestone overview, discussing my success' and falures, in terms of the things i had planned to have done by week five. Overall I was not very successful in completing my goals, but i feel i made up for it in audio and AfterEffects work. At this stage i can safely say i am around 30 to 40 percent complete. I am currently blocking out my cameras and running a few test environment renders with hdri, tweaking the colour grade in maya before commiting to any solid rendering.

Major Animation Project Stage Six: Week Four

Week four and I am not very confident about reaching my milestone next week. The audio component of my milestone SHOULD be complete by next week if all goes to plan but the whole conversion/graphics card issue is still yet to be resolved. Instead i have been going hard at the visual effects and animated 2d sequences of my major. I am currently working on a 2d limited style animation in After Effects to represent a four second dream sequence in my project. It's looking nice but still requires more polish. My goal now is to at least complete all my 2d sequences by next weeks milestone to make up for the 3d work I should be catering to.

Major Animation Project Stage Six: Week Three

This week I completed two compositing layers for my project. One is a psycadelic style animated graphic, four seconds in duration and will be composited over the last shot in my film. The other is a fiery background sequence which will be composited over a shot where "El Conejo King" is angered. I can honestly say that i am loving After Effects at the moment, and i am quite suprised with what it can do, so much so that i have decided to incorperate it much more in my animation than i had originally planned, which i feel will put the icing on the cake, so to speak, on my film visually.

Major Animation Project Stage Six: Week Two

This week completed Li's master character's facial texturing, all that is left now is his hands and it's done. I've been building upon my audio week by week in approach to my milestone also. The instrumental is virtually complete apart from a few minor alterations and polishing touches, just at the vocal lyrics and melody writing stage now. As for my own 3d work, i am still unable to do much due to conversion issues and my graphics card no longer functioning, but im hoping to have things all sorted in the next few weeks. Until then i've decided to start working on a few little animated graphics for compositing.