Post Mortem ANC230

The task that I attempted this trimester was a short fight animation. Even though we could have worked in a group, I ended up working on my own but the environment was handled by a group of studio one students.

I started Pre-production enthusiastic as it was a goal of mine to produce a fighting animation. I started off working in a pair where we started coming up with an idea for the fighting scene. We originally came up with the idea of a large guy against a small guy we were going to have them flying around in a dragon ball style of fight. Both overwhelmingly powerful beings having an epic destructive fight. The story was unclear as we never got the chance to develop it due to the fact that my group member left onto another group. It was because of this that I had to change the story to the smaller guy fighting an evil version of himself. This would minimise modelling of characters and allow me to concentrate on animation. I presented the project idea to the studio 1 guys and got a group to work on the environment.

It was at this point I started to fall behind. The treatment had numerous problems causing numerous rewrites which took up great amounts of time. This took time away from story board development and project documentation took far longer than I predicted. I was well behind schedule and started cutting into my animation time. The studio 1 group I was with starting to need the story boards. By the time I finally got to the story board stage I had to sacrifice the quality to complete them. The good thing is I gave my studio 1 group a lot of creative freedom over the environment so they were well on there way to creating a great environment. It took way too long to create my animatic but I finally moved on to modelling which I tried to complete as quickly as possible and had great success. It was at this point where I started to work very closely and took a more active role in the environmental creation. I did not create anything with in the environment. The studio 1 group were not confident with there modelling ability so I guided their modelling tasks and I received extremely positive feed back on the help I gave.

I started rigging and with me being so for behind schedule I had no choice but to create a CAT rig and just use it. Trouble came when I started skinning as I had very little faith in my skinning abilities. At first I was having great difficulty as like last trimester I had trouble comprehending the colours and numbers and tracking every vert being effected. It was a little later in the skinning process that I had breakthrough wile I was skinning the fingers. I started to select envelopes in specific orders one after the other instead of selecting everything and making it 100. I started at 0 and worked my way up slowly through the fingers one by one. I started to see significant improvement in my skinning after this and even went back to redo previous points to improve them. The skinning process became much faster and easier. I then started to create morphs for facial expressions and teeth and eyes to morph around. After the morphs I finally moved onto the animation stage

By this point I was so far behind schedule that I had to shorten my animation severely but I had a great environment to animate with that was still being improved. I was animating for three weeks starting at the beginning of week 10. With in this project my goal was to spend the majority of the trimester on animation because I have always rushed through it and I was hoping to learn a lot. Unfortunately at this late stage I had no time to really animate a huge amount so I picked 3 shots form the already shortened animation and spent 2 weeks trying to create the best animations I could out of them. So I ended up giving one of the shots some experimental 3D effects and some experimental camera movement. After the 2 weeks of animating I started rendering but being unaware that NVidia mental ray was no longer available in 3ds max I started experimenting with the other render's. This meant we had to create special materials for the scene. This task created tension within the group as the scene had a large number of materials to edit we decided as a group to use scanline. After 5 hours of rendering I had my three shots but they came out bad quality and the animation could be improved further. So I spent the 3rd week polishing and finally found that scanline was not working and ended up using quicksilver witch gave average quality. By the beginning of week 13 I had my three shots rendered and spent the rest of the week editing them for handing.

My greatest and most apparent problem I had this trimester was time management and scope. Balancing life other projects and this project proved to be unbelievably difficult for me. This brought me to an all-time low during my entire time at SAE driving me to an unmotivated mess. It is clear that I must not over scope and prioritise my time otherwise risk frailer. The most positive experience during this trimester was guiding the studio one group in creating the environment. I believe their skills may have improved due to my being there and I am very thankful to them for creating a truly wonderful environment.

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