3DA Project Progression
(For my project this was the initial
idea. The character would show impatience before walking to the step, sitting
down and then pulling out headphones and putting them on.)
(The
first animated post turned out as I expected, I liked the concept)
Suggestions:
Change character’s sitting action to headphones put on first.
Character’s
turn to walk was off.
(When I posted the second animation I had not had enough
time to finish working on it.)
Suggestion:
No Suggestions
(I
made some changes to my final animation post after some good suggestions.)
Suggestion:
Timing too slow at start and too fast at end
(The final animation turned out pretty
good and I like it. There are still some minor issues though.)
Reflection on the
Project
When I look at my finished project for this month, the first
thing to come to my mind is that I think it turned out good. It defiantly could
have been better and I did not anticipate how long it was going to turn out,
but I still believe it turned out good. Just doing the general blocking out and
then filling in the in-betweens was the easiest part. I found it relaxing and
not stressful. The hardest part was going back and making changes, whether it
was in the graph editor, timing or fixing problems, it was stressful and hard
to fix. More experience will help me later on so this is still helpful. The
problem with the pull vectors was the hardest part, as they would sometimes
work, and sometime not, which was aggravating. In the end fixing the problem
still caused other issues, like popping from one position to another but it was
less noticeable. In the end I like the animation; I think it turned out good
but if I had more time I would work on fixing the minor issues.
It’s hard to pinpoint a moment when I felt most engaged as I
don’t really remember that kind of stuff but if I had to choose I would say around
week two the process was going really well. I was getting things done early
with little to no problems. It was my first try at animating the walk cycle and
it started out well. Parts I needed to change were due to things I was not
familiar with. Working in the 3D space, there are more parts to pay attention
to. I used my knowledge from animating a walk cycle in 2D to jumpstart my idea
on animation in 3D and I think that really helped. Learning to use reference
started out confusing, as I couldn’t move the video down the time line, but
with help from other students I was able to fix that and use the reference. Week
three is when I started having trouble. I didn’t have near the amount of time
as before and I had to constantly fix problems. Pull vectors would constantly
not Playblast correctly, even when I scrubbed through the animation and
everything looked right. On the bright side, that is when I started to figure
out my workflow.
Truthfully, if I had the chance again, I would not have made
the animation as long. I needed more time to focus on details to fix problems.
If the animation was shorter I could have made it look better overall. The actions
in the scene were not particularly hard to do and I felt like I did them well.
I would probably still do something in the same story with the walk and sit but
not focus too much on the character crossing their arms and not do the
character putting on headphones.
In the end, this entire experience has been helpful in
trying, discovering and practicing different parts of animation. I really did
not have much advanced practice with animation and this class was helpful in
figuring out things I did not know prior. Prior to this class, I had not
practiced the animation principle in 3D to this level and I had no experience at
animating a walk cycle.
