3DA Animation Project

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.