Post-Mortem Rapid Production

Positive

I am very pleased with how my Jelly turned out for the majority of the animation, the stretchy bone Rig worked well to animate the squash and stretch for the wobble of the Jelly. Should I repeat this or ever animate Jelly again, I’d like to try animating it with two wobbles running along the two planes, for the animation I did I only animated it along the X/Y plane I’d like to see if I could add a secondary wobble on the Z/Y planes.

 

Considering I did the 2D Character in the last few hours of rendering out my animation I’m very happy with how it turned out, I had drawn like 5 different faces and expressions for him however cut it back to two in the final edit as I believe the rest were fairly unnecessary. I imitated Rick Murray’s 2D style from a few of his videos and assignments that I’ve worked with him on.

https://www.youtube.com/user/rickkmurray/videos

 

I’m quite pleased with how it turned out overall, small things such as using a mask on the 2D character for the Jelly, as the waiter dashes bringing him closer and ending the shot a bit sooner, and making the lights brighter would have just polished it off, however I’m still extremely happy with how it all turned out. Getting everything out of the way at the start was perhaps the key to my success.

 

 

Negative

Rigging was an interesting event in the pipeline. Originally I wanted to create a more complex rig for my waiter with arm and legs at least. But I realized that my waiter wasn’t the main character of the Animation like I originally thought. To avoid this in the future I’ll have to do more research and make more test rigs before attempting to rig, alternatively modifying a CAT rig so that I don’t have to make one from scratch.

 

Due to my original thought process that my waiter was the subject of the animation I put more effort into His model compared to the Jelly’s. This was generally fine and didn’t pose too many issues however while Rendering it was clear that the translucency on the Jelly couldn’t get through the multiple layers of polygons making the Jelly quite Dark and not as bright as id like it to have been, but that’s fine just change the flavor of the Jelly a little and it’s fine… In future all I’d have to do to avoid this is to delete the back polygons inside of the model.

 

Aside from my waiter having no way to move his feet as I’d liked too, Which is more to do with his Rigging than the animation itself, If I were to go back and redo it, in shot two I’d like to add some personality to his dash. At the moment he sorta zips across the screen like a robot. I could’ve avoided this even just by  arching his back a little or giving him some simple squash and stretch.

 

 

• Hypothetically, if your project was a large scale production, what production roles do you think it would require?

Project manager/Leader – Storyboard artist – 3D artist – Rigger/Skinner – Lighting artist – Animator – Texture/Material Specialist – Generalist?

 

• Out of the roles you have listed, what production role was the most challenging in this production, and why?

Probably the Rigging, as I have had very little experience in this area and generally dislike it the most.

 

This project taught me allot, teaching me the basics of all the steps within the pipeline, specifically how to render using arnold, including Lighting, texturing and using the real time rendering thingy. I also learnt the value in scoping down projects and how to do that more effectively.