Animation Final

Animation Junior Year Reflection

During this year in animation I learned a lot while working on my own and other group project. I worked almost exclusively in Maya and with 3d modeling. The first major thing that I learned was how to manipulate vertexes. Before this year all we learned how to do was put other shapes together and union or differences them together, but learning how to add subdivisions and manipulate them really helped in creating better, more realistic objects. It especially helped when creating organic objects or characters because you can manipulate simple shapes to create a more in depth complex polygon. The other thing that I found to be extremely helpful was the soft select tool. While we had used the soft select tool in the past I had never used it to the extent that I had this year. Its extremely useful in creating chords, wires or even character bases and the body of characters. I also used tools like create text, bridge and center pivot. These tools really saved time and allowed me to get to the more difficult parts of a model more quickly. I also learned that if you want to create a more realistic model, or if you are modeling after a certain object you could always import a photo of what you are trying to create and move a shape to fit it. This was probably the most helpful tip I learned because I saw immediate improvements in the models I was creating. While I worked in Maya almost the whole time, I worked in after effects for a stop motion very briefly for about a week or two. I learned how to string together frames that you import into after effects and make them flow smoothly and steadily. I also learned various things about exporting texturing and lighting but I will get into that later.

I learned the majority of this through my instructor Mr. Netterville, primarily through the project at the beginning year, which required us to create a fish model and then animate it swimming. I found this project to be extremely useful throughout the remainder of the year because I learned most of what I mentioned in the above paragraph through this fish project. Another asset I used to learn about new modeling techniques was Lynda.com (when it was still available to us). It had a multitude of tutorials that I could watch to learn how to model. When I briefly worked in unity it also had some good staring videos so I could learn the basic principles of the program. After I stopped using Lynda, I would scour YouTube for a halfway decent tutorial. This proved to be rather hard considering many tutorials becomes outdated as Maya continues to update and other tutorials just didn’t have a good end product. But eventually I would find a good tutorial on YouTube whenever I needed to find one. Overall whenever I needed to find a tutorial or something to help me in creating a project I was always able to find it.

I would say that my biggest strength is the ability to come up with new projects and get good starts on them as well as have them look pretty good. Having this strength also leads to my greatest weakness, which is starting a project without finishing it. I have roughly three of four projects that I had started but did not finished because I had another idea I wanted to go do. It’s not that the projects were looking bad; some of my better projects are some of my un-finished one. The problem I usually occur is being able to texture or light them. I have learned a few things about lighting and texturing better but every time I have to texture something and try to make it seem halfway realistic it makes my project significantly worse. I think during the summer I’m going to make it a point to finish a couple of those projects just so I can start fresh when it comes time to start animation senior year. I’m also going to work on texturing and look at some texturing tutorials over the summer so I know how to finish projects. I feel like I’ve improved a lot though this year. My projects, while not all are complete, are looking significantly better than what they were looking like last year. I was even able to qualify for eMagine with my mechanical model of a generator. Even though I have a lot of room for improvement, I still have come along way in my 3d modeling and animation skills since last year.

One thing I would like to fix next year is that I would prefer to work by myself from now on. I decided to work in a group earlier this year and it did not end out very well. Even though when I was in this group when I made my generator which was one of my best projects, I ended up doing most of the work for a pretty ambitious project which didn’t get completed with my assets alone. 2^nd quarter through 4^th quarter I worked primarily on my own and I started to accomplish significantly more than what I was first quarter. I’m not closed minded to the idea of working in a group again its just that I prefer to work alone, and ask for input from my peers when needed.

Overall I feel like my year in animation was an educational yet exciting one. I enjoyed nearly every project I worked on, and coming to animation for 2 hours nearly everyday was the highlight of my normally dull school day. I hope to fix and improve on my weaknesses and further improve on my strengths for next year. I also plan on taking my projects home over the summer so I can finish them so starting next year I can work on entirely new ones.