This project has been the one I feel like I have learnt the most on. It has been a struggle at times and I whole heartedly believe it is the hardest I have ever attempted, but the pa off has been so worth it. I went from at the start of the project being afraid to even touch the software Maya with no idea how to model or do basically anything on it and I've gone from that to making a full one minute animation, so or that reason I am pretty happy and very glad I did that project. I don't think I will be attempting to make another 3D animation in the near future as I do believe I am more tailored to 3D animation, but I am very glad I attempted it and I can say I have picked up many skills about animating with 3D animation software. So if I were set another brief to animate a 3D animation, i would not be as weary as now I essentially have the skills on some level to create a 3D animation.
That's not to say it all went smoothly, there were multiple times both matt and I ran into errors while animating. The part I struggled with the most was rigging my character. Having Matt's tutorials have been such an immense help throughout this project as I believe I would have been totally lost without them. I have said before on the blog that I really struggle with remembering instructions, in particular with technical instructions involving Maya. It is not the sort of software I only have to listen to half of the instructions and it'll probably turn out okay because it is such a technical program, the little errors I make do and have caught up with me and fixing these mistakes has been very time consuming. So if I were to do this project again I would definitely try to go slower at it. That sounds weird to say as only a few weeks ago I was quite far behind in my time management, but I understand now the key to being a good animator with Maya is to take care. I have often panicked and rushed with the software and this has led me to multiple errors. These mistakes weren't usually too major but they did when all is said and done set me back, for example i would frequently forget to rename joints and controls and keep my outliner in order.
Apart from that though, I have to say it has been the most organised project I have ever worked on and i have made sure to stay incredibly on top of my organisation. I had to bare in mind that while I was creating multiple files for the project, as was my partner Matt, so if we did not stay organised we would have ended up repeating ourselves, working on scenes that we weren't supposed to, and generally just getting lost. The project ended up being around 2GBs in size so it was simply not acceptable to not be organised with our file organising and naming. In the end it was a bit of work but it did pay off immensely as we never got too confused which we can be very proud of considering organisation is something both Matt and I struggle with.
There have been times we've struggled with the workload and we should have started animating earlier but that being said, in reflection I feel working on this animation with Matt has been one of the most fun briefs to work on. We were allowed basically unlimited creative freedom and when it comes to coming up with ideas, that is where both Matt and I's skills flourish. We have attempted things we have never done before and didn't think we would actually be able to do. For example, we actually managed to insert live action into our animation and have real life characters interact with our animated characters. I felt that this was incredibly ambitious for us to try even though i loved the ideas, I never thought we'd be able to accomplish it, yet we did.
Furthermore I have to say, I have really enjoyed working with Matt. I think we can both agree we do differentiate on some of our opinions, e.g. title fonts, but really these are pretty small agreements. But in the long run I was very lucky to be working with someone who had such a similar idea of what the final outcome should be as I did. Would I work with Matt again? Absolutely I would but if i was to change anything about the way we work together I would say that we should start animating our animation earlier to allow us more time for post production.
In conclusion I have really enjoyed this module, I might have complained about the software and made mistake, after mistake after mistake and gone through technical difficulties I still don't fully understand. But the way I see it, every one of these struggles has been a learning curve for me. I really wanted to learn how to animate with 3D software and I am very glad I got the chance to make an animation I feel is very successful. Looking at our final animation I am amazed at how it is now, to how it was in my mind when Matt and I came up with the concept idea two months ago. I feel we can both honestly say it is one of the projects we have worked the hardest on and we absolutely put our heart and souls into it, now we just hope an audience enjoys it.
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