Virtual Environments - 2D & 3D Visualisation: May 2011

Overall I really enjoyed this assignment, I felt it tested our ability to effectively develop an idea for a story, model, rig, skin, use of textures & materials, animating, and post-production. All of the basic fundamentals for a under-graduate practitioner.

I found myself doing more design work prior to starting the practical part of the project this time round, which I'll put down to experience. Changing my mind about which way to go with a story, continually redrawing character designs, and constantly changing environments I felt all contributed to the final piece.

I enjoyed making the environments, having spent more time on it this time than on the previous assignment. I wanted to make more of an effort to capture the look & feel, trying to keep it as true to the original as possible. The second environment changed frequently but in the end I was reasonably pleased with how it came out. It was pretty accurate to some scenes from the film, but with a few strange differences to orientate it more to the conflict between the characters.

My favourite part of the whole project was probably modelling the characters, it took a while at first to get them from looking so 'blocky' but I feel I progressed from earlier designs. I can't say I'm completely happy with the final models, however I am happy with the level of progression made from starting the assignment.

Rigging - eurgh. I actually found rigging rather easy, and the more time I did it (which was a lot!), the easier it got. There were a few issues at first, that I couldn't explain, but performing the same task over and over eventually hammered them out. I never used the CAT-rig, as I felt using it would have been cheating a little. I was pleased with how well my rigs worked but I felt that my ability at skinning didn't really capture my ability to rig. While I understand the basic concept of skinning I feel I need to spend more time on it in future as its skinning that can make even the best of models look awful when it comes to animating them.

I spent a lot of time unwrapping one of my characters, which gave me a fairly good understanding of how to do it effectively and efficiently, hopefully my characters portray this. Unwrapping was obviously a big part of making my Joker character look right as without I wouldn't have been able to do the face paint.

As an animator I feel I still have a long way to go, my biggest problem is one I could easily change but it's a personal flaw, Timekeeping & Organisation. I tend to rush as I want to see the finished result, this generally makes my animating ability look weak as it doesn't flow or look realistic. Over the Summer I intend to rectify this.

Overall I felt that I had improved on many aspects from the previous assignment, and identified some key places I need to improve, and where my strengths lie. As for the animation itself I am reasonably happy with the final result, I wish I had spent more time on it, and had better planned out the plot. There wasn't much fighting in it, which I felt there could have been more, then again there wasn't all that much in the original scene. Finally, I really enjoyed doing this project, and hopefully spending a little time this Summer to improve in places will see even better results next year.