First Semester  Reflection

This is my walk cycle project. It took a pretty long time and I was pretty harsh with myself in my blog over this project but looking back it really wasn't all that bad. I will say that it could have been improved if I had a proper model to animate with.  I wanted to reflect on this project because this project (besides my story) gave me the most trouble. Looking back on projects that gave you a tough time can really help you improve. To improve after  reflecting back on this project I noticed that the animation was really rigged with the character reacting to changes in movement with sharp movements making it look unnatural. Something that we didn't touch in the project but is still important to point out is that the rest of the body besides the legs and arms do not move.




Oh this project..... This project was a REAL pain. I mean almost EVERYTHING went wrong when creating this and on top of that we had a strict schedule we had to keep to. I chose this project to reflect upon for the reason I reflected on my last project,  the problems I encountered while creating the project. One of the problems I encountered was that my character WOULD NOT STAY TOGETHER. For the life of me I could not figure out why the puppet pin and parenting tools would not work. I ended up just animating each part individually. Something I learned from this project is that you will have to compromise. When doing something you will almost always encounter a problem and you have to figure out a way to work around it.



This was a fun one, my first 3d animation project. So far I am enjoying Maya much more compared to after effects just because of how easy it is to use. Another factor going into my enjoyment could be that I want to become a 3d character or environmental animator but still this program feels amazing to use. Anyways this project I was tasked with creating a castle by using booleans and textures. I thought this was a great intro project and it was a lot of fun for me to do. I picked this project to reflect on because I want to become a 3d animator and I think I can learn a lot from this project.  One of those things includes how to be effective in Maya. From what I have learned so far from Maya is that you have to take it slow. You can't just throw something together and hope it turns out well because something WILL go wrong and ruin your project. You also have to be able to see what will and will not work with some textures being just too bright or not being repeating.




This was my second animation project and you may notice that it looks MUCH more realistic compared to my last project. Well this is because of the use of lighting. Lighting in animation is absolutely essential if you want to create a world that feels alive. In this project we learned how to use the most basic lighting tools and shadow tools to cast onto our "poly thing". This "Polything" was created with the soul purpose being to demonstrate lighting. One thing that I learned from this project was that lighting is very realistic in these spaces. They act like they normally would if it was reality. If I were to use the spotlight tool it would look like a spot light is being used directly towards the object. This project in all is pretty simple to understand, we basically flashed lights at a weird ball and made it look cool. Even though its simple I can still learn the basics of lighting from this project.