evaluation

Evaluation The brief was to create a one minute cut scene cinematic film in teams of three, using Maya and Unity. We also had to (individually) create an alien and rig him and make a video show reel demonstrating a rigged animated and textured version of our tutorial character. For the alien character we were all given reference images for this part of the assignment, but I did try to give my alien a bit of my (his) own identity nonetheless. As I was confident with modelling I left this way too late as I thought the rigging would be a lot easier than it turned out to be, I had real trouble with the the rigging which was incredibly frustrating. Also I had missed some of the lessons ( a really bad idea) and so this meant that I had to do more work before I could even start this part. The modelling was the easiest bit as I enjoy modelling and that always helps, I feel confident in this part of the work. I have learnt again about the importance of proper timetabling, I mistakenly left myself with not enough time to do justice to my alien, thinking that this part of the exercise would take much less time than in fact it did, which is frustrating and I will need to work on my skills in the rigging department much more. For the short film we chose to do a “western” theme opting for the topic “challenge” which was to be a duel in our film. We divided up the work involved and I got the task of creating all the scenery and backgrounds. Initially we created lots of mood boards to look at different storylines and settings and it became clear that we would need a street scene with a saloon, a church and a barn along with other buildings. If I were to do this again I would have created a jail and a lot more different types of buildings/houses to add more depth to the backgrounds. I did research into various western type buildings and this was useful, I could see that the texturing was going to be an important part of this part of the project as the dry and timbery buildings have a specific “feel” which I needed to convey. We went to the royal armouries to see if we could get any good reference images, we took photos of the images we thought would be useful, to do with weaponry and this was a useful thing to have done as we were able to come up with some good ideas as this setting inspired us and we were able to brainstorm a lot about what we wanted to do and what would be possible. I needed to research the types of buildings that would be needed so I looked at two animated western type films : Rango and Black Water Gospel. I compared these backgrounds to those in old western scenes and photos I found doing my general research. I could see that the buildings themselves were actually quite simple. I also knew that I would not have to create the whole buildings in most instances but that the inside the saloon part would be the most important as this is where the animation was going to start so I really needed to set the scene to start with. It was important to make the scenery look run down and decrepit, this seems to be a common theme in western type films, and also we were using a grim reaper character so the old and tatty nature of the backgrounds would add to the overall feel and atmosphere of our animation. This was my first time doing texturing though and I didn’t really know how to do it at the start, and I had a few false starts with textures that didn’t work. When I was modelling I made a few models that didn’t work out so I had to remake them, but this did not waste so much time as I have done modelling before. With the texturing I found that I spent far more time than anticipated and this was frustrating but of course also useful and I feel I have learnt a lot from this exercise, particularly regarding texturing as I tried loads and loads of different textures but the scales were not right and so the planks of wood were not to scale and so they didn’t work out at all, so this part of the exercise took the most time for me. As I knew I was going to put this into unity with cartoon shading (which we as a team had decided to do) I didn’t put any bump maps into my textures. During the project we had a change in members of the team which added significant delays, also my time management was not great, however I do think this is a good outcome for my first attempt at such a big project. Overall I am pleased with our end result, particularly given the poor time management and change of team during the project. If I did the project again I would design the buildings a lot better as I had a bit of a mental block with Maya but now I am starting to have some fun with it and this is a breakthrough for me so I don’t feel now that Maya is as difficult as I used to, so I am confident that next time it will be easier to allocate my time better which is useful as next year I will be creating a whole level in Maya. This project has been so useful in helping me decide what I would like to focus on next year – Maya scenography rather than film.