Evaluation
Digital Skills 2
Jade Midson
I thoroughly enjoyed this project as I had touched upon some 3D before, but I felt a lot more confident this time. I managed to keep ahead of myself with organisation at the start and blogged everything as I went along, though towards the end I know I began to slow down the pace I was working at due to commitments to another project. I enjoyed watching the Moom character ‘come to life,’ and seeing my success in this, I was a lot more confident creating the Action Sequence animation.
I didn’t however leave much time to render my projects as a lot of the settings were wrong and wouldn’t render out properly, though thanks to the video tutorials, I was able to pick up on these issues and learn them.
The ball bounces were also quite fun to animate as we got to play around with extreme squashes and stretches etc.
A minor issue I had with the project was that I was confused with what I was being taught and the brief. For example, the brief said we had to include a collection of our captures and it was only mentioned that we save out versions as we went along in the project. Also, the camera’s settings were animated and we were told how to overcome this and then to ‘render all passes.’ However, upon doing this, one camera’s settings would render out as JPEGS and the other camera would render out as ‘TAGARS,’ which was confusing as After Effects didn’t seem to like this. The main downfall I would say is that I would have liked to have learned about all the different render settings a lot longer before the end of the project as this made me rush. Although having to complete my project a day earlier than needed due to personal circumstances may not have helped the rush, I think I would have been able to get all the rendered images together a lot quicker to author my DVD.
Oh, and as I was half way through rendering my action sequence footage, after about half an hour, I realised that I forgot to smooth the football that I modelled. Also, with this particular render, when I added it to the render queue in After Effects, the estimated time was ridiculously long, so I opted to only loop the video twice, as it is relatively long itself anyway.
I think I have learned that I need to keep on top of things as I go along like I started at the beginning of the project, regardless of other commitments, but I had fun animating in 3D, especially with the Action shots and using reference footage.
