End of Year Reflection

This year started like many others with a project in mind and a team to do it with. This year in animation was slightly different, however. This year there would be no little projects to waste time. There would only be semester long slogs of huge projects. The first project was a super hero spoof called Bagman. Issues arose from the very beginning with models and animation. Along with this being the first long term group project this was a lot to manage. It was a hard to get everyone on the same a page, but through hard work we were able to make it work. One of the things that was hardest to learn was rigging and modeling people. Luckily Zac did all the rigging but it was still hard to animated it. The other huge problem we had to solve was Maya’s less than settler lighting system, but we made it passed that as well, mostly by guess and check.

            the second project that was created was a pirate cove. I still feel that it the best project I’ve created. There were so many new things we had to learn. For instance, we had to learn about particle effects and found out about the generation tool. The biggest issues by far was getting the water to work, and by the end we were able to make it work, it didn’t look particular good, and we had to sacrifice all lighting to make it work. Rendering took so long after that it seemed the project would never get done, but we made it just in time.

            For both projects one of the things that surprised me was how hard it was to work with a group, even one your good friends with. Everyone has their own ideas on what they want to do, and sometimes these idea conflict with each other. That combined with the amount of things we could actual pull off lead to many problems, but in he ends the projects got done and it worked out to where everyone could at least be satisfied.

            I sometimes wish that I could have done I third project and that we knew something going into the projects that would have really cut down the time, but overall I’m happy with how everything turned out. It’s a shame that nothing we created one emagine, but that just shows use that other people worked just as hard s we did. This year, by every stranded, was great and I’m glad I got to experience it.