As of this writing, I had barely finished creating my animation this morning. And ultimately I'm fairly pleased with how it all turned out. This is probably going to be my final post to this blog because It's all finally finished.
My animation itself looks fairly sleek and matches my initial vision at least moderately well. As I predicted, I was able to use my limited toolset to it's maximum potential. There was definitely a few hiccups though. The scene that represented the third panel of my storyboard was a HUGE problem as expected (remember, I have no idea how to attach a camera to an object), as trying to move the spaceships & camera separately AND keep it looking fluid at the same time was looking to be downright impossible. Every attempt at this ended up having the ships jitter back and forward inconsistently and just look poor.
To circumvent this, I cheated and actually kept the spaceships in place for almost the entire scene (they fly off the side of the cameras viewpoint at the end of that scene) while having the camera pan very slowly in order to give the false illusion of movement. Ultimately it would have looked better if I had the knowledge of the correct tools. But I made use of what I had here.
Another issue I had initially was making legitimate looking lasers/explosions. I initially creating a long, thin cylinder and coloured it green to use it as a laser (This is actually what I did for my lasers during my cybernetic-inspired year 1 game design project), but they were still very dull. My Explosion/fire was just a large yellow sphere and it looks absolutely awful. It looked like someone had stuck some play-dough to the back of my imperial destroyer.
In this particularly instance I received some unintentional help from my friend Jack (also taking this course) who told me about the 'Glow' effect he used in his animation. I viewed his animation and it was immediately obvious how much better his lasers and explosion looked because of this effect. Naturally, I went and added the glow effect to my own animation. The lasers were immediately far better and the explosion were a definite improvement....I wouldn't go as far to say that the explosions looked GOOD though, I made an effort to add some distortion to my spherical fire in order to make it more realistic, but it didn't really work well.
The music I selected previous did fit fairly well with my animation. I midjudged how long a certain section of the song was though and as such it hits the 30-second marker at a weird time and cuts off the song at a really weird interval. Ultimately, this isn't an issue. But it's one that annoyed me slightly anyway.
As with any work done, a SWOT analysis is possible. As such I chose to add mine onto the end of my creation analysis.
Strengths:
-Totally obvious, but I didn't have to remake the models because they had been made already in the first half of the semester
-I had the rare luxury of knowing actually how I wanted my animation to look, and how each scene would flow into the other. This meant that I didn't have to re-think much (if any) of my storyboard during the animation phase, while many other would have had to change their original plan because of the storyboard not connecting too well.
-I seem to have the god-given ability to innovate in unfavourable situations. As such, my horrendous lack of Maya knowledge was covered well enough by my creativity for my animation to not suffer too much
Weaknesses:
-The aforementioned lack of Knowledge. I am certain that I would have been able to create a (relative) masterpiece with all of the knowledge I was supposed to learn for this assignment.
-Multiple unexpected and highly unwanted life events occuring during the second half of this semester meant I missed a lot of classes that would have made my life that much easier and also meant I wouldn't be sat here typing up my final blog in January 12 hours before my deadline was due.
-Also having 3 different jobs. When it comes to uni, 3 jobs is a severe weakness
Oppurtunities:
-This module allowed me to really explore the other side of my chosen industry. I have many friends that do this side of the subject and now I actually have an idea what they're on about now. I can see this becoming super helpful down the line when I need to convey myself to co-workers
-On a more spiritual level, this module allowed me to re-discover a more creative side of myself that enjoyed thinking about the artistic and even psychological side of things, A talent that school and working life desperately tries to beat out of you.
Threats:
-The previously mentioned unwanted life events were a major threat to my project as a whole. They still are now even 12 hours before my deadline. This is really the biggest one going as it really crippled me for a good 4 weeks and forced me to get my deadline extended
-Having equipment stolen, I had to do my entire project on the universities H-drive, because my external hard drive was stolen during Week6 and I don't have enough money to replace that hard drive.
-I was under a lot of pressure to not make a mistake on this half of the module. On the previous half, I gave a blog link that actually didn't work and this led to my work getting a far lower grade than it deserved. I had to double-check everything along the way this time because I needed it to be at highly marked as humanly possible to ensure I passed.
(Note: I find it extremely funny and sad at the same time that all 3 of these 'threats' were things that actually happened to me. It's like I wasn't supposed to pass this module)
And with that, this is the end of my blog. The work is all done!
I may possibly add a youtube video of my animation, on the off-chance that the DVD doesn't like the video. but that would be in it's own post.
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