Final Reflection

Emotion Project:

In this project, I was assigned the emotion disgust. The project goal was to animate a pre-rigged model named Max. In order to execute this project, I needed to understand the body movements and reactions that were associated with someone who is disgusted by something. This was a fairly easy research process that turned into a challenging project process. The easier parts were making the different joints and facial expressions move when and how I needed them to. However, getting these to move in tandem with the other parts was a greater challenge.  It took me a few tries to get all the moving parts to match up properly and actually simulate the expression of disgust, but when I did get it to work, it was well worth it. I really did enjoy doing this project and I hope that at some point we can revisit this project and do more with it or even try out other emotions that we want to do. There is a change that I would like to make and that would be to include some sort of object that is the reason for Max to be disgusted, as it would provide greater context for the scene being shown. Overall I really did enjoy this project, and I felt like I learned a great deal from it. 

Personal Project:

For this project. we had to come up with an elevator pitch about a project that personally interested us. Before presenting, we had to research the project and find at least one example of our project that could be used as an example. For my project, I wanted to 3-D model a set of floating islands and then create a world around it. This seemed very doable at first, and I even had some new methods I was wanting to use that would allow for easier modeling and more creativity to be expressed. I was very excited to get started on this project as I had a very grand vision for what I could turn this project into. The creation of the islands themselves was a relatively easy task and I thought that the project would've been a breeze from here on out. However, when it came to adding effects and some more environmental items, I hit a new wall of difficulty. The effects that I wanted to use such as fire and the growing of vines, didn't work out as well as I had hoped. The fire effect, a preset given in Maya's FX tab seemed like a given to use, as all the tutorials I watched had used it too. For whatever reason, it didn't work with my project and I ended up scrapping the fire idea until I could figure out how to do it. The answer came in a very challenging way. I ended up having to use a liquid emitter (think of a spout spraying water into the air) and then I had to change the visual effect from being water to being flames that transitioned into smoke. This was a tough but rewarding process, as I am very happy with the results. The vines however, did not work out so well. I originally planned on using an extension made using Python that would procedurally generate vines around the islands. Sadly I couldn't figure out how to get the program to actually run in Maya and I had to scrap that idea. My teacher however, had another idea, and that was to hand create curvy vines using the EP Curve tool and wrapping a cylinder around it to create a vine-like object. This worked at first, but upon actually playing the animation out using the new vine, Maya would crash therefore negating that idea as well. I decided to move on despite this and continued to work on the rest of the project. I am already planning a return to this project with several changes in mind on how to improve it and make it fit the idea that I originally had. Overall the project was a great learning experience and I really enjoyed working on it.

Rotoscope Project:

For my rotoscope project, I was tasked with filming a video and then drawing over it to create a rotoscope video. This project was very difficult for me as drawing is not my strongest skill, especially on a computer. However, despite the lack of drawing ability I really enjoyed this project. I really felt like I gained a much greater understanding on how 2-D animations work and how much work goes into making one. I definitely think that if I was able to spend more out of class time on the project it would've gone much smoother and looked much better for the final result. I would like to go back and draw over the animation to add color and hence style to the project, but for what I had completed I am very happy with the results.