3D Report
Matthew Coles
Thus far I feel as though the semester doing 3D animation has been a rocky one. I started off by selecting the scene from ‘The Big Lebowski’ as the scene that I mirror with my own animation. I selected the western genre to and I still feel that this was a good choice. I feel that the scene could translate to a western scenario very well. The problem was that the way I had the scene play out it felt to similar to scene from the Big Lebowski, but being the pig-headed person I am, rather than thinking into it a bit more I went with what I had. Next came the character design, and this stage for me would cause a lot of problems later on down the track. My character I felt was good design except for that it was to complicated. I checked out some of my classmates designs and I really felt like I dropped the ball on this one, theirs were simple and to the point whereas mine was complicated and to realistic for someone to successfully achieve just starting out in 3D animation.
In the modelling phase I felt like I captured my character reasonably well except that like I said it was to complicated for a beginner and I put to greater expectations on myself to achieve the realism I wanted and had envisioned in my mind. With modelling, the bit I found the hardest was definitely the face as doing realistic facial features, like the eyes and mouth, were harder than I thought.
Building the rig was actually very simple. I did however have some problems with getting all of the joints oriented correctly. What came after the rigging however was nightmare. Skinning my rig to the model was a huge problem as I could not get it to work how I wanted with the cape. I tried to get some clothing dynamics going on the cape and semi got them working but not well enough to warrant using it. Unfortunately due to time constraints I had to settle for what I had done which was fine for my new animation, that I had to change to avoid some impossible movements. With the cape as it was it unrealistically moved with the body of my character and it doesn’t make it look right at all.
Next came the animation of the character. I found this part to be reasonably simple. Once i got my head around animating the camera I managed to get the character done in good time. I think however that I could have gotten my animation looking a lot cleaner, however time was an issue so I was unable to. Firstly I think that walk is a bit messy because he still slides along aground a little bit with each step. Secondly the final step in the close up on his feet is a bit stompy and feels forced. Lastly, in the shot where he is walking towards the post his knee sticks out a bit and this is due to a rigging issue. For my lighting I had two lights. One was high up above the character and behind him to act as the sun and give the character and the post a silhouette and the second was behind the post so that Ace was a little bit lit up while he was walking towards the post. I made it so that under his hat you can’t see his face at all because i am not happy with it, he doesn’t have eyebrows and i didn't have time to do any face shapes with him.
All in all I feel I have done an alright job given how difficult I made it for myself. I was unhappy with character design, happy with modelling, happy with texturing, happy with rigging, unhappy with skinning and unhappy with animation. From this I can see what i need to work on and hopefully i can improve on everything and do a much better job than I have this semester not just with work but with my motivation and my ability to sort out personal issues.
