End of Junior Year Reflection

So Junior year is almost over now, and that means its time for another blog post. Having animation two hours a day everyday was really cool and helped me really get into and learn more about animation, particularly on the 3-D side. I finished my castle, redoing some stuff, and entered it into e-Magine, where I got third place in my category. Looking at the finished product compared to what I was doing even at the beginning of the year, I'm certainly learning a lot. I've also been playing around with some new techniques, which will hopefully make it into future projects. Things I've learned this year include:

Technical Skills:

Throughout the year, I've learned how to use many new features in Maya. In the castle alone, I had to figure out particle effects, texturing (beyond just clicking the "do-all-the-work-for-me" button), and various lighting tools. Since then, I found the flow path tool and after playing around with it for a bit, realized that I could make a roller coaster with it. The idea evolved, and I ended up making a full coaster, and for some reason, I decided to make it in VR. This opened me to the "amazing" world of rendering. There were so many things that made this process so hard. First of all, to use the spherical camera, I had to render in Arnold. After having to redo all my lighting, I realized that I couldn't batch render, so it took literally 48 hours on two computers to render each frame in sequence. It looks pretty cool, though, and it introduced me to a whole part of 3-D animation I knew virtually nothing about.

My Fish, modeled and textured,
but never implemented -_-

Collaboration:

This quarter, I worked with some other people to make a group project: some animated fish meant to teach children how to count. At the beginning, it seemed like it was actually going to turn out good. However, we didn't exactly plan very much, which kind of delayed the project...indefinitely since the seniors are done now. Technically we have the parts complete: all the fully animated models, narration, and a good background. We just didn't ever get to put it together. I guess we all need some better collaboration skills.

Communication:

While we didn't finish, we did a fair amount of communicating in the fish project. Especially in the planning phase, we actually thought it through and had some pretty good ideas. We had it all planned out on who was going to do what and what it was going to be in the end, but as previously mentioned, it didn't turn out like that.

Project Management:

I've never really had any problems with project management. I tend to get everything done on time, in this class anyway. I find animation fun, so its not like doing math homework or something. Actually, because of the time I put into these projects, I've made several models just for fun. The roller coaster is the biggest example, but I've made some other weird things, too: this Rubik's cube made out of Rubik's cubes (Rubik's tesseract), a hypnotic ring of gears, and a couple of optical illusions. Also, my previous statement about getting work done on time may seem to go against the fish project never being finished, but, not naming any names, some people didn't exactly do what they said they would.

Leadership:

There isn't really much of a chance to be a leader in Animation. Maybe we should've had one on the fish project, but we were kind of all co-leaders. I guess you could say I was a leader by example, people tell me that sometimes, but I could definitely get better in this category.

So this year was certainly interesting. I've mentioned it before, but having Animation two hours a day is really a big help when it comes to doing big projects. Looking through all my works on Youtube, I just seem to be getting exponentially better. Hopefully this continues into next year and beyond, learning everything I can along the way.

Last Semester's Reflection: https://goo.gl/WgNmVS