What have I been up to?

During the second year of my education I focused less on animating in Maya, I was tempted to continue in that direction and practice more because I seemed to find it easier than my friends, although my animations were far from perfect I felt it came a little bit more naturally to me for example when animating a character walking I would key frame the start and end position first so the character would move at a constant speed, this would allow me to know when to move their feet depending on what sort of walk I wanted (fast, hurried, lazy ect) I would then add in extra and move key frames for better timing and smaller details such as foot roll and other bits. This differs from how I noticed others doing theirs, they generally went from one side of the timeline to the other trying to add all the key frames at the same time so all the small movements where done at the same time as the big movements and key poses, this led to a mass of key frames witch confused them and meant they ended up with very jumpy animation with odd timing. 

The reason I didn’t continue to focus on animating was because I got very bored with it quite quickly, I haven’t really ever enjoyed it as much as the other areas (although the more I do it, the move I enjoy it), the only reason I contemplated it was because there is always demand for loads of animators so finding work isn’t as hard and also the third year project is coming up and there is a distinct lack of people interested or experienced in 3D, we can always employ the second years to animate as they generally do plenty of it in their first year, but finding someone to do all the rigging or texturing will be much harder so I figured I would spend my summer learning an area that few of the others were good at or had interest in so we wouldn’t be stuck in the third year. Of course I didn’t really learn anything over the holiday as I spent it in hospital doped up on morphine so I’m unsure on how third year will turn out.

 

Throughout the second year I’ve continued to model although mostly for fun and didn’t focus as much on it as I had liked, although it wasn’t because I was wasting time it was because I was learning other software like nuke. Nuke is amazingly powerful compositing software that came in very handy during the last project I worked on before my accident. 

This was the Red or Dead project, it was for a real world client that the previous second years had worked for, they were so impressed with the last years work the allowed us to come back and do another project although they seemed much less enthused. 

It was a team project although at times it was hard to believe as I seemed to do much of the work, this wasn’t due to laziness of my team mates but they just didn’t know how accomplish their set task. Towards the last week it become an endurance test where I spent roughly fourteen and a half hours a day in the studio each day. Unfortunately there are certain parts I would liked to have spent more time on or done myself, but in the end I had to accept it as it wouldn't be fair or feasible to do my own idea start to finish. During the project there was small amounts that I thought ran smoothly such as when I had completed several models I sent the uv texture maps to another team mate and they came back perfectly textured the next day this was one of the small parts I thought worked well and was the only glimpse I had as to what working in a professional establishment would be like as whenever I sent out other work such as backgrounds or prop lists I had to always go to and fro my computer to help them and make sure it was done right, this I found incredibly frustrating as I had trouble finishing my own work which led to me stopping handing out work and doing it all myself in the last week. Since we were going to composite it in nuke I decided that we were going to use 32 bit float, I also tried rendering with a depth pass so that I could blur objects further back in the scene although this lead to crazy render times that would have pushed us pass the deadline and it also took too long to try and teach my teammates how to set it up before rendering this eventually lead me to take all their work scattered about and set it up all in project folders and take charge of setting all the renders. 

to get around not having a depth pass in the renders i simply split each scene into layers such as Far, Mid, Close and Highlight this when composited in Nuke allowed me to add different amounts of blur to each layer giving the illusion of depth.