Minor - Reflective Statement

The minor project really was a challenge for me. Maya has always scared me a bit, and I think this is the first project I've had where I've fully thrown myself into it. I ran into a lot of difficulties due to my lack of experience, especially in the rigging process of the project. I'm disappointed that I couldn't finish everything that I wanted to get done. I made a lot of mistakes and had to redo my orthographs, models, skeletons, and skinning so many times which cost me a lot of time. despite all this, I'm extremely proud of myself and what I have managed to achieve. I didn't get everything done on my list, but I wholeheartedly tried my best. I also learned so much from the mistakes I made. 

I'm glad that I had my premise project to work from. I found it very easy to continue the project and knew exactly what I was working towards. My only worry was how I was actually going to make my film possible. It's quite easy to turn a 2D drawing into a 3D model, but to turn a 3D model into a 2D character has proved to be quite a challenge. I was able to experiment much more with techniques during the Minor Project than I did in the Premise Project. I still need to experiment with the VFX I'm going to use in my film, but I'm feeling much more confident about how to do this. 

Chromakey Test

At first, I didn't struggle much with modelling my characters. I made a few changes and ran into a few errors due to switching between different versions of Maya, but it was only until I started skinning that I realized that there were more problems with the geometry of some of my characters than I'd thought and had to go back to the modeling stage and make changes. I also had to redo the skeletons of my characters. At first, I tried to give my characters ribbon spines. But I was struggling a lot during the skinning process. I ended up having to take the ribbon spine out and create a simpler skeleton. This made skinning and rigging a lot easier for me, but this happened just a couple days before the deadline, so It was very hard for me to try and catch up to get my characters rigged. I managed to get 3/5 characters rigged despite this setback.

Page from 'Drawing The Line' Making of Document

There are so many things that I can improve on for my Major Project. I'd like to redesign my Making of Document and create a more professional demo reel of my characters. I'd also like to refine the Toon Shader effect more and improve my rigging and project management. Compared to my previous projects, this is the most organized I've ever been, and I will try hard to get even better as I still have a long way to go to work at a professional standard. I still find myself making beginner mistakes like working over different versions of Maya and then wondering why I'm having problems. Leaving things that are important, like sound design, to the last minute (which ended up not getting done as I ran out of time) and making frustrating mistakes. However, I'm feeling positive about how 'Drawing The Line' is going to progress. I now have a name for my project that I'm happy with. I know what direction my film is going in, and I now know what I need to do to achieve what I want. I feel truly invested in this film now, and I'm excited to actually make it!