At first I was super excited to get animating and started to design my character, but as I got to the modelling of him, I realised that although I'm a fan of animating... I'm not much of a fan of modelling, or particularly good at it. Once I had created the body, legs, arms and feet I began to feel like I had made a terrible mistake and struggled to find the drive to continue, which unfortunately made me take breaks from my project and stray from my timeline. I slowly worked until I realised I had my presentation coming up and kicked it into high gear.
I had my character model done and was excited to see what rigging was like. Unfortunately, this was something I repeatedly gave up on shortly after starting and deleting my progress as I didn't know how to revert it into a usable state. I did this on and off until I finally sat down and had a breakthrough, which is when I decided to catch up with my blogging as I had taken a break from it to focus more on the work. Fortunately, I made lots of saving points while I worked so I could go back through them and blog them once I was in a comfortable position with my work.
When it finally came to animating I had a wonderful time, such a wonderful time that I lost track of time and realised that I had to cancel my plans to create some minor animations which I came up with as sort of stretch goals.
Reflecting back on the project, I started off completely lost and looking for an easy project to do, or a project that would be viable for the assignment. After I received some guidance from a lecturer I had a project in mind that would have me testing quite a lot of my skills, old and new as well as some skills that I was yet to acquire.
Things That I Felt Went Well
- I learned quite a lot about the pipeline of characters for 3D games as well as what goes into designing characters and what they can do.
- I feel like my skills in animation and other areas have improved as well as confirmed that I want to seriously consider 3D animating for a career.
- I learned a lot of useful tips and tricks for animating as well as modelling, texturing and rigging.
- I found myself adding personal tweaks to certain animations which made me feel like they were more mine.
- When it came to modelling and animating although I struggled I found myself wanting to make them better and better as I wanted to make something to be proud of rather than just get it done to a minimal standard.
- I let my frustration get the better of me and gave up frequently on my project.
- I over-scoped on my project and spent a lot more time researching some things and not enough researching other things such as researching a lot of animation related things but not so much rigging things.
- I often finished work without keeping future plans in mind which delayed quite a lot of things such as when I "finished" rigging while it still had errors and when I tried to animate certain things I noticed the problems and had to go back and fix the issues.
- I did certain things without fully understanding them which caused more delays such as when I was modelling my character I was following guides that said doing things certain ways would HELP the topology but wouldn't make it perfect.
- My timeline wasn't accurate as I would sometimes either underestimate the time it would take to do things and leave them a bit late in the week and not take into account I had other assignments to do such as group project which I prioritized to avoid letting others down.
What I Will Take Away From This Experience
- I will definitely plan things way more to make sure there is a far better and more accurate.
- I will research every little part of my future projects and not prioritize things I'm interested in and research them more than other parts.
- Now that I have an understanding of the character designing and creation process, I can leave that to the people who want to specialize on that while I can focus solely on animation and improve my skills.
- I formed the habit of making a number of save files so I have some backups to go back to when I come up with an error.
- I will attempt new things that I'm not sure of rather than avoiding and finding a work-around.
In conclusion, while I've both struggled and straight up hated my project. I feel like everything I put myself through was absolutely worth it, due to all of the things I learned not just about the character creation pipeline and animating but about myself and how much I am capable of. I think I'm going to miss working on a project but I do feel like I need a break before starting another one.
So here it is, a showreel of the character and animations I've been working on for the past eight months, I hope you enjoy:
