Evaluation

This is the evaluation that I wrote about the project overall, I realise that I have gone over the word count slightly but I felt that everything I have written was all relevant. I have tried to cut my word count down but I could only get it to 1181. Next time I will make sure that I keep check throughout so that I don't go over as much.

During this project our initial vision was to create a western style animation with a supernatural twist. The plan was to have two typically western characters become embroiled in a duel.  We wanted to hide the supernatural element right to the end, this would be to add impact to his appearance, adding a twist. The twist was to be death himself, the Grim Reaper was toying with the two characters all along. Grim Reaper was to be present all along however only visible to the keen eyed.

However due to a multitude of reasons the production had to be scaled back considerably. I feel the largest contributor to the cutbacks was the turbulence caused by the groups changes cause upon us by external forces. These changes occurred without us being informed, we weren’t told until numerous days later. Prior to these changes  we had established roles in the group. I was to do the concept art and assist the other members with smaller tasks, Kieron was assigned character modelling and Finn was assigned environments. In losing our character modeller we had to reshuffle these roles as our newest member Dan didn’t feel comfortable in character modelling. Nobody in the group felt comfortable with character modelling but I  decided to volunteer for the role whilst retaining my smaller task duties. This left Dan with concept art and Finn remained on environments. As we progressed I attempted to coordinate the group often requesting updates but often times replies weren’t forthcoming. Communication could be improved upon, not so much in my direction but more towards group members replying to me. As we progressed with the project I became more persistent with my requests. Another reason is that some group members wasn’t contributing all the way through the project.

Whilst waiting for responses I used the concept art I had created in my previous role to start modelling the characters. The modelling went OK although I felt the face on the skinny cowboy was too sharp adding smooth to the model would improve this but would also take away the style we was going for, some of the animations were also quite wooden and the textures used did not tile as well as they could have, this could have been improved by spending more time in photoshop to make the textures tile fluently. I felt that I fully realised the Chubbier Cowboy. He came out almost exactly as I envisioned him. The curves in the face and stomach adhered to the tenth principle of animation, exaggeration. I thought that the flannel shirt texture of this character match him very well with his persona. His mustache also added to the exaggeration of this character as it was oversized and sharp. Overall out of the two cowboy characters, the chubbier one went better with the modelling and the style. For the skinnier cowboy I also felt that his textures match him as they were quite mature, which is what this character was aimed to be, more mature and serious. Stephen Wood an artist I know allowed me to use his gun he modelled, for the project as he had already created it whilst learning 3DS Max, I completed the guns texture in maya and created a flag that was to pop out of it.

It soon became apparent that Dan was struggling to meet the deadlines. This meant that I could not move forward with modelling the Grim Reaper. As the deadline came closer I became more worried about Dan being able to complete his task. It came to the point where Kieron offered his helping hands to create a brief turn around from my previous concept art for the Grim Reaper. As I had my hands full with completing the previous cowboy characters Kieron also offered to model and rig the Grim Reaper. I was rigging one of the characters when I realised I wasn’t able to rig both cowboys and animate all three with what time we had left. Dan then offered to rig one of the characters although he hadn’t done it before, group management comes into context here as Dan should have already known how to rig. I thought everything was going well until it came to a few days before hand in and Dan hadn’t got very far with rigging. Because of this as a group we change the idea so that we would only have to animate the character I rigged and the Grim Reaper. Dan was then given another task to create the new storyboard so then I could get onto animating, whilst leaving the character he was rigging how it was. We still incorporated the character that wasn’t fully rigged as a dead character laid on the floor in the environment.

The environment was one area where we scaled back considerably, the water tower and the wind turbine was missing from the final piece this was Finns task, however due to me not being able to assist him he was unable to get them completed in time. I did however still help out on small things like creating the graves for the graveyard. Even without the water tower and wind turbine the environment still came out looking rather good. Dan created the terrain as he hadn’t done much for the project so far, he offered as he was used to create terrains and felt comfortable in making one in the time we had. The terrain was very good as it matched the overall look we was going for.

The next task was animating, I animated the characters separately on their own timelines and then separated each animation in unity. Due to this method we had to make each scene separately. This was very time consuming and due to not having the environment I couldn’t create the animations together in maya with the characters interacting with the environment at the same time. I felt as though the animations were rushed and there were minor glitches that we simply didn’t have time to fix such as the gun flag doesn’t animate the way it is supposed to. In unity I applied toon shading to the environment and characters, this worked really well as it match the characters overall look and made the environments texture stand out more. As time was running out we realised we didn’t have enough time to code a way for each scene to play in order so we used quicktime to screen capture each scene and then edited it together whilst adding sound. I believe that sound went well with the overall video and Stephen created a laugh for us to use as the Grim Reapers crazy laugh, I thought that also worked well as it to me matched the overall tone of the video. Overall as a group we could have done better with time management, group management and helping each other out. I could have done better with my part by better time management, by making sure I have spare time for when things go wrong and taking a closer look at the small details.