Reflecting on my last project

At the beginning of the project I had a few different ideas and it was quite difficult to chose as my target audience had very different opinions. Once I decided on my brief I was able to get on with it.

Modelling- I felt that I had a good project in terms of good character design and development, but my rooster was a little complex when it came down to unwrapping the mesh for adding the texture. This time I need to create a more simple character and by doing this I will look at refrences to help me achieve a good strong character design. This time I want to try a human character as I always seem to create animals. I will go to life drawing classes to get a better idea of the human anatomy.

Texturing- I did struggle a little when it came down to the texturing, because of the way that i modelled my characters; having the texture on the form. I will think about the texturing before I come to model my charcter. I want to go further with the texturing; using hair and clothes.

Movement- I created blendshapes for my characters but for this project again I want to go further by having more of them being able to achieve more realistic looking expressions. My characters did not move quite how I wanted them to, so this time I will study the human anatomy and the bone structure looking at the way that the body moves and bends. Also to help me I will have recorded video refrences so that I can relate my characters movements to it and achieve realistic fluent movements. I want my character to move like an actual person; the skin, the hair and clothes.

Sound- One big regret that I have from the last project is that I didn't record my sound effects until after I had finished animating, for this project I will aim to have the sound recorded before I have started animating. By doing this it will help me achieve the expressions and showing the emotion of my main character whilst animating. A good idea would be to record the actors whilst performing my script as this would give me a good idea for the actions for my character. I want my animatio to ook proffessional and by having a good quality sound track and sound effects will help me achieve this.

Lighting- I need to look at how lighting is used in high quality proffessional films/commercials, In my last project I added the lights where I thought they should be i.e. for the moon light I placed the light infront of the moon but in some scenes it was easier said than done as the textures would look really odd in some lights and certain angles.

Timing- My timing wasn't perfect at all on my last project as I pondered too much on an idea, once I had my idea I was unstoppable (literally) which is a good thing as I love doing what i do. The bad thing about me is I can never decide on a final idea and is something that I have been aware of since a child, I am sooo indecisive! :( For this project I will keep to my timing to make sure that I dont have any problems and if I do have problems then I need to atleast leave time to fix solve these problems.