My First Ever Character Animation

Eyed and Seek from Sedarati on Vimeo.

I have finally finished my first character animation and it has been a very rewarding experience that has helped to improve my 3D design and illustrative skills. Looking back at what I have created I can see several things that I could improve upon and I plan to implement this new knowledge into my next project.

The main area I feel I need to improve upon is the overall animation in the piece because I felt that in parts it isn't as smooth and natural as I wanted it to be. I found it difficult to judge how realistic the animation was going to look when watching it in 3ds Max compared to when I imported the frames into Adobe Premiere. In Premiere the imperfections were clearer and for some of my early renders I rectified these mistakes in order to make the animation more natural. I still feel I can improve and with more experience animating I will have a better understanding of how to create realistic movement.

The narrative structure of my animation changed somewhat from my initial storyboard, most notably the removal of my rodent character that was supposed to steal the robot eye. I decided to take this character out of the scene so that I could focus my effort on creating a solid rig for my robot which I felt I did quite well. I feel the narrative was quite a strong aspect my scene that was clear and easy to follow; I've had some good feedback from fellow course-mates and friends in general regarding both the narrative and the overall presentation: and people thought it was actually funny! Humour being one of the main themes of the project with reference to Charlie Chaplin.

Another area of the project that took me a while to fully commit to was the environment. My initial storyboard denotes a landfill site as the location for my scene. However, when I began to model my environment I wasn't sure how I was going to able to animate so many falling objects like my storyboard suggests and I didn't want to merely imply that a pile of rubbish was collapsing onto my robot only to not show the implied action via a cutway.

With that in mind I augmented the environment into something more related to a car scrapyard; predominantly occupied with car bodies and tires. I felt this was a smart compromise as I felt more confident about animating large objects like cars falling however I would very much like to improve upon animating forces such as gravity in a more life-life way in the future: I enjoyed modelling the car too although I kept it relatively low in polygons to save render time.

Lighting is another element of visualisation I wish to improve upon because although I felt the lighting in my scene was appropriate I only used one light that acted as a Sun and would like to experiment with more advanced lighting techniques. I have been recommended the book 'Digital Lighting and Rendering' which I hope will help me with this.

This has been a great project that I have thoroughly enjoyed; it has expanded my skills with 3ds Max and opened my eyes to difficulties which surround the art of creating good animation. I look forward to my next project which we were recently briefed on where I hope make big leaps in all areas of my work; and I have to say I don't think I've ever been looking forward to a project as much as this one, which will begin at the start of term two after the holidays. A hint is in my blog title.