I found this task to make my character to be very time consuming as a process of completion. I often felt like I had wasted a lot of time on something that ended up either not working, wasn’t important, or errors with the software or files. Nevertheless, I found this project to be quite eye opening and taught me to be more objective focused but also sparked my creativity in the process.
I was very happy with how the texturing and materials turned out except for the hair. I forgot to make the hair less shiny, so it didn’t look like metal. It was time consuming and took a lot of patience to paint the UVs the way I wanted them, but it was worth it at the end because they turned out quite appealing. The UV mapping was also very streamlined and didn’t cause me any problems and I think that was because I struggled with this step before in the other projects but now, I became comfortable and aware of obstacles that came with it.
I wanted to wear a mocap suit to create my own animations but however it was expensive to rent a suit and unfortunately even if I was able to, I later found out that the file format of the mocap would’ve been incompatible with Maya and therefore a waste of time. Therefore, I decided to use pre-existing animations because it would be faster, its free, easily accessible and judging from my abilities to act a better-quality animation. During this project there were multiple times I had to redo the rigging of my character for the simple reason that sometimes the rig would de-skin itself from the model and therefore I had to remove the rig and start setting up the skeleton, control rig and weight painting. This was utmost infuriating especially when it happened right when I was applying the animation to the character. This was unavoidable so the only measure I can think of is to always save my work often especially before performing something that heavily alters my work and strive to work ahead of the expected progress so that if there are problems, I am not set back by them in the long run.
Unfortunately, I heavily misjudged how long it would take to render. I did a relatively high 60fps animation. I tried to offset the time to render by reducing the resolution to 540×960, overclocking my CPU, keeping my room as cold as possible, pointing a desk fan at my laptop and elevating the laptop to let more ventilation to cool down in hopes that my laptop could render out the images faster. However, I felt that if I do have an animation of my character I would have succeeded as I personally would know that if I had more time and/or rent a more powerful PC I would’ve produced a longer and higher resolution animation. Regardless I felt that I was still able to show my knowledge and skills in creating a simple character even with a shorter and lower resolution animation.
Overall, I learnt during this project that even if I knew the steps to do something I shouldn’t disregard the possibility that it doesn’t go the way I planned. Countless of times I felt that I knew what I was doing and therefore I wasn’t too worried about the deadline, but I should’ve worried about how long it would take to do all the steps. During class and workshops, I would focus on something that I wasn’t sure and ask questions on how to continue, what was possible with the project and what I should prioritize on.
I was not confident in my abilities design a character as I’ve had little experience in drawing creatively. This didn’t help understand how I can envision the character because I wasn’t satisfied with how I designed it. Furthermore, I was too focused on the context of what the character had to be that I completely disregarded how hard it would’ve been to create the design I made. I was initially planning on making armour that would be put onto of the lion itself, having fluid objects such as the hair and clothes and being rendered using Maya’s physics plug-ins, having rigged fingers and eyes. Eventually in this project I found out there were many complications to this and had to resort to more simpler methods to achieve a similar effect.