3D Animation Crit Session

 On Monday afternoon this week, our group had a crit session a week before our submission deadline, where we each looked at our animations and gave our opinion on them.

Below I have listed a few tips that I was given to do for my animation:

• Add sound
• Make the character that hits the blocks actions smoother
• Slow down the movement of the blocks falling a little as they drop suddenly

Some of the crit comments

Since then, I have re-animated again, however I made the animation too short and keying the character's and objects' actions again will take too long and not leave me enough time to render. I have rendered the re-worked animation to show the difference between the first and last. I think the second animation has certain areas which are animated much better than the first animation, and vice versa.
The main reason I have not tried editing my existing animation is because there are so many actions going on at once such as the character hitting the blocks and the blocks falling to the floor, and these actions are timed well so they are in sync. It would be very tedious to re-key the actions and I do not have enough time to re-do it again. However, I shall experiment with editing the key actions in another file and see if there is an improvement.

Changes I made to the re-worked animation:

• increased the size of the blocks so there was less but the effect of them being overpowering was still there, which I liked. I was given a suggestion about reducing the amount of blocks but scaling them up. This was one of the factors that worked much better in the re-worked animation.
• made the character building the block tower take longer to pick up the block to emphasise the storyline.
• gave the yellow character more expressions in the animation and enhanced the effect of it hitting the blocks and rolling off.
• I added more rocks which the yellow character trips over because it made more sense than one rock being placed right next to the blocks, this way it adds to the storyline.

My Plan:

I am going to try re-animating it again for the 3rd time and keep the changes I liked, however if it does not look better than my first try, then I am going to add it to the pile of things that did not work. I also need to search for audio to make my animation complete. Though each time I re-animate it, the problems I encountered previously were much more easier to solve and I decreased the time it took the first time to animate it. So overall, it is becoming much easier to operate Autodesk Maya.