Evaluation

Kinga Makowka

OUDF503

Evaluation

This brief was different to any others I have done in the past. I liked the freedom of being able to find something I would enjoy doing. It was hard because most competitions are animation or film based. But there is a way out of every situation. What really helped me is social networking sites. After attending the recent Bradford Game/Animation Festival I got in touch with one of the environment artists from FuturLab. I was lucky enough for him to set me a a brief and give me tons of tips and advice to start with.

Even though he set the brief he told me what he wants to see there was still this sense of freedom because I could choose what I want it to look like, feel like, choose my own target audience.

I enjoyed every part of the project, even the research purely because I love reading about space, mythology, crazy theories and that’s mostly what I did.

The only negative about not having that many restraints is the indecisiveness one minute I was sure I am creating a whole planet, the next I was convinced it would be more interesting to do floating islands. This is just an example but it took some time for all the ideas to settle and for me to make up my mind.

I tried my best at sketching as much as I could during this project, purely because my drawing skills are not the greatest and I want to improve them. I feel like I did not do too bad of a job and I will carry on with this practise during future projects.

What I am not so good at, and it became quite a problem lately is scripting and things. I had all the scripts because I found them on forums and things, but applying them where they need to be applied was a different story. The more I tried reading into it the more people confused me, so in the end my environment doesn’t have a respawn set up. It’s quite difficult because it is quite tricky not to fall off… So this is another thing I really need to start digging into, I am planning on getting some books to try and get at least some basic understanding of this so it’s easier to figure stuff out afterwards.

The other problem I’ve been having was with my textures. The structures were quite big. And my textures seemed to stretch quite a bit, I am not sure why because I tried my best for it not to happen.

Another thing I wanted to talk about is my terrain. I did not use the tool in Unity for that because it was floating islands so I tried to model a floating island, but then again came across the texture problem, and it was really frustrating… Because it either looked so unnatural because it was too perfect or it looked too square and… In the end I just improvised, I am not really happy with the result but again that’s just another thing I’ll spend some time looking into when I have some time to spare.

I completed my environment for a while before the brief deadline because he wanted to give me some useful feedback and ways to improve before I hand it in.

I receiver some really useful tips which will definitely come in useful in the future.

He told me to make sure there is a bigger contrast between the foreground, rocks and temples, and the sky/space. He said that while the grays and browns might be more realistic, it doesn’t make for much of an interesting piece and told me to NOT BE AFRAID TO PUSH COLOUR. Which is something that does not come easy to me, I usually try to make things dark and scary which usually makes it a 50 shades of gray/black thing... so I will have to play around with that.

He commented on the cloud in the sky, I thought it’d make it seem a little more like Earth just to make it seem more, livable but he says that it makes him think less of space and more of just our sky so it’d look a lot better if I swapped it for something like a nebula in the background, and with that have rocks more of a yellow/red tone and it would help the space become more interesting.

He told me to play around with a diffuse detail shader and it should sort out my problem.

He said all this along tons of others and I am so grateful for all of his help, and I see all the mistakes I’ve made and I will be fixing all of it very soon.

I wanted to improve this environment before the deadline but other deadlines which happened to be in one week didn’t let me do that. I do not blame bad planning for once, because I think my planning was quite good this time. I worked on everything bit by bit and I am pretty proud of myself it is just before the deadline you want to spend this extra time on it just to polish it up, but if there are a lot at once it makes it kind of impossible.

Overall I think it was a really good experience, you start seeing things from a different perspective, I always thought it’s best to make things as realistic as possible but really you want to blow things out of proportion and make it crazy awesome. Also receiving feedback from someone else than your teachers and friends is very good, because it seems to be a completely different kind of feedback. This positive helpful experience will definitely push me to do it more often!

Evaluation

Kinga Makowka

OUDF504

Evaluation

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Overall I really enjoyed this project. Right from the beginning I was really excited to be doing this and there were things that went really wrong and things that turned out amazing. But to be honest, it was the seconds best project I’ve ever done!

There are a lot of things I regret I didn’t do that I really wanted to do, but I really didn’t have time to... It might be due to me being awful with sticking to my schedules. But I really tried this time. I think where I failed myself is when I spent weeks on figuring out how to work part of Maya which I haven't used before. I spend days and days trying to find tutorials, videos written explanations I went through several forums trying to find anything that would help me and if anything it just ended up confusing me more. During this project I found out that the best way to learn something is to play around with it yourself. That way you actually figure out how things work, what attributes affect what, and it sticks in your head better because you look at 'Damp' and you immediately remember how at one point it destroyed your whole tornado because it just pushed everything down... it's like gravity in a way. I think it’s because bad memories tend to dig in deeper than the good ones. It’s like a relationship, when it ends you remember all of the bad things and why and how it happened, rather than the good things. You learn for the future, you know exactly what won’t glue and work out next time, and choose to only stick to what you know, things that will work out 100%. It’s so you don’t waste time anymore. And in any future project where I will be required to use fluids, I won’t have to spend a month on trying to figure anything out because I understand how they work, and how to make it work.

There are obviously a lot of things that went wrong throughout the process of creating this video. Mainly because I wasn’t comfortable with using the parts of software I did, or I used software that I barely used before, this being After Effects. I watched a few tutorials here and there and it didn’t take long to realize it’s pretty much Photoshop, which I am very comfortable with using, but for video. Saying that when I started it was clear and simple, till things started going wrong, out of nowhere, like things disappeared when they shouldn’t have or the masking was all wrong even though when I did it it looked fine. But once you start digging through all the options you do get to the bottom of things ( most of the time) usually it was something like I keyed the wrong effects at a wrong time or the file ended early and needed to be stretched a bit. Also there are a lot of things that went wrong with Maya even though I’m really comfortable with using it. Mainly because I haven’t used fluids before and it’s really complicated. I have got a few playblasts and screenshots for you to look at, again, on my blog. also when it came to rendering the tornado, I did end up doing it about 4-5 times. But I got something out of every bad render, I needed a lot of dust and particles in the air, that’s where those came in useful. I masked them, changed the opacity and I think it looks really good, it blends really well so I decided to use those. There’s a lot of things to be honest but you can read all about that process on my blog.

There is something I know is wrong, and I know I shouldn't have done but I couldn’t help it! I ended up not sticking to the storyboard. It’s just as I progressed through this project i liked the ideas less and less, I came to a conclusion that it might be a little too much, a little too confusing if I went with my original idea. And I thought it won’t look as good if I squish all of it in. Maybe I’d be able to do it and make it look good, but not in a minute video. Which makes me wonder how did I manage to make an animatic with it, it looked fine there and the animatic was a minute long… We live in a really weird world. Maybe once I’ve got a spare minute I’ll come back to it and complete it. I won’t worry about having to cut scenes, and sacrifice the quality of it for the sake of completing it.

During previous projects I had a little trouble with blogging about my processes, simply because once I start working on something I don’t think about going onto my blog straight away or during the process because I find it quite distracting. I mean I tried to do this before but what usually happened is that I wrote about what I just did and after I do something I usually get ideas of what to do next, during the process of writing about the first thing I completely forgot what I was going to do next. So this time around I bought a little notebook, and as I was going through the editing etc, I didn’t have to worry that I’ll forget or that I’m not connected to the internet etc. and I just noted down what I thought about it and how I’ll improve on it, took about 10 seconds each time and it let me quickly move onto the next step. Then when it came to blogging I just copied what’s in the notebook. It made this job so much easier! This is definitely something I’ll be doing for each project. Also now I have the notes of all sorts, things I don’t usually blog about like what values I had certain attributes on etc. I am able to quickly and effectively do a tutorial on maya fluids. I think it’ll be really good both because I’ll be helping others, and i might actually get my name out there if people find it useful. And it’s a win win situation if it does!

If I was to do this again I think I wouldn’t spend a month on trying to teach myself a piece of software as complicated as this. But then again looking back I’ve learned some really useful stuff,and not many people can actually do it, so when I think about it I probably would just do it exactly the same, I think this month spent on purely maya fluids was worth it. Because now I can create brilliant stuff and I’m really proud. Maybe next time I’d spend a little longer on my ideas, and think it over a lot more than I did so I don’t end up changing it again… which I doubt I always tend to change my ideas halfway. I need to find a way to change this about myself. It’s not the fact I don’t do enough research, or enough idea generation. I go through a lot of brainstorming and think about all the possibilities for a while, it just… it’s always different when you actually start doing it. I think it’s because you see and realize things you didn’t think of before. I suppose it’s just my creative process, everyone’s different and for one person it might work out a little differently than the other and you can’t really do much about it.

Now it’s past all the stressful rendering, and past all the uncertainty I look at my work and I’m quite proud of it. It’s quite breathtaking knowing how much sweat and tears went into it. You see past all the layers and layers and piles of stuff and see it as a complete sequence, it’s amazing. And just the fact I taught myself most of this stuff, it does make a difference. Achievement unlocked!