18: learning journey

On May 19^th we were asked to present out learning journey throw this academic year. I opted to do a PowerPoint presentation,,, why, why did I opted for that.. I pretty much forgot what I was planning to say, but anyway.

My learning Journey, this year went by rather quickly and some of the briefs we were given were challenging and enjoyable.  So lest start

OUDF503: Responsive

Responsive was a challenging but enjoyable brief for me, the challenging part was finding a live brief I could respond to. The weeks were passing and I still didn’t have a brief I could respond to, that is until I came across //Filminute. Brief, well contest, make a 1 minute film/animation,  simple brief for a simple mind. now i needed to figure out what I wanted to do, an animation was a no brainer, but what to use, Maya or Blender.
Since I wasted fare too much time in fining a brief and story to use I left my self-short of time learn how to rig and animate in Maya, no time to test, no time to practice time to use Blender for the last time.

However since I was familiar with Blender I was able to produce the five required characters and settings in a matter of a couple of weeks,  in the end I was able to produce the 1 minute animation in a few weeks, if I handed wasted so much time at the start I would have been able to make it better.

OUDF504: VFX

VFX was my least favourite project by fare, mainly because film and photography is not my thing, and once again too much time was wasted trying to plan what I wanted to make and produce, One of my ideas would have had a humanoid creature (tree like) walking through an area and crating nature around it,,, buuut this would be too difficult, again at this point my knowledge with Mayas UV mapping, rigging were minimum.

But in the end I did pass this project, and I did learn how to use Mayas CV curves and paint tools for some interesting effects, as well as manipulating and “animating” a still image.

OUDF505: Machinima
Ah, machinima, our last project of the year, this was a semi enjoyable project, the project was simple enough, make a 1 minute cinematic in Unity how “simple”,   Not so simple when Maya was presenting us all with problems at every turn. However in this project I did lean one important thing, maya is very fussy when it comes it doing things in order, simply but not deleting the history of the model, or freezing the transformation of the control bones can break the model,,,

Over all this year I have improved my modelling and animating skills using Maya (thought there is still a lot of room for improvement), witch in its own right is a plus, most of my modelling skills were transferred over reliably easily from Blender to Maya. And hers a thought, the more I use Maya, the less I remember how use Blender,, sh!t.. ah well