Blue Baboon Reflection

I started off well with the last project; I had a simple idea, a simple story, one that would use my skills in character design, CG modelling and character animation.

Character design and modelling
I’m happy with the way my characters were simply designed, making the modelling process very easy to complete. I would like to have had the time to make a maquette for my pet sitter character to better visualise him from all angles. And for the baboon, I made the mistake of baking the Super sculpy before being sure that I was happy with the design.

Animation
In some scenes, the movements look a bit stiff, they would have benefited from video references and more time spent on them. In other scenes, the animation is incomplete, and in a few, there is none at all. The animation quality would have benefited greatly from better…

Time management
As this was the first CG film I’ve attempted where there are characters involved (and two of them for that matter) there were a lot of things that I hadn’t tried before and that I had to learn on the job. I had little idea of the time it would take to do certain things, the order in which to do others and the amount of work involved when it’s me doing everything. The time plan I made at first was unrealistic, the second was much too late in the production. Though the story was relatively simple, I spent far too much time working on a storyboard that I didn’t use. I was unrealistic about how much I could achieve in the time that we had. I had a few tricky problems that took a while to solve. By the end I’d run out of time to find or record decent sound effects and didn’t anticipate the sound studio being out of order. Though I had music for the chase scene, I didn’t have anything for the other scenes. I couldn’t complete the animation for all of the scenes and editing was a day-before stressful scramble for the deadline, leading to a largely unfinished result.

Thankfully, I have time now to finish off this film and polish it for use in my show reel.

What I’ve learned:
• Sounds, (especially dialogue) are better made before the animation
• Clusters do not work for eyelid blinks on their own; they’re good used for making blendshapes though.
• When doing blendshapes, be sure to do them BEFORE connecting your character’s skin to the skeleton. As the deformation order will be messed up if you do it the other way around.
• Though it is good to try things that you haven’t done before, leave time in case it all goes wrong.
• Plan your time use from the start, it’s bound to run out earlier than you expect.
• When painting skin weights, limit yourself to the add tool. First rough all of them out, and then smooth them if you need to (from the extremities inwards) with all other influences locked. This way you prevent influences being added to places you don’t want.