There were a variety of creative decisions influencing my project, but perhaps the central and most important of these was the idea to portray two characters of indeterminate gender sharing an important connection - and in that regard I think that I have achieved it pretty well as the golem Embry and druid Vasili could be interpreted as either male or female in their fantasy based designs and skirt/wrap-like outfits. Pre-production and designing a character/background came pretty naturally to me after all the work of our first semester, and when we began to work with the Maya program, I found myself remembering things from the time that I had studied it 3 years ago at AUT.
It took a little to get used to using the program again, but the way that we learned to model the characters was much different to the extrude and adjust method that I had learned before. I got to use both methods in the process of creating my prop and character, and I found this phase particularly enjoyable. I would definitely like to continue to model the geo for characters, though looking back I deleted a lot of edges in my mesh that caused problems for me later on. I know better than to do that now, thankfully. That said there were issues that I had with my mesh, particularly his face and the indents surrounding his nose. For a while he looked very alien despite how closely I had modelled him to my drawing, and it took quite a bit of trial and error moving vertices around to fix him. I accidentally cleaned my history after converting my model to high poly, which was a point of frustration when trying to modify his face for blend shapes, but at the same time I’m grateful for it, since it gave him a much smoother range of motion. There is something very soothing about modelling characters though and I would like to do more of it. I’ve considered that it might be a field I could go into if I choose to pursue 3D further.
Rigging was quite a bit harder and every bit as awful as the second year 3D students told us it would be. I had absolutely no experience in this area at all and I know I struggled a little bit and assumed things wouldn’t take me as long as they actually did. Even now I’m still not 100% sure my model has all its skin weights in the right places, and evidence of my attempts to fix things (and actually make them worse) can be seen in the final animation. Skin weight painting in particular was what I found most tedious and perhaps is my least favorite part of character modelling this entire semester.
In terms of scene setting, I feel like I cheated too much with the background. Initially I’d planned to put a skydome of ice over the character and prop, but it made the scene seem too empty and less like the palace look I was going for. I’ve never had much initiative with lighting either, and if it weren’t for Keat’s guidance, I know my scene would not look as lovely as it does now. Camera shots are the worst part of setting up a scene for me, as I do not feel like I have a talent for framing and angles, and I’m just grateful i didn’t have many moving camera shots, because I really hate setting those up.
Animating the character was quite an exciting part though! It was such a wonderful feeling, seeing something that you created moving about before your eyes and knowing that it was something you made from scratch. I already had ideas for how i wanted Embry to move around, as a clay golem I wanted him to be heavy and his movements to be slow and reverent - childlike the way the original film clip for this assignment was. There were ideas to contrast his warm coloration with the cold colors of the icy environment, which i think has come through quite well. In terms of actual animation, I’ve done little bits in Maya before, but they have never looked fluid and realistic and just came off as bad and clunky. Under Keat’s guidance, I’ve come to love the movements and actions that my character has gone through, and its always amazing to realize how such tiny details like a slight twist of the spine or bend in the knees really affects how realistic the overall animation becomes. At times animation can become very tedious and exhausting and I found myself only able to do a set amount per day, which I know is not good practice and I won’t have such a luxury once I’m working in industry.
Overall though, I have really enjoyed 3D, perhaps even more than 2D and I can definitely see it as a field I could go into and enjoy. I still have a lot to learn, but hopefully with practice those smaller movements and camera angles can come more easily to me and I can create truly engaging stories for others to enjoy.
