Portfolio Reflection

Walk Cycle

 In this project we had to draw a character, scan them into the computer, and color and animate them. We learned how to make a walk cycle in 2D, and how to edit things in photoshop. I picked this project because I liked the way it turned out and how the walk cycle looks  good and doesn't slide. My strengths here are in animating, my weakness is my drawing wasn't very good. I haven't really improved my drawing skills because I rarely need to draw. If I could change something I would make the arms move up and down or wiggle.

Story Animation

For this project we had to create a "story" using all the animation techniques we had learned so far. We had to use multi-plane, squash/stretch, puppet pins,walk cycle, and have at least 3 scenes. I picked this project because it is my favorite 2D piece I made. My strength was in animating the character but, again, my weakness was in drawing, though I had to draw this one with a mouse. If I could change anything, I would make the string of the fishing pole look more fluid.

Ice Cream Animation

This was the first project where we actually animated something in Maya. We had to make an ice cream cone, bowl, and scoop on a lazy susan that spun on a table. In this project I learned how to make bump maps, how to group things in the outliner, and how to use keyframes to animate in Maya. My strength on this project was in modeling the objects and applying textures, and a weakness would be I couldn't get the bump maps to spin with the ice cream. If I could change something, it would be the bump maps.

Castle

The castle was our first modeling project in MAYA. It taught us how to use booleans to make ore complex shapes, how to add images as textures, and the extrude tool. We learned it through a pdf with instructions that we followed. I picked this project because I like how it looks, with the shapes and colors. My strengths on this project were using the tools we were learning, and there wasn't really a weakness here because it was a pretty simple project. If I could change anything I would make the grass bigger to eliminate some of the blank space.

Hammer

In this project we had to make a hammer and a nail on a wood floor. It taught us how to edit vertices to make shapes less sharp and geometric and used the extrude tool in more advanced ways. I picked this project because I like how the nail and hammer head are shiny and the shadows look good. One problem I had and couldn't fix with this project was that the preview in Maya, the render preview, and the actual rendered image (the one you see here) never matched up. In the Maya program, I could get it to look perfect, but in the renderer, it was always way brighter than in Maya. After that, the rendered image would end up looking a lot darker than both the Maya preview and the renderer preview. I never had this problem with any other project and could never figure out how to solve it. My strengths here were in modeling and a weakness would be the lighting, since I could never get it looking right. If I could change something (I tried to change it, but couldn't), would be the darkness problem.