Animation Practice Evaluation

Animation Practice Evaluation

For this coursework, we were tasked with animating a scene based on audio from monthly audio contests at the 11 Second Club. At the time of planning, the audio in the monthly contest was from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and this audio was chosen. Unfortunately the final product didn’t turn out as expected. A glaring problem with the animation is the vast difference in animation quality between the two characters on screen. This is a result of rushing the animation due to time constraints and lack of fine tuning of interpolation. The lighting isn’t as good as hoped for as problems were encountered late into lighting and couldn’t resolve them. The final lighting looks very dull compared to what was intended.

If more time was allotted, more time could have been spent making sure the quality of animation is consistent and the lighting interesting.

Lip syncing and animation was one aspect of this project that is inconsistent. As previously mentioned one character’s animation was rushed, however the character on the right is animated more or less exactly as intended. The environment was also rushed due to poor management of time, while a majority of time was spent on animating a single character,  texturing or modeling the environment, and other aspects, were neglected, as a result it relies solely on use of flat colours and Arnold renderer materials. In future projects, time will be managed more efficiently, putting more effort into all aspects of the project, rather than spending too much time on one part. Additions such as bump mapping, more detailed modeling and more interesting lighting would have gone a long way with improving the overall quality and look of the scene.

Another complication in the process was the necessary use of the new Arnold renderer for Maya 2017 which caused numerous issues due to a lack of familiarity and experience, as opposed to Mental Ray, which, due to it shipping with both 3DS Max and Maya for numerous years, has a large amount of resources online for learning. Adjusting to Arnold took quite some time but a lot was learned during the process, allowing for experimentation with many different rendering settings that will be useful for future projects. If given more time, more time would have been spent experimenting with Arnold and seeing what can be done, improving how fast the same results or better could be achieved. Regardless, the experience gained from this project is invaluable and has given the knowledge needed to further experiment with Arnold.

The project was further complicated by render times and underestimating them. Originally the animation was intended to be 60FPS, but upon testing out different render settings, rendering times per frame were reduced from around 6 minutes to 2, Meaning it would take up to 20 hours or more to render the whole animation. Unable to do that due to time constraints, the animation was reduced to 25 frames per second and many render quality settings were lowered to get a complete render in time for the deadline. Depth of Field and Z-Depth were originally planned to be used during this project but since render times were already a problem with the limited time left, they were omitted to focus on allowing enough time to render and upload the animation.

The rendered files were imported into After Effects to be rendered as the final .mp4 file. Unfortunately because of a known bug with the specific version of After Effects used on University computers, rendering the project out was impossible without audio errors and problems.

Ultimately, this project was a learning experience that was held back by time constraints and my own failure to work efficiently in them. If I had been given more time, I’m certain I could easily build upon what I learned during this project and produced a far better animation. I believe future projects will benefit immensely from what I’ve learned during this project, from rendering with Arnold to lighting a scene.