Animation Evaluation

I have forgot to make regular blog posts while working on my animation. So I am going to do just the one to evaluate my animation at the point of completion (17/12/13). Today I finished the animation I have been working on over the last 6 weeks and explain what I am happy with and what I feel needs improving.

So for the most part I am happy with the end result of the project and I feel that I have learnt a lot over the course of the module. I have made a 30 second animation in 12 from not even knowing the basics of 3d modelling this is the part of the whole project that I am most happy with.

The parts I am unhappy with is the overall quality of the final project I have produced.  Starting with the model of the Battlestar Galactica the model is good I feel, but as much as I tried to texture it to look the way it does in the series I could not I just did not have the skills with photoshop to put such an advanced texture on a large model. So as a compromise I gave it a gun-metal grey colour for the animation so it didn't just look like a giant white blob under the lighting that was in the scene.

The second thing that I am unhappy with is Raider model I have made, I is just far too square and doesn't have the nice rounded shape as the ones in the tv series. This comes from a lack of experience with the modelling tools and not knowing how to get such a shape without adding in lots to polygons to do so. The metallic looking texture I gave it does look nice and I am rather pleased with that part of it.

The viper is the ship that I am most happy with out of all the ones I have made the textures on it are simple and the ship itself is simple so even a novice like me can do it justice.

Moving away from the model side of the animation and on to the animation part. The full animation is okay, but the thing I least like about it is the way there isn't a smooth transition between the scenes. It ends up giving the whole thing a very broken feel to it and nothing like this would ever manage to pass in industry. I feel this again comes from a lack of experience as I have never done any video editing before in my life, and don't know how to do the nice transitions between scenes. It may also be to do with the way I did the each scene as its own 5 second animation then use movie maker to stick them all together.

On the whole I feel that the project does show my level of design skills and is a testament to why I want to going into the programming and technical side of games development. However If I where to start this project again from the beginning with the knowledge I have now I would do the following to improve it. I would put more time into the models as I feel an animation is only as good as the models in it. I would use a better video editing software to put it all together and I would make the animation longer so as to be able to tell more of a story (this is very hard to do in only 30 seconds).