Making my environment was a very long process which acquired a lot of concentration and drafting. I changed it so many times during this project. Just before the start of our final term, it was standing at 49MB without the characters, so I cut it down by refurbishing the entire file. Eventually I got it down to 7MB, which was great, it not only meant faster rendering time but it also looked a lot better. I also changed quite a few of the materials. I decided not to use mental ray for this piece because I wanted to get the characters movements quite sharp, so every time I would render, I would get a quicker render and get a quicker understanding of whether the characters movements were on point. Even without the use of mental ray, I felt that the materials still looked effective. The only disadvantage was that sometimes when I zoomed in on the materials, they didn’t hold up well and would become pixelated and that’s when I regretted not using mental ray.
Although it seems the environment was my biggest problem, rigging, skinning and enveloping tested my skills the most. At first I rigged both characters with bones, I made them very successfully, but when skinned with the characters, bending of ligaments gave a less promising outcome. Therefore I decided to use the Cat rig which is excellent because it skinned with the mesh very well, and all the ligaments were better than bones when it came down to enveloping.
There are many successful aspects that I like about the animation as well as unsuccessful aspects. I would say one of the success’ was the movement of characters, it was a lot smoother than my last project which I am happy about. I am also happy about the way my after effect additions to the piece brought more energy and interest to the narrative. The choice in sound was pretty spot on as well.
I feel that my work also has unsuccessful aspects which I could improve on if more time was given. I believe that I could have added more choreography to my fight sequences as it was not that realistic that one of my characters would be beaten by one punch and a kick. I could also improve on mouth syncing, although it was mostly accurate, timing was off sometimes. Finally I would have included more shots of the entire scenery since it took me a long time to build it!
Nevertheless with the amount of time I had, I am proud of the end result and now I know which parts I can improve on.
