Watch here!
BEHIND THE SCENES:
Animatic
I created this short Animatic to help explain the animation I wanted to create for my Capstone.
Animation Progress (4/11)
The first full animation pass I did of all my scenes together.
Monkey!
Man...
What I learned during my Capstone Project:
1. Don't be afraid to take on huge projects:
Apparently, doing a whole animated short by myself wasn't really recommended since that's a lot of work for one person to do. However my professor encouraged me to push through with it anyways, so I did.
Here's the thing. If you don't think you can handle doing a big project by yourself, by all means grab some friends to help or take on a small project, but for me there's a few reasons why I wanted to take on such a big project.
- I wanted to push myself to make something big that I would be proud of.
- It's a good way of showing that you're capable of working in multiple areas in animation and understand the animation pipeline.
- You don't have to worry about making little mistakes. I feel with smaller projects, there's much more emphasis to make sure the quality is perfect in order for it to impress others. The thing about big projects is that the scale of it on its own is the impressive part, so I didn't have to worry to much about all the little imperfections in my project.
2. Be prepared to fall behind, even if you've already prepared to fall behind:
When I wrote out my schedule for my project, I gave myself a whole month of extra time JUST BECAUSE I knew I'd fall behind at some point in my project.
... Turns out, I still fell far behind at points due to unexpected issues with the project (and my inability to stick to my own schedules).
But because I already knew what I needed to do to catch up and finish on time, I was able to finish ONE DAY before the due date!
Incase you're curious what I do to catch up on fallen work:
- I pull all-nighters (this is not healthy and highly not recommended... But chances are if you're a college student, you probably do this already)
- I consider what actually needs to be done, and what can be quickly thrown together.
For example: in my last scene (when the man throws the fruit stand at the monkey), I HAD to render it out so I could get the whole project in on time, but what I DIDN'T have to do was fix the man's animations to look more realistic (you can see what the man's animation used to looked like in the 4.14 progress video). Because the focus during this shot was on the fruit stand as it's being thrown, I knew that I could get away with doing a sloppy job on the man's animation as he throws the fruit stand (which is why if you look carefully in the final animation, you can see the man's model break at points.
3. MAKE SURE YOU UV/TEXTURE YOUR MODELS BEFORE YOU START ANIMATING THEM!
One of the biggest factors that lead me to turn in my project a day before it was due was forgetting to UV my models before animating them. For those of y'all that don't know what UVs are, imagine the map of the world.
Although this map is a flat image, the idea is that this image is a flat representation of our round, spherical world. A UV allows for this flat image to then be projected onto a sphere and have that sphere look just like our world. However if our UV is off in some way, Africa could end up over Europe, or South America could take up the whole surface of the sphere.
Because I didn't UV my models correctly, they ended up having the textures of their eyes and such all over their body. To make matters worse, since I already animated the models, that meant I had to go to each scene of my project, and either transfer the RIGHT UVs onto those models, or copy over the animation from the animated model to the UVed model.
About Me:
As a wee lad, I was always interested in story telling. This lead to me wanting to creating my own animations.
Part of an animation I did back in 2015
Throughout my time at UTD, I've learned to become a better animator, game designer, artist, etc.
If there's one thing I encourage all new students to do, it's to try learning multiple things.
Although learning to be the BEST character modeler would be pretty cool, I feel with such a competitive field that having a multitude of skills will serve you much better.
The people that made this possible!
If I had a child that told me they wanted to be an animator,
I would respond "No, don't".
Which is why I'm very grateful for my family and friends for supporting me throughout the years. Who knows where I'd be without them.
I'm also very grateful for everything I've learned at UTD. It's thanks to all the lovely professors here that I'm actually able to create the projects of my dreams!
(Please don't quiz me on everything I've been taught though. I WILL cry)
Also, thank you Professor Elizabeth Boyd for guiding me
through this project!
Without you, my animation might've turned into...
*Shivers*
...
Originally this site was a LOT sillier than it is now.
If you dare look at my funny version of this site, feel free to click this button.