HA12 - Task 8

Project Evaluation:

After finishing my project, I am able to reflect on it and see how it went, how I can improve in the future and what are my particular strengths and weaknesses. I had a lot of choices to makes throughout the animation, what I want to do, and how I want to do it, I researched into different things as well as brain stormed and created mind maps, in the end I decided to go with animating a spacecraft during a small sequence of flying, fighting and landing. I believe that my animation is created of a high standard and I am very happy of how it came out.

Reviewing each task, I think I progressed well and thought like a professional, carefully planning and preparing the animation before actually processing to do it. I believe that I have made good use of the software available to me and that I progressed efficiently. My finished final animation matched extremely closely to that of what I had planned and therefore I think I did very well and didn't go overboard with the idea compared to my available skill set and time. I think the best parts of my animation was the complex camera work as well as the ship manoeuvres right after the wall was destroyed. Overall I am quite happy with the overall effect. The biggest struggle within the animation was to create a good fracture on the wall and then managing to properly render it. I rendered the project numerous times in different resolutions and settings and everytime after viewing the rendered files the render would start right after the wall was destroyed, skipping 30% of the animation altogether. I eventually managed to make it work by splitting the project up and rendering individual parts in a specific resolution. In regards to my work, I think my strong points is the research as well as the production log, I feel like I've done a very good job on that and that those two documents are very well detailed and well made.

Of course there were things that I could do better on. Apart from obvious things like, just adding extra details to documentation in every regard there are other things, especially the ones directly related to the animation. I think that I could improve on the animation by creating a better, more detailed model that would actually be more interesting to look at, things like the landing gears and the weapon slots weren't that detailed and I think they could have had a lot more work on them. I also think that I could improve on my animation by creating better lighting as well as making the animation look even more fluid than it already is.

There are also a lot of skills that I managed to improve upon, my organisational skills have gone up significantly. My ability to work more efficiently and quickly has also gone up, I have also learned a good workflow scheme for producing animations as well as how to create proper storyboards and what details should be on them in order to have all the planning on lockdown. I also learned a lot of new functions within NewTek Lightwave. Things like how to properly render, how to do fractures, how to animate fluidly and properly by using different stretches of key frames etc. What different FX Tools do and how to use them properly while also maintaining good performance after the project has been rendered out. I then practised video editing within Adobe Premier, how to edit alpha channels and how to edit and merge different scenes together. I also learned how to legally acquire assets that aren't mine and were made by another individual. Overall, I feel like I have learned a lot from this project and I will definitely use this knowledge in the future.

Concluding, I think that my project was a big success, I have made a good animation, with good planning and well thought out workflow behind it. I am very happy about the general work done by me. If I were to do it again I would definitely use my own model as well as make it more advanced for it to look better, I would also create a more fluid animation. Nonetheless, I definitely learned a lot of things, especially about NewTek Lightwave.