End of Project Evaluation

Our project was a massive learning curve in terms of our artistic skills in achieving the detail we wanted in our models, and organising a large group to create the film. I think the project has gone well, however, I think there are a lot of things we could of done differently to improve and make production more efficient.
In terms of my personal project, I think my assets that I created were successful, I learnt a lot about how to go about making certain objects and how I could make them quicker, sometimes finding this out after it’s too late. I learnt when using Mudbox the topology can be created after the detail using Topogun creating a much cleaner and truer model to the high poly model. I learnt that modelling and unwrapping should be thought about constantly otherwise you can make things a lot harder for yourself. The personal work went on longer than anticipated and caused us to fall behind by a few weeks but we were able to catch up.
Creating the film was a great experience and I really enjoyed it. I think that we ended up having a group too big for us to deal with. We both needed to create our CG assets as well as communicate with a large number of people causing us to fall behind on modelling and communicating. I think one of us needed to be fully committed to the organisation of the team and had no CG assets to create; this would have allowed the team to work more efficiently. I think our team was too large to handle and we had too many part time second years from motion design involved causing us to have to waste a lot of time waiting on certain things to be finished before we could carry one. We also had to wait for a lot of the motion design guys to finish their previous project which delayed the project slightly. I think I could now organise time much better now and overall we should of got everything started a lot sooner but issues such as weather, permission to film on location, the change over from Max to Maya, and moments when our project got bottle necked waiting for one person to finish some work so the rest of the project could continue caused delay. I think we should have stayed using max throughout the project rather than changing to Maya for the animation team. It took a bit of time to get used to the different program, and although I learnt a lot about rendering and lighting we would have saved time continuing in max.
This project has made me appreciate immensely the work that the motion design guys do, it has made me realise how rewarding it is to see your vision come to life on the screen. It has made me want to be part of something where I do have an input in its creation.