3D Animation: Final Blog

 The editing took a couple hours to complete, but my final animation is finished and I am very proud/satisfied with how it turned out. I know the previous blogs were a pretty could time stamp of the process of my final, but I'll still summarize the whole thing from the start. I started off by looking at what rigs/models were free and available to work with. I wanted to create a storyboard based on what characters I could use, and I knew I wanted to challenge myself beyond just cubby. I ended up finding the Kong and Irex rigs and decided to take inspiration from the 2014 King Kong movie when Kong fights off 3 dinosaurs. This allowed me to move onto the storyboard which provided a good basis for my project, however the final animation did stray away from the original idea a little bit. The next part was building my scene which honestly ended up taking up a good 1/2-3/4 of the total time I invested into this. My previous projects like the oogway scene and the grogu scene gave me some understanding of how to build a scene and texture map a little bit, but I felt the desire to be ambitious with this one. I ended up trialing and erroring for about 2-3 weeks until I got results I wanted. I built my own ai-generated sky dome, texture mapped dimensional ground, lots of poly vegetation, and even crafted my own rocks/boulders. I wasn't able to add real grass unfortunately without my computer crashing. I am still very pleased with how it turned out, and as a result I was able to finally move onto the animation. The process actually wasn't that bad considering I had so much time to work on it, so I was able to break it off a little bit at time. Don't get me wrong, I spent many late nights doing it, but it was fun to work with the rigs and really satisfying to see each little action play after I finished. I did run into the playback speed issue which was one of the biggest obstacles I faced, but I did get past it. Some actions like the dinosaur roar, the punch, and the jaw break took way more time and effort than everything else, but those scenes did end up stealing the show. I'm also glad I was able to still incorporate cubby and I think the relationship between cubby and the gorilla felt very authentic. Once I finished the animation, it was time to render which was the worst part of the whole project. I spent a whole lot of hours in the lab rendering on I believe 12-14 computers or something like that. Each time I rendered out 100 frames and had to combat my rigs inflating which was extremely infuriating, but we did it. It turned out pretty good with a few minor adjustments, but in the end we had a great finished piece of work. The process and this class in general has been very good for me and I think I have greatly improved and tested myself as an animator. Now I get to look forward to what's next. 

(PS, I didn't blog a crazy lot because I was putting so many hours and so much time into my animation, that I just didn't have the energy to offer 20+ blogs, but I hope the extra effort I put in showed off)