Evaluation and review
In the project “Lighthouse”, I was concerned with the fact that the plot of this animation is set in a future era, an era where humans are already very familiar with and use robots and artificial intelligence. Many jobs that are fraught with danger and far from human society have been replaced by different kinds of robots. In the animation, a large robot replaces the lighthouse and the lighthouse keeper because of the danger and solitude of the job. The animation shows a dormant old lighthouse robot sitting on an island far from the city, blending in with its surroundings. That is, until one night when storm conditions in the nearby waters worsen and the waves begin to affect a nearby ship. The ship’s alarm was detected by the lighthouse and it was activated once again. The giant robot slowly rises from the island and begins to slowly and heavily turn around and start walking in the direction of the ship to save and help the nearby ships.
Based on the feedback given to me about this 3D world and animation project, there is a section on my direction and the theoretical knowledge I have gained from this work that can also be used to help me in my creative practice. Due to the specificity of maya and the fact that this is the first time I have tried and learnt the software and skills involved. I need to have ideas, experiment on different levels and have the ability to explain to others the direction I want to explore and understand. There is also the ability to implement innovation well in the development of the project.
But on the other hand. After self-examination and feedback, I have recognised the problems that exist. There are different levels of issues that I need to address in each part of my 3D world and animation. Firstly, I need to learn a better way to use the implementation of feedback in maya. Also, I need to learn how to use more software and plugins in maya to help me express my projects better, such as adding more attempts to prove my ideas and the ability to maintain my logic and continuity of work. Also, I need to experiment more with new materials and new ways of modelling, choosing carefully which materials I need and might use so that I can strengthen my skills and knowledge of materials to experiment with in my 3D world and in my animations. Most importantly, I need to apply professional behaviours effectively in my practice and improve my productivity. I need to develop a daily schedule through thorough reflection and personal development to help me start working and practising creatively and effectively. However, due to my laptop hardware, unity’s entire animation seemed out of reach and the long loading times often crashed my computer, which caused major problems for me at the end of using unity.
Overall, animating characters using skeletons and rig in maya was a new thing for me personally. Not only that, but because my character is a robot it doesn’t have the same skeletal system as normal human skin, thus taking me a lot of time to work out and learn this stuff. But it also helped me, now I understand the character skeleton which I then use multiple methods to create and have some knowledge of it. On the other hand, in this area of motion capture I used them later due to equipment and various delays. And because my character is a robot, its movements should be different from those of a normal human. However, I didn’t take this into account, which led to a lot of problems with the motion capture animations, such as different bones, misalignment and conflicts between models, which took me a long time to adjust and change. The last problem was that when I tried to export to untiy there were often some decals that disappeared and reappeared, I didn’t solve and understand this problem in the end, which is a pity, maybe I need more time to understand unity and maya.
Overall, for me personally, Maya and unity is still a software and skill that deserves more time to explore. Each one of them is worth more time for me to learn.
