Task 7 - Evaluation

Final Evaluation

Ryan Seewoolall (20137903)

As the project comes to a close, it is imperative to carry out a final evaluation which allows me to assess and reflect upon my work over this journey. Being able to establish my strengths and weaknesses over the duration of the project, and to ratify the lessons I had learned while working on this animation, therefore allowing for my growth and development when it comes to future projects.

This project was titled “Next Gen”. Ultimately, it was an open concept that was attached with the task of creating any product of work, as long as it pertained the game development pipeline. This brief was general, which allowed for me to take my own interpretation of it to a higher degree of uniqueness that was specific to the product I wanted to produce. With the brief established and analysed, I considered the areas of game development I find myself excelling in, ultimately that pointed towards 3D modelling, and any adjacent areas. However, I recognised that for this project, I needed to push myself out of my comfort zone and attempt to learn new skills that would later benefit me, without going too far as to straining the quality of my final product. With these points to consider, I landed on doing a 3D Animation for my medium/product. 3D Modelling would prove to be easy, and I can push myself to learn animation, without completely forcing myself into new software that would absorb a lot of my production time. With 3D Animation as a medium, I set out to create an animation that would aptly portray my personal concepts of what the next generation would look like. I landed on creating a piece that aimed to represent my growing fears around AI’s rapid growth in society, and its impact on the future generations. Reflecting upon my choice here to create a 3D Animation, I’d say I’m happy with the result and am glad that I took these points into consideration when thinking about which medium to work with, as it ultimately benefitted me especially in my production phase.

Over my production, I had managed to complete a large amount of what I had set out to do, resulting in a fully completed 3D Animation, in a striking visual style as I had desired, and with sound accompaniment. The only aspects I hadn’t been able to carry out exactly as I would have wished were an inclusion of more detailed background elements, and a focus on more fluid animation. The animation as a whole had been produced effectively, however there were a few limitations solely regarding time, that had not allowed me to create the more detailed buildings, and the heavier pieces of world building in the background of the animation. I am still justly satisfied with the final result, as it effectively still portrays the calibre of work I can produce within the time frame, despite the few aspects I wasn’t able to complete as those were only omitted due to trying to focus on time management, as opposed to my skillset.

Evaluating my Design Choices

Ultimately, in the animation, my design choices were heavily rooted in the desire to stand out and convey the message I wanted to in a memorable manner. The visual style I had opted for aimed to be bold, and immediately clear that there is something different about the tone of my animation. Searching for this visual style led me to find out about depth buffers, as I have mentioned over this project previously. The unheard-of nature of using them for an animation’s art style pushed me to try use it even more, there proved to be many limitations to a lighting style that cannot be controlled very much and forgoes the use of textures. Despite knowing this, I chose to stick with it as I recognised that this style would help the story I want to portray, as a world without creativity would logically not have a visual style full of art and textures. Due to this, I had to make various other design choices later down the line that existed as work arounds to the lighting. My other design choices around the story and theming mainly draw from my desire to make the message contemporary and relevant, setting the world about 5 years from today makes the situation feel real and very prevalent, which I believe coupled with the rest of the other aspects of the animation, was achieved.

As aforementioned, this evaluation serves as a way to establish the lessons I have learnt over the course of this project, there were quite a few, as I hadn’t ever created an animation before this on a scale like this either. Broadly, I believe I have now recognised the importance of an effective production plan, as the one I had created for this project proved to be vital in ensuring my time keeping was correct, and that I didn’t feel overwhelmed over the duration of the project. Conversely, one lesson I learnt was that in depth research can vastly help the creative process, as for the research I had carried out enabled me to easily come up with concepts and ideas as I moved onto my pre-production phase. These lessons are vital and I wish to ensure that I pertain them all future projects I carry out in the future.

Assessing the Problems

Past this, I wish to reflect upon the problems and issues that arose during the project, overcoming these inherently allowed me to better the quality of work, while also teaching me vital lessons similarly the prior paragraph. One of my more prominent issues was the simplifying of some assets for my animation itself, such as having to repeat building models, as opposed to making more variety and also having more landmarks for the setting itself. This was solely an issue with time for my production, as it ran on longer than expected as I had underestimated how long each part would take, when applied to how much time was available to work on it. To rectify this issue, I resulted in using Blender’s array modifiers for environmental assets, so they were placed in rigid increments, as opposed to me manually placing them where they were best suited.

Another issue I had run into was the method of texturing the paper in my animation, I knew I wanted my silhouette style for the whole animation except that piece of paper since that needed texture. The lighting doesn’t adhere to textures so at first, I was unsure of how to approach this. After ruminating however, I managed to figure out a work around. Initially I rendered the animation as is, with the paper being render in the lighting like normal too. Then, I begun another render, with the depth buffer turned off, and placing normal lighting in, and texturing the paper. Now that the paper has texture, I hid everything else in the scene, but not via normal means, but by utilising Blender’s “Hold-Out” function, where objects are hidden from the render, but still occlude, so the paper wouldn’t render if it’s behind a background element. With that, I rendered the animation, then overlay it onto the final render, creating a seamless effect of the textured paper amidst the solid colour lighting. Circumventing this relied on my understanding of Blender’s systems and function, which makes me glad that I chose to stay with Blender as a software for this project.

As a final point, I’d like to assess any areas of improvement for this project and any areas of success to keep for future projects. As for improvement, and parts that could have gone better, I’d say ensuring that production plan has more contingency time to allow for issues similar to the one I had for my production phase where I almost ran out of dedicated time. Additionally, I believe my research and other tasks could improve from being more concisely written, as I believe there are a few aspects of writing that aren’t as necessary as others, meaning the text becomes bloated and long to read, ultimately obscuring the more relevant points. In future projects I intend to ensure I follow these weaknesses with improvements.

As for areas of success, I am personally proud of my research, despite the issues I had just mentioned with it. Amidst the longer parts of text, I believe my work to be relatively comprehensive and cover a myriad of points that proved vital in my creative decision making over the course of the project. In addition to this, the product of my production was to the exact calibre I desired, in my opinion it was a strong testament to my skill sets surrounding Blender and 3D modelling and therefore stands as an overt success for the project.

Overall, I am justly satisfied with my work for this project, and believe it aptly represent the quality of work I can produce and what I have learned of this academic year.

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