MDU105.2 Overall Assessment and Issues Encountered:

MDU105.2 Overall Assessment and Issues Encountered:

The process of going through an entire production pipeline in this assignment was definitely an eye-opening experience. I've learned many things during this time, such as how you can never take time for granted, how sometimes things just won't go how you planned, and that you need to take these things into consideration during the planning stages or you'll be late with your deadlines, and most of all, just how much it pays to keep practising with the software to sharpen your skills and create better and better things. 
I'll definitely look back on this assignment as the best way for me to have an idea of what 3D animators must go through everyday to create films, tv shows, games, etc., and I can now break every part of the process down in my mind to give myself a better idea of how they create them. 

During the whole production, I encountered quite a few problems. While most were minor and easily fixable, there were some that resulted in complete do-overs to solve. 

These were:

1. Not enough polys on the chest front (I had 4 on the extruded surface instead of 6)
2. When extruding the top of the chest down to make the inside of the chest, the extruded part protruded in front of the front chest face. This was quickly fixed by adding in a step I missed, which was to inset the top of the chest base polys. 
3. Snapping UV vertices to each other occasionally resulted in incredible amounts of lag, and this would not stop after loading the previous saves, restarting 3DS Max, restarting the computer, or even changing computers, as I had to completely re-do the chest multiple times both at university and home. I could not find out what was causing this problem, and waiting through the lagging moments did not result in it eventually going back to a normal speed. The only solution I had was to make the chest again from scratch and hope I didn't mess up the settings again.
4. While texturing, there were times when the textures weren't quite sitting right, or were at weird angles to other parts, as was visible thanks to the recommended checker pattern material. This problem was fixed by simply going back a few steps and correctly breaking the right edges which I missed.
5. Again while texturing, I had many fears that my texture image was going to be too pixelated, because in 3DS Max it was showing up with few pixels, and the texture was very blurry. I believe I fixed this by resizing the UV jpeg image to 2048 x 2048, as I had initially had it sized to 1024 x 1024. However, I can't actually be sure that this was the solution to the problem or not, as I realised that rendering the image smoothed everything out to a high quality, clean finish. 
6. While animating, there were many times where I wouldn't have Auto Key selected, and so of course my animations weren't working. Clearly this mistake was fixed by realising what the problem was, and turning Auto Key on to add key frames.
7. The coin cluster inside the chest issue which I spoke about during the Animating blog was one big issue I came across also, not creating and rigging the coins to the chest before I began the animation process was definitely not a smart move. 
8. With texturing again, I realised near the end of my production process that the UV lines on my chest were still visible, so this was easily fixed by going back into photoshop and hiding the UV layer.
9. During the rendering stage, I somehow managed to irreversibly make the render show just a plain black image, even after going back through the tutorial video and setting everything to the correct settings. I later realised it was because I was setting the quality of the render too early, or perhaps without an actual camera selected. This issue pushed back my submission time by a whole day, because I simply could not figure it out, but later realised that simply loading back to a previous save fixed the issue, and I made sure to leave rendering until the very last step.
10. The final issue I had with this production was going over the final, completed render image sequence, and realising that I still hadn't learned my mistake of not selecting a camera whilst rendering. Instead of panning around the board, then zooming in like the scene was supposed to, I had the whole thing rendered in perspective view, right in front of the board. The render time was about 6 hours, and of course this pushed my submission back even further. However, I doubt I'll be making that mistake ever again. I have definitely learned from that one. 

These were the big issues that I encountered with my brief production, and I can only imagine what it would be like for a company worker on something of a much larger scale! It's insane to think about all the aspects that make up complex productions, and how much time and effort would have gone into making them.

I definitely have a new-found respect for 3D animators after this assignment, and I'm much happier for it.