What Should I Do?

Ladies and Gentlemen, should I change my blog name to ‘Sleepless Animating’ because that’s almost sums up the way things are feeling at present and it seems that the future will dictate this to become more than a feeling. There’s also not a whole lot of thinking happening in the world of ‘What I think’. I am been melodramatic, so don’t be alarmed kind souls, I am sleeping. But by all means please do let me know if you like the name, leave a comment or send me an angry e-mail. Post cards and Morse code are preferred though. It’s that time of night and I’m been a little bit stupid.

 

There is a Point

There is a point to this post though and I’ll get too it soon. I am doing a large variety of work at TAFE, (I’ll try and post some of it over the next 2 weeks) the majority of which is 3D, this is prefect because presently 3D is one of my major concerns as far as my animation life is concerned. There is a definite desire to get better at it, I love it, but it’s not my strongest point. With that in mind I decided that my animation short this year will be in 3D and I was going push myself as much as I could manage by doing things like hair, fur, cloth and other such messy things that may hurt me and hopefully I’ll learn a great deal in doing them. So far in my experiments with Maya fur I have already learnt a lot. I should also express that in the knowledge that this project may pull me through the ringer I picked a story and some characters that I would hopefully really enjoy with the optimism that, and this may sound really dumb so bare with me, that I could re-use these rigged characters, improve on them and use them to practice with, perhaps even create a few more characters as I go. So far I can say that I really am quite fond of my characters and that they’re good fun to draw.

Now I have one more thing to mention before I get to the point. I actually love hand drawn animation, I love watching it and I love doing it, even with all those in-betweens. I actually feel a lot more comfortable and relaxed doing hand drawn animation than 3D, I like the fact that I can spend more time focusing on the creative aspect of just drawing the pose, the character, the expression and the way it all flows together. I like the fact that I don’t have to model, rig, texture, add cloth, add fur, some light, don’t forget to save, for that sake of all that’s sweet in the world please don’t crash, or corrupt, where did this polygon come from, why is his leg moving backwards and of course I can’t forget ‘Holy sh*t, how long did you say that render would take?’

The Point Has Arrived

It has been recommended to me, on more than one occasion that I shouldn’t do this animation in 3D but that I should do it as a hand drawn. I’ve kind of put these recommendations to the back of my mind thinking something along the lines of ‘ok, well that’s a fair back up plan’ until today when one of my teachers said that I should quite seriously consider the idea of doing this as a hand draw short. So as a result here I am seriously considering it. I don’t really know what to think. There is in my mind more of a grantee of success if I do hand drawn. But am I throwing in the towel before I’ve even started? At the same time I am aware that it is unrealistic to believe I’ll be able to create a good quality amusing animation all by my lonesome while doing 3D. I’ve seen 3D project done by teams of people with bachelors in animation and have been less than impressed.

 

Anyhow, after further talking with my teacher we agreed that it might be an idea for me to model my most difficult character (the baron) over the next 2 weeks,  try and reach the quality I’m aiming for, if I can’t, then I do a hand drawn animation.

I know you won’t, but I’ll say it anyway, ‘watch this space’.