Toolkit 2 Reflective Statement

Project 1: Drawing

Overall, Project 1 felt somewhat unfulfilling, especially with missing out on analogue and digital sculpting in term 2.  I strongly believe Covid affected this area of Toolkit detrimentally, but I was grateful for the pockets of opportunity, such as life drawing week, that let me develop my traditional or tactile creative skills. Project 1 was a significant help with Premise, as they coincided with each other and had similar demands; the storyboards, expression sheets and overall character design exercises from my character bible grew my digital drawing confidence and gave me a template workload to transfer onto Premise. The randomly generated prompts I received for my character bible were not ideas I found personally interesting and it was especially hard to design insect character’s due to their frustratingly complicated anatomy. However, receiving randomly assigned prompts is always an opportunity to produce work that you wouldn’t normally prospect on your own, something I learnt when completing my Script to Screen project in year 1. 

Despite Project 1 being heavily restricted, I found it had the most enjoyable workload out of the three that made up Toolkit 2. I was able to practice what I love, which is digital and traditional drawing.  I’m extremely proud of the pencil portraits I completed at the end of the project for life drawing, and I think they show solid observation and drawing skill development. I anticipate further focus on drawing in year 3 of CAA. 

Project 2: Animation

Project 2 had an emphasis on facial animation and lip syncing, which I learnt is far less complicated than I first perceived. In fact, I found mouth animation much easier than learning to animate a walk cycle. Breaking down facial animation into simple stages, like basic jaw movement, phonemes and visemes, made the whole process easy to digest. I also enjoyed the artistic liberty I had as an animator with the characters’ expressions. I found the ‘barbell’ animation task less successful and surprisingly more challenging than facial animation. Looking back, I could definitely exaggerate the characters’ extreme poses to further strengthen the overall weight lifting movement. Comparing these two exercises, I think facial animation can be easily disguised when done poorly, but body movement can look fake very quickly. I found effective character posing easier to achieve as stills, which I completed at the start of Toolkit 2 as 5 action poses and 5 drama poses. The challenge comes when converting still poses into moving poses, which involves working with in-betweens, ease in & outs, and effective use of the graph editor. 

Project 3: Maya & Associated Software

The major outcome of project 3 was most definitely Jetpack Jones, a character that took six months to model, skin, rig and texture. Being my first character model from scratch, I'm extremely pleased with the final result. The wireframe renders demonstrate my initial attention to good modelling house-keeping; tidy geometry made of even quads. The clay renders respond well to lights, demonstrating smooth modelled surfaces. The final beauty pass includes bump maps and texture maps made within Mudbox, culminating with different surface shader attributes in Maya to present a character made of varying materials. Additionally, I paid attention to render settings within Arnold and on individual materials to create good quality outcome renders.

Improvements to the face would be beneficial; the mouth is beak-shaped, making it difficult to create effective blend shapes, resulting in an awkward smile. The back also protrudes strangely, a result of using the orthographs too strictly and not assessing my modelling from a 360 perspective. Additionally, the characters boots warp when posed, most likely an issue deriving from shin and foot skinning. These faults can be managed with angles and posing as a disguise. I firmly believe my future character rigs and models will be drastic improvements thanks to the knowledge I gained from this pipeline.

Creating this character was a monumental achievement and an opportunity to see where my creative preferences lie. I can now say for certain that modelling and texturing are my favourite areas of the pipeline and I’ve discovered the joys of Substance Painter. The Lighting & Rendering tutorials were also great additional exposure to Maya’s capabilities, but I found it overwhelming to absorb so much information at once. I’m glad I documented my work effectively, as I can revisit these tutorials at a later date to possibly help with my year 3 final outcome. 

A highlight of project 3 has been learning to utilize Substance painter into my Maya texturing. These specific workshops gave me the confidence to peruse independent Maya experiments for my Premise project, because the example outcomes and its brief involvement with Jetpack Jones were extremely successful. I think the in-class oil can outcome was a clear visual influence on my own independent Mortar & Pestle experiment; Substance Painter can produce very effective rust, stone and grainy materials easily. I also noticed how effectiveness of the dumpster texture outcome; the graffiti printing method through Substance Painter would’ve been a great asset to my year 1 Fantastic Voyage project. I definitely expect to use this software for the remainder of CAA.