During the break, I mostly focused on creating the animatic and “You Are Here” book projects. Therefore, while I did work on my 3D design, it wasn’t my main focus. Still, I managed to create basically all the setpieces, and colored most of them. This is what I managed to make by Monday’s lesson:
There are many things to do still, like giving the clouds a better texture, coloring the chains (and lowering their polygon count- more on that later), and animating some setpieces like the man flying through the screen (which I luckily understood how to do in Monday’s class) and maybe having the clouds move forward, as well as bettering the lighting.
I could’ve probably been going a lot quicker with this had it not been for Blender: from around halfway through the project, it started freezing for a few seconds every 30 seconds or so, whenever I had to color or move anything, even the camera. I asked Sam about this, and he said that I should lower the chains’ polygon count, as there are many chains and therefore many polygons. As soon as I’m finished writing this, I’ll look up a video detailing how to lower the poly-count of many objects at once, since doing it one chain at a time would take me forever.
I realize I essentially caused my own problem there, but I think it’s only natural: 3D is not nearly as intuitive as 2D, nor am I experienced in it as much as I am in 2D. The technique and knowledge needed to do anything is hard to learn, and I’m having to research how to do a lot of things (such as changing the opacity of the clouds), as the video recordings only contain so knowledge.
This isn’t the tutors’ fault, of course, but I really feel like this is the first time the current COVID situation is impacting my learning. Before now, the knowledge I needed for the rotations was fairly basic, as it was all 2D art, which I knew how to do, and the knowledge was delivered in person on Monday. With this rotation, however, I’m finding that the online learning method just isn’t enough, which is demoralizing. And I’m afraid the next rotation, VFX, will probably suffer the same fate.
This whole situation has admittedly made me feel a bit negative about this rotation, but I’ll still do my best to finish it and deliver a final scene as good as I can manage.