Fantastic Voyage: Evolution- Reflective Statement

Reflecting back on Fantastic Voyage I feel mixed emotions. On one hand, I am proud of what I have accomplished in terms of deciding on the foundation of which I based project on and sticking to it. While on the other hand, I feel that I could have challenged myself more in terms of Maya.

Although my Maya journey was far from perfect, I stayed relatively in my comfort zone in terms of modelling, with each model being simple, and the animation not really having any background elements to model.

However, I do feel that I have made up for this through my texturing. Texturing in this project was very much a challenge for me, being that each model was very organic, and each element of detail, and just general look was influenced by how well the texture fit the model. This really made me become a perfectionist on how much I wanted elements to line up, and look appealing to the audience.

In terms of time management and organisational skills, I felt that they may have dipped towards the end. At the beginning of the project, I was very organised and kept in contact with the client, making sure my script was scientifically correct, and having my voice over artist ready. However, within the final days, is when plans did not go so well. My main problem was adding eyes to my animation.

This problem brought the project to a halt in some respects, as majority of my time was spent trying to figure out how to do the process. If I was to redo this again, I think I would look at all the different options and routes I could take, concerning adding eyes to my models. For example, it wasn’t until a few days from the deadline, that I discovered a much easier and simplistic way of adding eyes in Maya instead of after effects (that I found out wouldn’t work on my Maya project).

If I had known this earlier, and looked at all my options, it may have allowed me more time to have sent off my project to conductor earlier, allowing me to have my rendered film for crit, rather than pre-vis.

Despite this, I am overall content with how this project went, although falling at the finish line, I tried to  work through the problems that the project presented, and have learnt a lot through the mistakes I have made, and now have much more of an understanding of what needs to be done in order to produce a film using Maya, and all the aspects that go into it, that should be taken into consideration.