Toolkit 2: Reflective Statement

Reflecting back on Toolkit 2, it has definitely been one of the most difficult projects so far. My main struggle since the beginning, had always been Jetpack Jones, although starting out ahead in the beginning I never quite managed to get back round to it, always pushing it off for other parts of the project such as Moom acting exercises and Mudbox. This was due to how slow I was following each video as precisely as I could, with one video taking me sometimes a day or two to finish, instead of using them as more of a reference point I could follow along with.

One of my most favourite parts of the project was definitely focusing on lip-syncing as this allowed me to experiment with Moom, acting through him in a way. Although I still feel my lip-syncing could use a little bit of work, I am happy for one of my first tries of lip-syncing with Moom.

I also enjoyed exploring the world of Mudbox, as I had really little to any knowledge about the program before, though I would like to go back and experiment more with this program,  as although I now understand about it, I feel that I need to fully mess around with it a bit to feel more comfortable. The only problem I had with Mudbox was the occasional crash from time to time, especially when working with adding textures. I am not sure why but there would be a lot of lag when just colouring base colours onto my model, to the point where it was a struggle to really add any textures to it on top of that.

If I was to do this project again I would definitely set some sort of goal with Jetpack Jones at the beginning, making this project more achievable for myself, such as making sure I completed at least one or two videos a week, rather than keep pushing it back to focus on the smaller projects. However, over the summer I am planning on modelling my character ready for third year, as I know this will probably be my most time consuming and biggest goal I want to achieve, especially since I haven’t fully created a whole character in Maya yet, and to do this I will have to loosely follow along the same pipeline as Jetpack Jones.