Project Evaluation.

Throughout this term, I have learn't how to model, texture, animate and light a scene in Autodesk Maya. As well as rendering out all of my scenes and editing the animation in After Effects and Premiere Pro.

Overall I am really happy with how my project and the final underwater and light ray effects I created in After Effects CS6 and Premiere Pro CS6 turned out. I feel that my modelling was the strongest part of my project, seeing as how it was my first time modelling an entire scene in Maya on my own. I wanted to challenge myself and get out of my comfort zone by creating two scenes from scratch, one being my bedroom scene and the other being my fishbowl scene. I also feel that I was able to achieve the realistic quality that I initially set out to create. My weakest point of my project was the texturing and UV mapping in Maya, I found it very difficult in the beginning to get my head around the process of how to texture my models. I did look at a lot of tutorials and guides online which helped me and I think did look really good in the end, however it did give me the most trouble throughout my entire project.

My strongest part of the animation I felt was the swim cycle, because the animation look quite smooth and I spent a long period of the production getting the weight of the character looking right. Next time I animate in Maya I will make sure to keep an eye on the movements of the arms, I found that in some circumstance they were twisting at awkward angles and it did take me a while to correct the problem before I could finish the production to begin rendering.

Overall I have learnt a lot about animating in 3D, and I have found that I did get on well with the software once I figured out how it worked. I think modelling and animating in 3D software could be a possible career path that I would pursue based on this project and what I have created.