Rendering

Here is my complete rendered animation, as I have still some time I’m going to work on the last few frames because I want to change the end. I’m also going to try to change the noise in the images.

Here I changed the end a bit by making his ears move a bit.

There is a kind of flash at the end (around 18sec), so I looked in the image sequence and one image is way more brigther than the others. Which is kind of weird because I rendered all the images at the same time with the same light setup. So, what I did is that I re rendered the image and replaced it in the sequence. Here is how it looks like :

I also worked on the end, because I wanted the mouse to stand up and walk around with the cheese stuck on her. I tried, this is what it looks like but I prefer my animation without this part so I’m just going to leave it without this part.

It could have been a good idea but i would have needed more time to work on it. What I wanted is the legs showing out of the cheese so that he would walk around and then bump into the foot of the table.

Reflexion on my animation

Looking back at the very begging of the semester I must admit that I would never have expected to be achieving this. As I never have done any animation or modelling before I was really stressed about how I was going to catch up, and learn the basis. Finally, everything went pretty well, for the most part. I was really interested so, I did a lot of research on my own in order to work out how I could manage doing my animation.

And here we are three months later, I did it! And I’m quite happy with the final result.

It could be improved though. I have some problems with the lighting. We can see for example, that the last few images at the very end are brither than the other. There is also a lot of noise, which I tried to fix a bit in after effects, but it’s still pretty obvious. The moment when the mouse is lifting the cheese up is a bit messy, I feel like we don’t feel the weight of the cheese. Maybe it should be slower in order to emphasis that the cheese is actually heavy. The pause before the fall is also perhaps a bit long. The movements are also a bit too symetrical and the camera angle when he is falling down could have been better from another point of view.

I could also improve on the timings, I think in the whole it’s working but it is still a bit messy. This is what I struggled the most with: getting the right timing. I think the best way to improve this, is to practise. What is also very helpful is looking at references or acting the scene yourself and count approximately how much time the action is taking so that you can sketch the key poses and have a rough idea of how much time is needed for the action to be accomplished.

I also feel like I have underestimated the amount of work which is behind all this. I wanted to do much more complicated things but I realised that I wouldn’t have enough time and knowledge in order to do what I really wanted. It was especially a matter of time, because it does take a lot of time! Once the modeling and the rigging are done, the animation part is the most time-consuming I think, because you need to pay attention to every little details you wouldn’t even have though about. I think that I spend a lot of time on modeling my character because I wanted him to look really nice but I regret that I didn’t add teeth and eyelids. I think it would have been nicer (like only two big teeth), and I could have emphasis the emotions with the eyelids. Anyway, if I had to redo this kind of exercise, I would spend less time on modelling in order to be able to focus more on the animation part and work more on the detail, because little subtleties s can bring a lot to animation and actually make the difference!

In general, I do think that the emotion of my character is pretty obvious, he is really happy and excited about the cheese. I could have made it more obvious in his movements, by adding some dynamic to them (work a bit more on the ear and eye movements) with the tail also for example (I did animate it a bit but not that much).

However, I feel like I’ve learned a lot during this semester and I really enjoyed doing this animation!