11/11/2020
Putting a stop to the making process, I made sure to leave a fair amount of time before the deadline to render everything—this was one of the smartest decisions I had made in this project.
It took me three days to render four animations.
I had expected the task to be fairly frustrating as rendering would take a long time, but I really didn’t know how my animation would really look until three hours later. It was a tedious trial-and-error process as I encountered a new issue every three or four hours, be it that objects that were hidden will appear in the final animation if they weren’t deleted, or that the rendering can mess up the colours, or that one of my objects’ surface was inside out so the lighting looked strange on it. It also turned out faster than I had expected because the lag in the software when I played the animation made me think it was slower.
I had set up a total of four cameras in my environment and animated two of them. One animated camera was more dynamic, moving around and tracking different fishes as they swam, although it was much too fast and messy when viewing it after rendering.
The block I had put up for scale that was hidden was also visible
I set a static camera in the corner of the store like a security camera to view the fish interacting with each other. I didn’t realise until watching this that one of the fish swims through the shelves.
For the final video, I’ve edited all the animation from different angles together.
The blender file can be found here
Overall, I’m quite happy with what I have achieved considering how worried I was at the beginning of the project. I like the contrast in the pastel colourfulness of the store and the blue outside world, and I think I animated the movement of the animals well. There are some faults and mistakes that I had overlooked when I was working on it that I notice now (flying blocks, random objects, fast camera movements, etc.) although if I were given the chance to do this all again, I’d be more mindful of these details and leave more time at the end to fix everything.
3D animation in some parts what I had expected but in others completely beyond. There were aspects that I found easier than I had anticipated and some that were more complicated and tedious than I had thought. With the cameras and blocking, it’s essentially a digital movie set which I found very intriguing. Although the process of 2D animation is more enjoyable to me, I can see why 3D animation is a popular medium in film and video games because of how alive it feels. Though the process may be tedious and difficult with lags and errors, the end result feels incredibly fulfilling.