First off, I feel that the goal of creating a demo reel is different to that of creating an animation in class. For a demo reel, you have to be concerned with not only high level polish, but also presentation (lighting, composition, character design). For in class assignments, I feel it's often counterproductive. Believe me, I've had students (this has happened maybe 40 times in the past few years) not finish a basic cycle because they took too long pimping out their rig.
What I'm going to do is for some assignments, lock down the rig to something I give out. What this does is to force you to be creative within certain parameters. For other assignments, I'll open it up a bit more to custom rigs.
So in this class, there are 2 things I want to focus on:
- Animation Quality
- Composition
What I don't want to focus on.
- rendering
- lighting
- motion blur
It's not that these aren't important, but prioritizing everything at once gets in the way of animation. What I will stress is to reference your rigs in...this way later on, you can customize them and preserve your animation for presentation. I completely understand the pressure to have a great reel...believe me, I'm constantly working on my reel too (that never ends), but often the best work comes out of a sense of freedom and fun, and not trying to pressure yourself into figuring out how to get it onto your reel. Do a lot of hard work and focus on getting your process down and level of polish high, and you'll have more great work to choose from.
all for now....
Sounds perfect! With rigs and other constrains pre-decided, we can actually focus all our energy on the animation :)
ReplyDelete