Week 5 Blog - Animation Studio 3

Week 5 Blog

With no meeting with Rikki this week, the focus went to knocking off tasks on the trello list and with this weeks meeting we had to confront the issue that some tasks had fallen behind of schedule. With how we decide to approach this situation we could either fix this problem and keep everything on schedule or we could spiral into a downward spiral of deadlines not being met and the potential risk of losing a life on our 3 lives system. That potential damage is a worry and I won't deny that I feel a bit uncertain as to how we will go from here. One red flag that has definitely got me concerned has been the lack of communication on the slack channel this weekend. With the urgency we require, have very little feedback on my stuff to work with has left me stranded at the crossroads with the lab design not locked down while the shader testing has been messy, with no direction to go with to finding out how to get the look we need and plenty of Maya crashes from random value testings. While I was reminded of the availability of certain members for these days I was hoping that more would at least be aware of the chat rooms in case of urgent feedback but that didn't seem to be the case. I don't like the feeling of being stuck on a task when I have to wait on others to move forward as I feel like I can't contribute anything else at that point. I know it's something I can't really alter but it's something that niggles at me and makes me feel like I'm not contributing enough.

On the plus side I got my ship block outs done and ready to share and the assets assigned were finished in time. But I am concerned with the lab design and the shader testing as they have not been so smooth. When some members felt certain that we'd lose a life I didn't want to fall into that mindset as there's always a chance that it could be avoided and overall its a negative mindset to be in and would hurt morale, but I can't help but feel uncertain myself now. I think this Tuesday we'll need to do an emergency meeting to discuss the urgency of communication as that has been a major issue that cannot be ignored at this point.

On the independent study side of things I have started looking into specific tutorials on character designing related stuff and I decided to focus on specific things to start off with. To start with I went with Eye designs after watching a video talking about the best way to practice drawing, using eyes as an example, focusing on how it's best to focus on a task until you can do it efficiently rather than doing it once and then moving on without a second thought.



The above was my attempt at making eye designs on paper which turned out decently for my 1st attempt. I'll have to try this exercise out digitally as well to see how that fares and figure out which of these designs I prefer to draw. From here I think I will look for tutorials on making heads which can also be used to expand on the eye stuff as I can try drawing them at different angles.

When Tuesday comes around things will definitely go in a different direction depending on how we go with our current deadlines. Things will either even out or go all over the place and hopefully it won't be the latar.