Animation time (finally)

I began animating and it was a nightmare. I spent several hours watching tutorials, putting my model in the scene to find my scene was 1000x larger than the scale of the model and having to downsize everything and setting up a custom control to set key to everything (which is so helpful. Took me about 10 minutes to do and I'm so glad that I took the time to learn how!)

It took me 5 hours to animate the first five seconds of my scene. I was panicking and very worried. It'
s so much harder to make a character look unbalanced on water than you'd think. However, I showed Szilard and he really liked the little playblast I had done so far and said you could tell I'd put a lot of time into it. He also reminded me the animation only has to be a min of 45 seconds. I thought it was 1.30min so I'm really relieved. Short and sweet will be my style to this.

Looking at the playblast now I'm pretty proud. It's just amazing to see this static character I've been working on for weeks finally come to life. I almost forgot his purpose was to tell a story.

I've gotten more confident with the animating and more familiar with my rig now although the claws have been a nightmare to animate and his controls aren't as easy as I'd thought. So my work flow has sped up a lot and I'm now half way through animating. Actually I'd say a third of the way through now.

Once I've finished animating I need to go back and add the polaroids and water effects. Hopefully this doesn't ruin everything and I don't have to change the timing of my animation to make it work. I'm thinking a wave deformer on a flat plane will be good for the polaroids.

Also - my rendering times were horrendous. About 5 minutes for a really small, low quality render. Not ever 720p. So I removed the vray grass and it has improved remarkably. There is no longer 'calculating time' before the render. I'm sad to see it go, but my tutor reminded me that I'm not being marked on all the little special effects but rather the animation, character and story telling. So that's what I'm focusing on although I'm a sucker for special effects :(

Also, my tutor looked at my head texture, clicked one button (break connection) and the reflection problem was fixed! Thank you! I knew it would have been something silly llike that but I never would have thought of that. Very happy that's fixed.

Here is a high quality render, showing the beginning of my animation. My character slowly walks up to the water as you can see in the short playblast above. I'm yet to put the polaroids, water effects, animated fog and lights in the scene.