Animations - Did yours go to plan?

[114Klutz]

As with most things FIRST related, animations rarely go by plan. Things happen late - I slacked off a bit when I shoulda been working - then went without sleep for a day or two.

How was your timeline this year? Did you stick by your original concepts or change them during the season? Were schedules kept?

[Nuttyman54]

not at all. We had a great plan, but it fell apart, mainly due to the fact that the lead animators are the Team Captain and Team President, but also due to computer failures (2 dead harddrives within 1 week). So no animation. I'm pretty bummed, but the robot works, so that's what mainly matters

[ewankoff]

at first there was no plan but with 3 weeks to submission our animation team got it together and pulled together a spantacular animation. the only thing that took more time that expected were finding the 2 skylights that were under ground and doing nothing

our animation didnt win any awards yet but we still have palmetto

[Koko Ed]

We had a precise plan and stuck to it and for once it came out exactly came out the way we drew it up(except the game screen animations which weren't as dynamic as we would like and the word are backwards) . It's very simple and straightforward.

[Morgan Gillespie]

We had a pretty detailed plan yet then we realized 30 secs wouldn't fit all of it unless we rushed it, which was our main goal not to do. We wanted something slow and easy to understand. So we cropped a few things out, like adding all the ingredients and actually mixing them. Yet I think it came out excellent if not better.

[Capt.ArD]

Yes, ours came out almost exactly as planned. there are many, many things that i wish we could've done better, but for the most part, it worked out well. it helps that we had a simple animation concept and got the plans done early.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Our animation was supposed to be submitted but it didnt happen because i was unhappy with how it turned out. A classmate (ex team member) and I did work on the animation during one of our classes and we stuck to our plan to a letter. Whats more is the entire team submitted the idea to us. It looked very good in modelling but the materials were a little off. I have concluded that without learning how to UVW map there is no way i can get a material accurate enough to show the detail of the model.

So no we didnt stick to our plan when it came to submitting it but when making it we were very *searches for word* nope sorry i got nothin but you get the idea

ps: anyone know of a great UVW mapping tutorial? or a good hair tutorial?

[Nuttyman54]

Originally Posted by Damien1247

ps: anyone know of a great UVW mapping tutorial? or a good hair tutorial?

I'd check www.3dkingdom.org and www.3dcafe.com for tutorials or just Google it. As for hair, i've never found any good tutorials for animating, but if you find any, please let us know here

[Capt.ArD]

There is a hair and fur plugin in max. pretty straightforeward. the help menu in max is suprisingly helpful (pun not indended). if you want a nice walkthrough, PM me and i'll see if i can throw a tut together myself.

[Damelvin]

Slacking off too much and being addicted to WoW really affected the way our team's animation came out. I did myself like last year so that also effected the results. But I think its a whole lot more detailed than last years. Hope to get more animators this year from Sheldon High School

[DinkyDogg]

I'm on the same team as the original poster. Our definately ended up different than our initial plans. We intended to have more scenes, for example, but time constraints kept us from creating all of them. Some of the scenes ended up a little rushed as it is, so I'm glad we didn't go for all the scenes we had planned.

Also, I had originally intended to model a robot in 3dsmax, but when our team's Inventor kru showed me their model I knew I couldn't equal it in max, so I used theirs. Not in the original plan, but I think this turned out well, too.