Animation horror (or happy) stories?

[Kevin Thorp]

OK - it's the day after the deadline. Hopefully you've all had time to catch up on your sleep.

Did everybody make it in time? Other than the problem of "invisible" storyboard files, were there any problems uploading?

[fireball3004]

Lol, you want a list of problems that occurred?

-I couldn't get in touch with one of my animators to get his scene to edit
-our mentor didn't e-mail me with his account for submission
-the night before I recognized a glaring hole in the animation/script
-I didn't do ANY work before the submission date
-only meeting once a week starting 3 weeks in because of limited access to faculty and facilities
-having only 3 people who have used animation before and 5 people...
-being an utter noob after my 3rd year at this

no we didn't get it in on time... I'm angry w/ myself... but my revenge on our mentor and myself will be to hold some great classes in animation that get people excited before I leave, and finding someone who will open rooms in future years (yes, I broke in a couple of times) so they can't merely kill the animation team like they've wanted too.

[Morgan Gillespie]

I think just having the connection time out... 3 times... while uploading just about did it for me.

[BuddyB309]

heh, I've been pretty disconnected with my team this year But there was one night I was home and randomly showed up at the bot shop. I looked at their project, told them what was wrong with it. And worked with them untill the wee hours of the morning. Up until that point they hadn't accomplished as much as they should have. They all really enjoyed working hard that night. Its always fun to crack the whip

[Koko Ed]

The animation is done and gone.
I'm happy.
The end.

[Jreed129]

Our team did not have any problems with the animation this year, which was a surprise and we got it uploaded a day ahead of the due date which was also a first in my time on the animation team. It was a good thing we got ours uploaded the day before too because the power was out at our school from about 4:30pm to 6:30pm, when I left, I don't know when it came back on though, but it would have been a devastating blow if we were not done when we were.

[Popper99]

Well, this year I tried rigging ( ). The rigging on the dogs went really well, but you probably noticed the robber collapsing into himself at various points. Even then it was a nightmare trying to get that working right, so I'm happy we got the character moving and the animation shipped

[robonerd13]

We successfully got our animation in a day early!!! And so the storyboard is "invisible" we thought it was our link that wasnt working all the way...but other than that it went well...and is really nice good luck to All!!!

[Magiciandude]

We didn't have any trouble with finishing on time or uploading. We actually uploaded early. The biggest problem we had was figuring out A.) How to make a good looking ocean and B.) How to make a cargo ship transform into a giant running lizard without any mesh collision or scaling...that took about a month...other than that things went very smooth!
-Chris

[rastermon]

We got new computers in the school lab, but they still choked when trying to render particles with Mental Ray. We had to settle for the scanline renderer

I had forgot that we used Combustion last year to add our audio, so it was a last minute download, and then groping around how to sync the sound with our final video - credit, title, etc.
I spent one night trying to find my download password (I'm a mentor)

I'm overall happy with our animation - we used a combination of keyframe animation and particles. The render output could have been better, and perhaps shorten our narration script.

[gbzalla]

Our animation went pretty well this year despite being a second-year team. Although our team consists of me and one of my friends (both self-taught) I think we made a pretty decent animation this year. Our school has no computer that could handle 3ds max very well at all so we did all of the work separately at our houses (after collaborating on what we wanted to do of course) and then combined it all at my house a few hours before the animation was due. So it all seemed to go according to plan.

[Church]

We had bumps, but in general I couldn't be happier with my team. The girls didn't even see the program for the first time until a week or two after kick-off. For a while I was pretty convinced that if we had a submission at all, it would be almost entirely mentor-made, and that was the LAST thing I wanted.

Our finished product may not be a winner, but I think it's a strong contender, and I'm $@#$@#$@#$@# impressed with how proficient the students were with the program after working with it for just a few weeks.

Okay... I'm done gushing now.