Animation horror (or happy) stories?

[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.