WRITTEN ANALYSES AND REFLECTIONS
Our team consisted of eight students, six from UAL and two other students assisting from other schools. Yiyang helped us develop the concept in the beginning concept, and Hefan helped us with the animating. They did a great job assisting, but most of the work was done by the students from UAL.
The group started with Yuting, Yiyu, and me. We had an idea at the beginning of the term and started to find other people to join us.
To combine everyone’s abilities and show them to the full extent. We decided to make an animation that has both 3D and 2D. Since everyone in the group was very enthusiastic and engaging, we developed the idea and started to work on it. The whole collaboration process is tiring but rewarding.
I primarily worked with Yuting as an assistant in the virtual 3D scene during the collaboration.
I’m good at researching and developing a concept for animation, so I did most related work. I also use 3D as a reflective and testing tool for the group members’ design. In the creation of the virtual classroom, I test out the 2D design in 3D to help the final decision on the concept. Creating the characters was quite challenging because it was hard to achieve the characteristic we wanted initially. Because we have sculptures as main characters, the model initially didn’t look cartoonish enough. So I exported the model to different software and played with the decimation setting to find the ideal amount of polygons we needed. After getting the suitable polygons, I modified the model’s shape to make them look alive. I also learned new skills during this group collaboration, such as UV mapping and texturing with Substance Designer.
During this group cooperation, I sometimes had to deal with the situation that I had to rush my work to keep up with the workflow. So I had to figure out the quickest way to do stuff to keep up with the plan. I think this experience is also a necessary part of group cooperation because I don’t work alone. It was hard to decide what I do for the group in the beginning as well because I know a bit of everything. But overall, I’m more interested in doing stylized and cartoonish stuff. I think I will try to improve more in the future to help me on producing my own work.
Generally speaking, this collaboration experience was very successful. The combination of the 2D and 3D worked really well. Everyone contributed their best to work and did a great job.
WORK IN PROGRESS FILM
FINAL ANIMATION