My Thoughts

i am reasonably happy with my final animation. i have enjoyed the full process from research to final product. and watching my character come to life in sucha short amount of time is a great feeling.

i feel the emotions of the truck come across very well through out the animation with the strongest part being where the box falls off of the back of the forks. the sudden surprise and then subsequent frustration/anger translate very well.

the soun effects i feel let the animtation down a little due to their low quality with the weakest sound effect being the crash effect when the box hits the floor. it sounds very much like metal on metal rather than wood on concrete.
the ambient sounds as i have mentioned in a previous post are very intrusive at any volume higher than they are in the final video.
the song fits very well with the video and complements the actions within the video. i think this is helped by there being no spoken words in either the video or the song.
i find the look of my animation very interesting as it look very realistic but the shape etc of the model is a very unrealistic shape which provides something different.

Skills

i havn't learnt many new skills this semester. i have applied my current skill set to further my modelling and animation's to great effect in my opinion.
i have furthered my skills and knowledge with materials and using custom bones, which i know will help to improve my future work.
i have however revised my thought process to how i research and develop ideas. which is why i think i have created such a strong character.

i decided i would do something a bit different to my previous animations and although i have created cars and trucks before, they have always been just that, cars and trucks. not a charcter which is usually percieved in a totally different light.

i learnt a new way of transitioning the camera around the scene using large movements one frame after each other to compeltely change the camera view of the scene, with little effect and clipping on the viewable video scene.

Improvements

although i have produced what i belive to be a visually stunning connectable character and scene. there are some areas i wouldl like to improve.

firstly there are a few parts of the animation where the meshs intersect which wouldnt be possible. this was a frustrating problem and was mainly due to having to redo the forks of the trunk in a hurry when i had the scaling problem. i made the bones too fat and they hindered my ablility to see exactly where the fork mesh was while picking the boxes up.

secondly the link to object and link to world contraint caused some unwanted movement on the crates during some of the scenes which mainly caused slight movement when they should have been stationary and on one occasion caused the mesh to intersect with the floor.

lastly a problem i noticed once i had rendered the frames, when the truck throws the box into the air, once it goes out of camera shot it stops moveing. the shadows from the lights are still cast however and you can see them on the floor from the stationary object.

regarding the sound i think the only way i will be happy would be to record all of my own sound clips and finely tune them to truely fit within the animation, as the free clips online are either too low quality or not quite relevant.