So animatic night was last night.
nnnngghhhhhhhhh. . .
It wasn't that bad. I went sixth on the first night, and I assumed they would have a lot of energy in the beginning to rip students apart, but they definitely got more spicy as the night went on. I got off easy compared to my other friends who went later than me.
None of the critiques really surprised me, but I was just really frustrated with their expectations. 2D animators use their animatic as a base starting point for their films, but any 3D artist is going to just throw away their animatic once they start blocking. Mine was in 3D, but because I'm making this in Unity, none of those cameras will be used in the end. They said my camera angles weren't done well, which I expected, but I didn't expect them to say my camera 'lacked personality'. I just didn't want to spend even more time on my storyboards and animatic when it feels completely useless to me, but I still was disappointed to hear things weren't clear and they didn't get it. With an experimental film, I don't think people need to necessarily understand what's going on, and my film is just an environment flex anyway, but it still stung.
There were two suggestions I liked, and I don't know how viable they are, but I'm going to keep them in mind. One was to use a VR camera to record out the final video to give it a more human feel, and the other was to bring in elements from the other dreams into each dream as it becomes more suspenseful. Like trees popping in to the apartment, or a couch appearing in the quarry. That seems really freaky, and the freakier, the better for this film.
I really don't want to have a rig. I really don't want to have a rig. I really don't want to have a rig.
There's a fine line between standing up for myself. . . and taking suggestions from professors who have been doing this for half their life. Maybe it's stubborn and immature, and I'll have to sit on that for a while, but I just really hate doing rigs and character animation. There, I said it. It's not that I don't like animating, it's just that I don't have the time to do both animation and sick environments. I cannot have another Otter Space; I will lose it.
I've been refreshing myself with the asset packages that I bought from the Unity bundle, and they're INSANE. I wish I was better at Unity and coding, because these assets are AMAZING. Like, throw together a Red-Dead-Redemption-2-style-scene-in-an-afternoon amazing. (I've been playing that a lot lately, it's my new favorite game.)
In the meantime, I've been doing more modeling and texturing.
I'll go over it more in my next post, but ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I figured out the high to low poly pipeline finally! I've been casually trying my hand at it every couple of weeks, but I just couldn't figure it out. . . UNTIL NOW! My process is to make the high poly version first with beveling, and then merge vertices back together to get the low poly version to perfectly fit. I've been pretty good about poly count up to this point, but with this process in my tool belt, you'll be able to run our game on a calculator!
ALSO! I went to a seminar featuring some of the developers from Vicarious Visions, a local but AAA studio; they were going over their new project - the create-a-park for the remastered Tony Hawk Pro Skater series. I had a great time and they all seemed like amazing people, and causally I went to go check their job listing and they have an environment artist job that was posted five days ago!
I don't want to get my hopes up, but it seems like a dream job for me and I'm going to spend all weekend revamping my reel and cleaning up my cover letter and portfolio. We'll see if I'm what they're looking for, and I could use some practice with the application process anyway. I'm really excited!
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