Angelo Sparks-Nieto
Feed Back Journal – 6/12/2015
From the beginning of the year my main problem seemed to be proportions and style, while with personal projects I did well, when it came to group projects, things seemed to come a slow progress. Animation is also something I seemed to have a problem with but but had improved over time and practice when ever possible.
The first animation I did was a project called, “So Long Suckers” where I animated a small character riding a bike, and then a larger character stealing the bike and riding off with it. It was my first time animating a rigs so Mike Ton, Michelle, Eliza, and Augustine from our class pointed out the animation was a bit sloppy sloppy and stuttered, not to mention there was hip movement that made no sense or that wasn't there. I improved over the time between that and the next project, “Fantasy Fighter” where I made a set of animations for a character I created called, “Domnall, the Mole man”, there I focused on improving hip movement and made sure that the weight he had could be seen in his body movement, it was a good improvement and I delivered satisfactory results.
Character design and modeling is one of the things I improved in the most, our first character modeling assignment I made a character called, “Teodora” and it was an absolute mess, Olivia helped me out a bit but even with her help and suggestions I was a little lost in the dark, then again I was just getting associated with Zbrush and haven't really understood what most of tools it had would do. Also, the model I created was very bland and had some pretty odd texture mapping issues as Mike pointed out with the assesment, such as blocky normals and bad seams in the UV's. Since then I've improved on using the tools provided by Zbrush to create better map materials and models, I've learned how to make better details such as creases and muscle mass, and learned how to quickly modify and lower polygon faces. As well, I've also figured out the tools and method to make Zbrush models work out much more soundly with Maya. In fact in my portfolio I have made a better rendition of Teodora.
I am still learning though and I'm not quite perfect with many elements of 3-D modeling and animating, but I am learning and practicing when ever I can. Even now I'm working on personal projects and sharing my work on Twitter and Tumblr to get feed back and learn tricks from others.
