Reflective Statement

 Creating Hem was extremely out of my comfort zone, as I would like to be a character artist or a technical artist. I did not begin third year thinking that I would create an animation. Instead I thought my major project would be character based. Hem to me is a triumph as although it is not 100% where I want it to be yet and I do plan on revisiting it, I am happy with how it turned out. My minor project was to create Arne which I found exciting, it gave me knowledge about character modelling through trial and error and to a lesser extent that feeling carried over to animating. I found myself being excited by the prospect of breathing life into a character. There are a few elements missing like sound effects in some places, refined animation and kinks in animation that need to be ironed out, but I feel confident in saying that I will be able to improve upon my animation over time.This project was not without its mishaps, I found myself not being able to batch render half way though the rendering process. Luckily I found alternate methods of rendering which became my saving grace.

 When deciding to create the animation I began by accepting that animation is my weakness and that I would work twice as hard in making an appealing world and working as hard as I can to overcome my inexperience. I was discouraged at first as I felt that I was not actually progressing but being stuck, but the first time I managed to make Arne move somewhat fluidly I had a eureka moment. My initial style was cel shading but after some discussion with Phil and Alan we decided that that method might have proven difficult to achieve the wanted results. So I did a test in Maya with flat colours plugging colour into the incandescence of a Lambert and then using the colour channel to control how three dimensional the object is. After some thought  I had an idea, so rather than using the Lambert which is finicky, I tried a layered shader as it made sense to place a 2D texture with transparency on top of a 3D base.  It worked better than I thought it would and that became my worlds style. Overall I am happy with how Hem turn out and look forward to improving on it.