UV Mapping

I have been watching a lot more UV mapping tutorials and decided I was ready to give it a go. I chose the mound first as it is a complex shape. It took a whole day to do, but I am very happy with how it turned out; there is minimal distortion and all of the seems are exactly where I wanted them to be.

Props

I modeled the props for my film, keeping them low poly so that they could be smoothed later.

Group Work: Book

I was asked to animate a page turn for James. His film is in 2d drawn into the computer and I therefore had to match style. To do this I attached his page designs as a toonshader and added thin black profile lines. As both sides of the page are shown during the page turn I had to enable the plane for double sided texturing. To do this I ran both texture files through Condition and SamplerInfo utility nodes. This allowed me to attach two files to the texture and display them depending on which way the normals were facing. I based the rig of the book on a page turn tutorial at http://www.highend3d.com/ and customised it to my needs. I had a few problems with the paint weighting but these were resolved with a couple of hours of experimenting.
I have not yet been given the final textures as one page is the credits, which can only be wrote towards the end of the project. This animation will be used in two shots of the film. I did a test based on the camera James wanted.

Progress to Date

I am slipping further and further behind my schedule because of numerous set backs and spending far too long redoing my blockout. The main reason for this was to act upon changes recommended by my various lecturers. Unfortunately they all had different ideas they thought I should incorporate which often conflicted, or they had problems with elements of the story that they thought did not make sense or were not realistic enough.

I should have stopped making changes to my story after taking on board the feedback I received after my first blockout, rather than confuse myself trying to change my film to take all of my lectures conflicting opinions on board. Their feedback has given me a much stronger story with clearer intentions and motives, however even at this late stage I am still being recommended to make changes, additions to my story or even completely change it and start again, which does not fill me with confidence.

Progress on both my film and my Dissertation has been greatly hindered by my very methodical working manner, feeling I have to explicitly plan out every little detail before taking any action. I am having to reduce the length of my film and get help in areas I was not initially planning on, yet I feel I may still struggle to hand in the minimum required. I have considered download rigs instead of using my characters, but I think if I concentrate on maximising my efficiency then I should be able to get everything done.