After receiving the feedback from the Dissertation Proposal, I feel that I should use this opportunity to answer some questions about it as well as discussing where I should go from here.
The first issue to tackle is that the elements that are being marked are not made clear. This is an issue I talked about very briefly at the start of the proposal, stating that I will only focus on the animations. That being said, I didn't mention the things that I wouldn't be animating, such as environments, models, textures, etc.. I will use a free, open-source rig from the internet (such as the ones exampled on this blog), and I do not plan to do any texturing or other work on the rig. As for the environment, I'm planning to stick to simple shapes (cubes, spheres, cylinders) for different surfaces and objects for the character to interact with; although I do not plan to be marked on texturing for the environment, I may put some simple patterns onto surfaces in order to easily distinguish them from the character.
The timeline is generic, but until I've done my storyboard, it's hard to know what needs animating. In hindsight, I feel that I should have allocated more time to planning the actual story, but I was told early on that the story isn't what's important, but the skills being demonstrated, so I ended up focusing on learning how to animate in Maya. As it stands right now, after exporting a very short animation from Maya, I can say is that most of the time will be dedicated to animating the character (which is extremely vague right now), and I can also safely assume that I will need at least 2 - 4 weeks to get the cameras set up correctly and render the final project.
I plan to make my storyboard very soon, which will give a clearer indication of how long each part of the animation will take. Until then, all I am certain of is that I will animate only the humanoid character, I will use simple directional lighting on the whole scene, and will export the animation as a 720p PNG image sequence into Sony Vegas, then convert it to a WMV or MP4 file. Without the storyboard it's also hard to know exactly what camera angles I will need to use, but I've animated cameras in 3DS Max in the past, and considering how easy I found it, I think the same ease will apply in Maya.
After recently trying to animate a face in Maya, it's actually a lot easier than I originally assumed. I therefore feel that including expressive facial animation is a good idea, but that I should do a little more research focused on it first.
Right now the next step forward is to draw out my storyboard, and then I can hopefully update my blog with a more acturate timeline.
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