SWOT analysis and SMART targets - character animation brief

SWOT analysis - character animation

I will go over my different strengths and weaknesses based on different aspects of the briefs which i have being doing over the past few weeks.

To start with when it comes to modeling my character i feel this is one of my strengths as i had no trouble modeling my character feel that it has come out better than i woul dhave hoped. The only problems i had on the modeling side of things were parts where i was slightly unsure about a cirtain aspect of cinema 4d or other things like that. For example the weld tool in cinema 4d was somthing i didnt know much about, but dave explained how it worked and it was that i didnt realise where you clicked and what needed to be highlighted for it to work. Most other things i managed to get around by trying things out myself or looking online.

I found the rigging part of the animation process very easy aswell. Following the tutorial given to me by dave i had no problems with any of the different parts of rigging. The only thing i would have liked to have knows was how to rig a hand using bones, which i didn't try as finding a suitable tutorial online was hard. The only thing close to a tutorial i found was in the Anne powers cinema 4D book, but at this point i had allready achived the desired results using morph tags. Weight painting was fairly easy, i had no real problems with this either, some things didnt work right off but changing some of the affected areas for each bone sorted it out. my character had a lot on polygons inside other parts of the body so i had to get the camera inside the character for some parts, which was awkward, and my set selection tags didnt work for weight painting.

The parts of modeling i mentioned above i feel are my strengths but there are one or two other parts which i think i need some work on.

Texturing my character was quite easy but i dont feel this is my strength, because my texturing is not as good as it could be, but the character himself looks fine with the textures i have used, with some changes to specular, bump maps, colour, reflection and other channels. I modeled a safe as a part of my animation, which i modeled with no problems but getting the metal textures right was hard, i looked at several tutorials online about which settings to use for different metals, and chrome coloured textures. I also looked at several tutorials nd board to make the background completely white, which after asking one of my peers turned out i did it in exactly the same way as him.

One aspect of modeling i dont think im too good with is creating complex shapes using the least polygons possible and creating the leats irregular faces.

As for animating my character, it isnt the area im best at when it comes to 3D work, but i think its good enough. Im not finished animating yet, but ive spent some time making a sneaking cycle. My timing needs some work and my way of going about smoothing out walk cycles could use could be slightly more informed.

These weaknesses mentioned above could be a threat to me in the future and for the small amount of remaining time i ahve left on this brief, but ill set smart targets to combat this.

SMART targets

I feel that i should set some targets related to texturing and complex modeling. As for texturing i'm going to look at some tutorials on texturing an mainly creating metal textures, hopefully gaining a better understanding of each channel in cinema 4D texture edit should help me make almost any texture i need to.

I think when it comes to complex modeling i plan to do some tutorials on making some more complex models with low polygons and keeping a clean mesh.

When it comes to animating i think that right now there arent many tutorials which would help with my current brief, so i plan to just keep tweaking my work till it looks how i want, by doing this i should get a better understanding of animation and bcome better at it.