This is how I would imagine the final animation to be rendered. I was inspired by the Coca Cola video with the polar bears that can be found in my visual research.
I used a SkyDomeLight with a cool colour to light the whole scene, creating an icy cold feeling.
And I used a circular AreaLight in a warm colour to represent the light from the sun.
So, as you can see, the animation is not finished, so what happened?
I overestimated myself
I have so far always been quite good at time management and even if I had to cram in a 80 hour week working on my assignments I always finished them and I always did really good. As you can see, this didn’t work that well this time. I have completely overestimated myself. Due to health reasons I missed a lot of lessons this term, spending several days in hospital and having to take many rest days, preventing me from immediately catching up the missed courses and with other assignments coming up I used my ‘being well enough’ time to work on those, pushing the animation practice assignment further and further back.
Looking at moodle made it all seem so easy, I had a list of things I had to learn and several tutorial videos from the lectures. I had a rough idea of the things I would have to look up myself as well, like texturing in Substance painter and how to use the Bifrost Ocean Simulation System that I wanted to use for the water.
When I started I made good progress, I had already modelled my characters in Zbrush a few weeks back, had the storyboard and my ideas. I was sticking to my time schedule and it looked like I would be able to finish if I started putting in more hours.
Then disaster hit. My grandma got very ill and I had to go back home to visit her as no one knew whether she would make it. That almost cost me a weeks worth of work so I would have to put in extra hours to make the deadline so I started pushing myself.
I quickly realized that the tutorials that were put onto moodle weren’t sufficient enough, as I had missed all the context from class and the bits in between and some tutorials seemed to miss parts that were important to proceed or weren’t detailed enough to work properly so I had to look for alternative ways which cost me more time that I didn’t have and the estimated one day of rigging for both characters quickly turned into 4 days of rigging for one character and as you can see, I haven’t even finished that.
Putting in the extra hours also didn’t work quite as expected. I thought I would be able to simply do extra hours each day like I did last year where I would work up to 14 hours each day and I would be fine. I was not aware though that I wasn’t as stable as I thought I was. I had gotten a lot better since earlier this year and my hospitalization, so I thought I could do it, but the extra stress got to me immediately and my body completely shut down, resulting in a suggested hospital visit by my GP which I had to decline because I had to finish the assignment and I knew I wouldn’t be able to do that from there. So this resulted in me having to work from my own bed, trying to get as much done as possible in the little time I had until I was too exhausted to work.
SO, here we are. The assignment isn’t done and that is really bugging me because I had all these cool ideas for it and I am really happy with what I have so far and I know I can do better. What ultimately led to this point was my own poor time management and outside influences that I had no control over.
What I have learned from this: My health is not invincible. I may be fine next year, I may not be. But I have to plan more in advance now in case something goes wrong at some point so that even when it does, I still have enough time to finish my assignment without risking my health and stressing myself out to a point where I can’t do work anymore like it happened this year. Also, I have to make sure to try and catch up immediately if I miss a class so that it doesn’t come to haunt me later and I lose all context.
What happens to the unfinished assignment: I am planning to finish it during the summer break. I really like what I have going on and I really want to finish it as I think it will be a great addition to my portfolio and an opportunity to prove myself that I can actually realize what I had planned and finish what I have started to the standard that I have set myself.
To create my rig I am following Peter Gend’s rigging tutorial on Pluralsight.com.
This is what I have so far, including a video demonstrating the finished leg & spine rig on a proxy version of my bear. 
I used the automatic unwrap to create my character’s UVs and imported them into substance painter to create the textures using software provided materials.
For simpler textures, like the eyes, I used the Hypershade tool.
As previously mentioned I didn’t have to retopologize the seal so I only concentrated on the polar bear for this. I used Maya and followed the tutorial provided in class.
1. starts out of focus, a piece of ice in the foreground comes into focus. A pom pom appears behind the piece of ice and it is wiggling around.
2. The seal is appearing from behind the ice, only until it can glance past the edge of the ice piece.
3. camera changes to the back of the seal, looking across his shoulder. A polar bear appears in focus, the background is still blurred. the polar bear is looking for something, turning to left and right. the seal is retreating and the camera follows until the polar bear has completely disappeared behind the ice.
4. The seal moves his head towards the side and glances around the ice piece from the side. the camera follows and the polar bear is gone.
5. camera returns to the front of the seal. the polar bear is standing behind him, smiling slightly viciously, holding his hands like he is about to attack the seal.
6. close up of polar bears hands. polar bear reaches out, holds (to build suspense) and taps the seal.
7. Seal turns around and smiles at the polar bear. you can hear a little laugh.
8. / 9. seal and polar bear are rolling down a hill, play fighting, crashing into a pile of rubble and trash. trash starts flying through the air and landing in the sea. A piece of ice breaks off and floats away.
10. the camera rotates to a top view. you can see that the polar bear and seal are trapped on a little piece of ice in the ocean with a lot of cracks in it. they hopelessly sit at the edge of their home.
11. white text on black:
Their home is melting & only you can stop it!
24th May 2019
#Fridays for Future
fridaysforfuture.org
The polar bear:
I started out with creating a more realistic looking bear, as I wanted to challenge myself and create something a bit closer to photorealism than what I had done up to this point, but still make it anthropomorphic.
As you can see in the pictures above, I definitely succeeded in creating a more realistic looking bear, however I didn’t like the way it looked at all, at least not for this project, so instead of continuing with this one I started creating a new, more stylized and humanoid character which is a combination of both character designs.
I did give the character a quick texture paint in ZBrush, just to give a general idea of what it was supposed to look like later.
The Seal:
This is the finished Zbrush model of the harp seal. for some reason, I managed to use a lot fewer polygons on this model than on the polar bear while keeping a similar look. therefore this model won’t be needing retopology.
Year 2 Animation Blog 