Reflective Review

If I would have had more time available I would liked to have spend more time on certain areas of the assignment.

The first would be taking more time texturing my X Wing and the Tie Fighter as they use textures that have purely been samples from the internet or drawn on in Photoshop, I would like to have added much more detail to the textures and use similar techniques that I used on the Death Star like the bump map to create a much more realistic look of the metals and parts of the body. Putting textures on to the faces gives a good effect but as soon as the model is seen in detail it is clear that the faces are flat and they don't look very realistic.

The second would be to spend more time working on the detail inside the trench of the Death Star as when it is seen through the animation it is obvious that it isn't a rounded shape and you can clearly see where the faces change angle. Also I really wanted to give it an uneven effect like it does in the film with the walls being jagged and made up of square blocks. The trench was also meant to include stationary guns that should have been firing at the X Wing but again I just didn't have the time to create any.

The Third thing I would have liked to spend more time on was adding lighting to the scenes as I didn't actually use any lighting apart from the default ones. Once again it was a matter of time and I felt that the default lighting was good enough for what I needed in the animation. One problem I noticed with the default lighting was the fact that it appeared far more lighter in the render than it did while creating the animation. It is very misleading as some scenes look fine but others can suddenly change.

Overall I learnt a lot about how to use the software and I have gone from knowing absolutely nothing to being able to design, texture and animate short animations. I wouldn't say that I particularly enjoyed modeling as it can be a very long and tedious task which I can get angry with very quickly but It was very interesting to learn how animation is created and I now look at the animated films in a very different way, constantly thinking about camera angles and why certain things are filmed in certain ways.