I can’t believe it has been a month already. Between work and Animation Mentor time is flying. Work was strangely busy and pretty tiring this week, I was supposed to do employee reviews with my staff, and it was busy enough I never really found the time to get two of them done all week. Being so busy and having so much going on, I’m pretty disappointed with the time I had for AM this week. It is not a good sign to be falling behind and crunching to get assignments done. Sadly I did some revisions on my previous assignments, but I didn’t upload them ahead of time, and was tweaking this weeks assignment until about 15 minutes before noon, which is when our assignments are due.

Of course just as they always warn at AM upload early and don’t crunch because technical problems can be lead you to not getting an assignment in on time. Sure enough with 15 minutes left I’m all ready to render out my playblast, and an odd display error I’d seen once or twice had shown up in my playblast. Something odd was going on with my NURBS spheres. First thing I tried was simply shifting my view a little as that typically solved it when I encountered it during animating, but to no avail. I next tried settings that seemed like they would be affecting those polygons, and sure enough backface culling fixed it. Perfect right? I add my Animation Mentor Shot mask, and sure enough, the shot mask doesn’t work right when backface culling is on, so I had to turn backface culling off. I tried High Quality rendering, which again fixed the balls, but killed the shotmask, I guess it also uses backface culling automatically. so it came down to priorities, do i hand in an assignment with funky looking balls, or no shotmask with frame counter. The balls are the focal point so they took precedence and with that I got my assignment and planning image in with 1 minute to spare.

Sadly that one minute was not enough time for me to re-encode my revisions however, so already, poor planning, exhaustion and sure even a little plain old laziness I’m sure, has possibly hindered my mark a little. In the end though I’m not doing AM for the marks, but the education, so understanding the feedback, what and why I should improve things, is more important than upgrading my marks a little, as long as I’m not failing or handing in late.

Anyways my latest animation, and no poses of Stu, for Lesson 4.