July 7th 2019 | First 360 Animated Skit Complete !

I'm finished with this learning project as I've reached my animation skit goal that I originally envisioned! It has been a great learning experience so far. Here is the 360 Skit for you to watch:

Just watching it over now that I'm finished with it I can see pretty much all of it can be redone to be better. Quite a few times I found myself during the later half of the project thinking that I could have saved time or made it better if I had done things differently initially. For example, I discovered that you can animate the texture/material and change it using timeline. This would make things much easier than than how I was activating and deactivating the expressions to get the characters to emote different expressions

Regardless I'm happy that I was able to keep progress steady and finish all of this in two weeks. 

Maybe I'll revisit this skit in the future and redo it as a comparison piece.

Quality varies based on device and application

The quality of the 360 video really varies depending on what device you view it on as well as the application it's opened in. It looks best on mobile and rather pixelated on desktops because of the larger resolution. When testing it out, if you use the YouTube mobile app it looks good but if opened in a mobile browser the quality drops pretty hard. 

What I'm taking away from this is that I shouldn't get too hung up on detailing the models, objects or the environment because those details might not be visible depending on the device or app used to watch. 

What's next?

Working on a animated cooking skit. Trying to finish it within the next two to three weeks to submit to Dillon Gu's animation contest. Don't think I'll have a chance at winning but it helps me with figuring out my next project and focusing my efforts to improve.

I also finished the Queenie model 2.0 I started on last week with the goal of making better hair and creating a simple outfit. Unwrapped it and applied a texture and it looks much better.

I'm working on creating a Stevie cooking model. Trying to improve it all around and so far I think it's much better at a basic modeling level. My new experiment is going to be rigging the eyes so that I can animate where they are looking as he cooks.