Evaluation

The task was to take an 11 second voice over from a video and create an 11 second animation that would fit to what was being said. On the whole I think my animation was acceptable. The one main issue was the fact that it wasn't 11 seconds. While this wasn't completely my fault I suppose my choice of animation was to blame. It is very disappointing to see what should be a great little animation fall down because Maya won't recognise silence in an audio file, Premiere works only when it wants to and nobody can remember how to fix the texture issues on the Morpheus rig. I did find that the Morpheus rig, while most people complained about its complexity, was quite enjoyable to have so much control, it also look the most human which, for me at least, makes it seem more professional. That being said having a professional animation and rig would be better rather than just having the professional rig. The overall animation went okay and largely without a hitch, the lip sync on the other hand was a completely different story, trying to sync lip movements to audio playing at full speed is not a wise move as I found out. I only changed it to half speed yesterday and spent the evening redoing my lip sync properly, and I'm very glad I did as it looks so much better than it previously did. The textures are the best I can come up with as nobody could remember how to fix them properly and the tutorials I looked at online were of no help at all and actually confused me even more. The Premiere decided to stop working when 48% through rendering out the AVI file even when I switched to another computer, however when I tried it today it worked perfectly every time, so I have no idea what was happening with that. One thing I will say about animation is that Playblast is my new best friend. It is great at rendering quick animations which allow you to check in real time how the animation is going and is especially useful for lip sync as my laptop really struggles to do animation.
If I were to do this again I don't think I would change anything other than the audio file so it would start with something else other than silence. That way I think Maya would recognise it so I could animate a full 11 second animation instead of a 6.18 second one.