There was 3 catagories you could choose from, Arena Intro, Weapons Testing and Robot Combat. I decided to go for the Robot Combat as it sounded the most appealing. Having such a tight deadline I thought I'd keep it very simple with not a lot of action and just a brief combat sequence. I don't think I realised the amount of work that needed to be done to get this finished on time, even with keeping it simple. The Mech Models and Arena, which were supplied for the challenge, needed a fair amount of cleaning up and then I needed to rig up the Mechs. I went for a simple FK upper body and IK legs as it was quick and simple to do however I regretted making the arms only FK when I started animating.
I only had time to do 1 animation pass so had to nail it first time as I couldn't go back to change things, there were cases when I had no choice but tried to avoid this if I could. It got to a stage where the end became really rushed and not as smooth as I would have liked. I then moved onto the effects, again I only had 1 shot at this and my first simulation had to work, thankfully most of them did, maybe not great but good enough to fit into the animation.
Then it came to rendering and setup each shot to render out all the elements in their seperate passes to composite together in After Effects, which gave me a lot more control. As I started putting the clips together I realised some of the shots just didn't work so had to come up with a new ending. This just made things worse and again it was rushed but seemed to fit better than the previous version, even if it isn't that great.
Overall I was happy with the result based on my time restrictions but there is a lot that needs to be worked on and it is far from being complete, but I was just Happy to have a finished animation to submit even if it wasn't all that great. I'll be looking forward to doing another one of these challenges except I'll make sure to start on time.
