Advice needed for 3D animation project in limbo

[Anonymous]

Hi there

As a learning exercise I have worked on a simple .50 second project (on and off) since January.

Here is the 90% complete version as an exported video.

https://youtu.be/v0LfuU7WvDQ

I've hit a major problem. The oversized beak on the bird has proven a very unpopular choice with viewers - and the clip is pretty much hated by all who watch it. Ouch. Double ouch.

I perhaps need to rip the beak off and replace it with a much thinner more needle like beak. (See example photo attached.) However, as I am a newbie I sense this could potentially open a can of worms with my project, and potential transform something nearly finished into an unfinished mess.  The kiwi bird is bone-rigged but I'm purely guessing that beak removal won't affect the rigging or the animation.

Any thoughts from more experienced users are welcome.

Rather than performing surgery on an unpopular  bird, perhaps I should start again with a new model, new project and use whatever  resources I can from the original project to do it again?

Cheers for your time and thoughts.

Geoff

[tdHendrix · Accepted solution]

Since you don't have joints for the beak you should be able to just move the vertices around and make it smaller/thinner as long as you don't add/remove geometry it should be an easy change to try out. If you referenced the rig into the animation scene you won't have to re-edit any of the animation files.

If the point of the project is to learn new skills then ask yourself if you revisit this project to make improvements to it will you learn enough new skills to make it worthwhile or would you learn more starting a new project?

For the second project, one thing that will help avoid the beak situation would be to get model feedback before too much work is done on your project cause it's always a pain to change stuff later on. Also evaluate what things you'd like to improve upon from the first project and have a pre-production phase where you do R&D to learn some new skills that will help you out. If you feel you'd like your animations to be better then start watching all the animation tutorials you can find and animate some bouncing balls, if you want nicer environments look into things like Paint Effects, or if you want to focus on rendering/lighting then learn about some of the renderers that come with Maya.

Like you said, it was a learning exercise so don't worry about what people think of your project  With any art form the things you make at first are going to suck for a while, but the more of these projects you do the better you'll get. There is no secret to getting better, it's as simple as learning new skills and applying them to your personal work. You're on the right path. Good luck!

[Anonymous]

Great answer! I very much appreciate your feedback. Extremely helpful.

Cheers.