500 Word Silent Comedy Analysis

For this assignment, we had to create a silent comedy animation. For me it was a first in creating a character in 3D so it was quite a difficult task.  The basis for this project was based around Charlie Chaplin and his silent comedy.  When watching the tutorials for this assignment, the character was a male so it would be simple to assume that the majority of the students would create a male that was bold as we haven’t covered hair particles yet. However I didn’t want to create a male that was bold so I create a female with simple hair and a hat. My character was based around my inspiration of a Japanese student, so I gave her a simple Japanese sailor uniform to wear.
When creating the character we had to draw the character from a front and side view and mould the polygons into the shape of the character. This made the basic shape of the character easy to make, however it was hard to then put detail into the clothing after. Because my character was a female it meant that I had to create a bust for the character. Creating this was quite comical as the shape of them made the character look like she had breast implants; however by tweaking the shape, I was able to create a subtle bust for my character, without looking like a bust obsessed modeller.
Once I had created my 3D character I had to then give her clothing some texture. The method for doing this is by ‘unwrapping’ the skin of the character and painting it in Photoshop. However with this part I had some trouble as the unwrapping had to be done in different sections, starting with the head, however whenever the selected part was unwrapped, it would disappear off the screen. I requested help on this matter but was unsuccessful. However after search around the internet for answers, I found a plugin, which did it automatically, without making the character disappear.  Once I had painted the character I had to give it a skeleton by adding a rig to it. This was successful until I tried to animate it. When I wanted the character to walk, there was an automatic walk cycle built into the rig, but I did not know how to make it stop, so I had to make the character walk manually, meaning that the walk cycle was not as smooth as I had hoped.  However after a while the animating came fairly easy and I created my animation.
From this project I have been able to learn how to create a character and make it move with emotions. However if I had more time on this project, I think I would have put more detail in my model, such as the eyes not looking as natural as I would have liked and also making the clothing more defined as well as making the walk cycle a lot smoother, but due to the lack of help It took me longer to paint it, which left me with little time to sort animation out.  But overall this project has taught me that I would like to go into modelling but not character modelling.