Conclusion & Reflection

I’ve learned many good things throughout the Advanced and Experimental Unit for these two terms. From learning different new software, tools and techniques, making more involvement with friends and team, and to finally discover what I really want to pursue. I’ve discussed about my thinking on future path that was still unclear at that time in my old entry (https://kamil.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2021/02/01/self-reflection-and-future-path/).

By the end of this term, it has become more clear that I want to focus my career on animation especially character animation. I also discovered that I somehow able to perform camera tracking works quite nicely, although not at expert level. I managed to track footages from my personal project as well as 6 out of 8 challenging footages from the Indie Film project, which I originally didn’t signed up as matchmover but as animator only. Before this, I always assumed that I’m very weak with tracking and don’t have much interest in it. But thanks to Luke, he was the one who encouraged me to keep the idea of doing camera tracking in my personal project, which lead me to try doing the same with the Indie Film project.

It’s completely different now that I even proposed to include camera tracking as part of my final major project (FMP) with a combination of 3D character animation.

During this term, I’m more active and engaged in conversations with others when compared to the previous terms. I also tried my best to assist friends who asking for help in the class and group Discord server when they have problems with technical and software. Probably because of this, several classmates started messaging me personally when they need help. I believe by helping others, I can also learn something new when I try to solve the problems.

Speaking of learning new things, in terms of techniques, I’m now more knowledgeable with tracking tools in Blender and 3DEqualizer, discovered few tricks of how to solve a challenging camera track, learned and understand more tools in several 3d software that I used in this term. I also learned how to use Houdini and quite amazed with the software capability, although I didn’t plan to use it as my primary animation tool at this moment.

With all that I have learned now and in the future, I hope that they are not only for my own benefit but to keep developing it further to contribute and give benefits to other people as well. This is something that I want to achieve with my future works and thesis. To me, that is the most important.