I've been attempting to add some fur and lighting to an animated character. The first thing I've learned is natural fur is very hard to get right. There is a very large gap between the fur anyone can do with a couple clicks in Maya and the fur on Sully in Monsters Inc. that looks perfect and probably had a team of technical directors working day and night for a year. There really doesn't seem to be a middle ground. Fur seem to looks terrible until it looks perfect.
I'm back from my year long endeavor into 3d animation, and I've brought a demo reel with me.
After testing the waters of animation, rigging, modeling, lighting, dynamics, texturing, and compositing. I've sort of figured out where I fit. and I spent the last semester really focusing on texturing, lighting and comp. with a little bit of everything else sprinkled on top. Except for rigging I really enjoy all aspects of 3d animation, but I really had to narrow it down so I could put together a demo reel without being too all over the place.
I've been studing alot of photography techniques and traditional stage lighting theory to apply to my lighting work, and watching tonnes of old movies. I'm going to try and write a couple posts about what I've been seeing in older films and how I see it appling to 3d animation.
