I don't normally bother taking the time to rant about stuff here, but this has been such a pain in my tail that I just need to have a good long vent about it... And by "long" I mean very, very long.
Sorry.
So first things first. There's this project I've been working on for school. My class is working on producing a short animated film, and I'm the lead rigger for the film. For anyone who doesn't know what rigging is, it's basically setting up the joints, skeleton, and animation controls of characters/objects. It's much more complicated than that sounds, and most people don't enjoy doing it. I kinda like it though, so I volunteered for the job. I wanted to learn more about it and see if it would be something I'd want to do as a job once I'm out of school. So as the lead rigger for our film, I've been assigned to rig both of the main characters in our story.
Now, I'm still very new to rigging, and still relatively new to the 3D program we use even (Maya, for anyone who's curious). I did one simple rig last year, and that's the total of my experience with rigging. The rigging I'm doing now is about 5 times as complex as the one I did before.
I was assigned this project back in April. At that time, my professor handed me a 3-inch thick, 8.5"x11" book, told me all the instructions I'd need would be in there, and that she'd be willing to give me extra help along the way if I needed it. She wanted me to work on it over summer vacation so that it would be done when classes started in the fall. Unfortunately, I couldn't start rigging until after the summer break started because the person who was modeling the characters didn't finish until then. But I figured, the books seemed to give pretty thorough instructions, and my professor's always been really good about helping me out before, so I could get it done over the summer.
Fast forward a bit; I hadn't forgotten about my rigging duties over the summer, and I set aside the entire month of July to work on it. Rigging was supposed to take maybe 1-2 weeks per character, so I figured four weeks plus whatever other time I could squeeze in afterward would be plenty. Plus, the deadline wasn't very "solid" at the time, so I knew I would have even more wiggle room than that. So I started rigging... and shortly ran into a problem. Something wasn't working right, even though I was following the directions. I messaged my professor, and waited for a response. She replies the next day, asking me to email her the file I was working on. I emailed it, and got no response. Waited another week, figuring maybe she was just busy. (You know, despite the fact that she spends a few hours every day playing facebook games.) Still no fix to my problem, so I messaged her again. And again, she tells me to email her the file. >_> So I say "I already did, but I can send it again... Let me know if you get it or not." I emailed it, and never got a reply. After another week (now having thrown two weeks' worth of time to the wind), I figure out that I'm not going to get an answer from her. So I email one of my classmates who knows Maya better than I do, and luckily he was able to help me. Without him I wouldn't have gotten anything done at all. He also helped me with a couple other problems I ran into as I continued to work.
My professor ended up giving me an answer to my original problem - an entire month later. By then I was already way past that point. However, because I lost two weeks waiting for her answer earlier, I ended up not finishing the rigging before I got super busy in August. I had family visiting, my job gave me a lot of hours, and by the end of it I didn't have a spare moment to do anything. I told my professor I wasn't done, and she told me not to worry, that I'd have four weeks or so at the beginning of school to work on it.
So school starts, I bring in my project files and such so that I can work on it during school. I spend just about all my time working on it, every day, for the first week of school. Then I run into more problems, and I got to sit down with my professor to see if we could get the issues worked out. At this point, the rig was about half done for one character... except half of those things that I'd done, weren't working properly. And after we talked it over, we decided I'd have to just redo those parts - which would mean an extra few days of time. I'm also thoroughly frustrated with it by this point because the project has been hanging over my head for almost four months, and I feel like I've had nothing but problems with it.
Not
only that, but when I spoke to my professor about the issues, she asked me: "Well have you been following the check lists I gave you?" And I was like, "....What check lists?" And she said, "The check lists I gave you. There are errors in the book, you're supposed to be following the instructions on the check lists, because they have the corrections."
...... ARRRRRRRRRRGH!
She never mentioned any check lists before. She specifically told me "all you have to do is follow the book." That's what I did. But apparently there were check lists she had given me grouped in together with a bunch of other files she had given me for the project. She never pointed out the check lists, never said I was supposed to follow them instead, and even if I had opened the check lists on my own, there's nothing on there that indicates I was supposed to follow those instead. I had no clue.
Eventually I decided that I was better off just scrapping what I'd done and starting over. The parts I had to redo were the more difficult and time-consuming parts of it anyway. So all the time I spent on it over the summer and that first week of school, essentially went down the tubes. I now had three weeks left to rig two characters, and I still didn't know what I was doing half the time.
Still determined to finish though... I restarted the rigging. Things went quite a bit faster the second time around at least, because I mostly knew what I was doing this time and had learned from previous mistakes. So far so good. But this is where I am today. Still rigging the first character, and I only have a week left now. I'm hoping there will be some kind of miracle and that the second character will be a breeze, but it's not looking hopeful. It's driving me crazy because I have to read each line of the instructions 5 times to make sure I'm getting it right, because even the smallest things can totally screw it up. Even capitalizing the wrong thing can cause all sorts of malfunctions. There's a lot of programming involved as well, so syntax counts. I have to worry about so many things all at once and make sure everything's the way it's supposed to be.
And the thing is... I still think I would like rigging. I'm just so incredibly frustrated with the lack of help I've received, the learning curve I'm struggling against, my time constraints, and feeling just alone in general on this that it's driving me crazy. I'm only one of two people in my class who's doing this kind of character rigging, so nobody really understands it or can help me out. (The other person who's rigging is the guy who was able to help me out before, but I hate to bother him too much, you know?) I'm just so frustrated and stressed out. And the worst part is, I think my professor is interpreting my frustration to mean that I don't like rigging, so when it comes time to pick something we want to focus on doing as a career, she's probably going to suggest I do something else. It wouldn't be so bad if I could just learn more of the basics before being thrust into this kind of project. I just don't know what to do. ._.
*sigh*
So that's been my life for the past four months. Kudos to anyone who bothered to read all that. I need to get back to work...
Topic: Stressing over school... (Read 501 times)