Entry done, 324+ hours done with Maya...

All objectives done, at last. Here is the end result for the 11 second club.

In the end I got some good feedback from Jouko, and still yesterday made some changes to the animation. 

I found out that it's a very useful thing to observe two sequential versions side by side. In the beginning I didn't do this. Now I feel that it was hard to evaluate what direction the changes have been taking the animation. It might sound like an obvious thing to do while planning and evaluating, but only now I really acknowledged the power of comparison between two versions. When I look at them one after the other, I see changes and different animation. Naturally. But only now I have some kind of a grip to evaluation: Which one is working better to my original idea? I have to compare between two almost similar clips and it's so much easier to do this, than look at one clip and think: "Is this to the right direction?"

There's something in it, for sure. I still have to think about this a bit and make some conclusions.

Oh but it was a tough month. I had to learn a lot of new stuff, lipsync in the top. I managed somehow, and my workflow wasn't definitely the best, but I managed. All objectives ticked.

Some times I was totally fed up with keyframes and the adjusting, endless adjusting, fine tuning. At times I swore to myself I'm not going to touch 3d stuff no more, ever. What a fucking waste of time, I thought. Why should I ever use this way of animating, I want to draw!

Yea.. That's how it felt at times. I didn't really have a mentor to motivate me, or guide me. I was my own boss and now I'm really glad I managed to pull this off to the end. Very happy.

Now when I've cooled down a bit, 3d does feel a lot better. :) I still have some things I want to learn, grabbing and doing some pushing experiments. Also parenting exercises with zvmasterparenting tool, that I have to learn as well. An when I go forward I have to get into modelling a bit more, rigging, texturing. . Taking stuff to Mudbox and back, all that sort..

Finally

It's been a nice experiment. It's motivating to know I can learn a new program on my own. Maya has been my objective for a long time and now I have a feel, that I am experienced enough to use it in my projects. Though in the introduction I said I try to get from 1 to 100, I think I got to .. maybe 40? 45 or something. While learning I always noticed I have more stuff to learn so the boundaries pushed further as I advanced.

Anyway, well done, Kari.
(Special thanks to the autoreference-bots, for keeping my blog alive.)