Week 10: The Rock in the Road.

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A five year project by what appears to have been many many students was recently featured on CGsociety.

http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/rock_in_the_road

The animated short, a small story about a boy trying to get around a rock in the road became a much larger project, causing many students to pick it up and put it down as a core team worked on it through most of time, even after their studies had been completed.

The animation looks like a slightly lesser quality pixar piece, with a few rendering issues and one shot where the apples in the cart go from yellow to red, then back again. But apart from a few technical hitches, the animation is extremely high quality and the storytelling as professional as can be.

What's impressive is that it was done entirely by students, even if the time frame was far longer than the usual a project of this scale would take. Though on student hours, that isn't surprising.

It shows, once again, the talent that a small group of dedicated individuals and time can show. It becomes even more impressive when they tell of how they built their own tools, a custom rigger and unified mesh system, and overcame a mountain of simulation and technical difficulties to put out the final animation.

As someone who is a generalist in 3D, I can see the quality of the final product, even though I may turn aside at some of the stylistic and artistic choices, some of these being technical, like the way V-Ray renders certain kinds of skin which I've never liked as I feel the clay look to be a cop out, and the overapplication of bloom in some shot; I cannot help but applaud them for the effort they put into something so large and to have pulled through after working for so many years. Sometimes the the technical process of creating these products is a long and tiresome one. In fact it often is. So it goes without saying that these people need all the pats on the back they can get.

Then there's the fact that they were featured by CGSociety, something will help the careers of those involved immensely.