Changes From Concept To Completion

During the modelling, texturing and scene assemble stage of the project I changed or removed quite a few things that I had initially planned on doing or including in the scene all the way back as far as storyboarding. This is a short list of some of the things that were either changed or removed from the finished film - as well as a brief explanation as to why that change was made,

• Wallpaper Design - Changed from stars to clouds
• This was done because when I started creating the star design I realised how much time it was going to take and scrapped it for clouds as they could take up bigger spaces on the wall and I wouldn't need quite as many of them
• Dresser Design - Changed from open to closed
• This was purely a time saving measure as having the drawer closed meant I needed to do less animation as the scene no longer involved the ball bouncing off the edge of the drawer on the way down to the ground and instead just rolled directly down to the ground and only bounced when it got there
• Wall Art - Changed from Toy Story inspired images to my own character concept art
• Again this was done to save time that I could then dedicate to working on the animation as I wanted to give myself as much time as possible to do that as I could in case any unforeseen issues popped up along the way
• Putting fewer unique objects on the shelves
• Originally I had planned to put unique objects on each of the shelves in the scene but when I started running into issues where the scene would crash frequently or the controls would be delayed in responding to my prompts I decided to cut that idea and instead just copy and rotate what was already there to make it look like something different - even though it's the same set of books just rotated and recoloured a few different ways
• Putting less furniture in the room
• My initial concept designs included a chair at the desk, a beanbag chair in one of the corners and a cardboard box on the floor by the desk. I even started modelling a globe to go on the dresser before I decided to cut all of this stuff in order to save time and space on my computer as I had gotten to a point where the Maya file would take over 20 minutes to open any time I wanted to work on it. So, I went through everything in the room and removed anything that I could where I believed its absence would not affect the scene overall.
• Cutting a character
• One of the more difficult changes I made was to cut the very first character I had created for the film. I had to do this because for some reason, any time I tried to add it to the final scene Maya would crash either as it was importing it or shortly after it had finished importing. So, after spending about a week on it I decided the best use of my time and in the interest of not corrupting the full master file, that I would cut that character out and revisit it in my own time to try and determine the cause.
• Changing some of the animation
• A change I made from the storyboard to final film was to cut some of the animation that would have taken place between Scene 7 and 8. According to the storyboard my Pokebot character was going to circle my name after he fixed the letter placement but after realising that by including that animation I could be looking at somewhere close to 900 frames I decided to modify his animation to include one initial loop, including fixing my name, stopping to inspect his work and then zooming back under the bed. This would not only save me time during the animation process but also at the rendering stage too as it would mean I wouldn't have as much to render overall.

As mentioned before, this is not an exhaustive list changes I made but I felt it would be a good idea to show how my thoughts and creative idea making process changed as I delved further and further into the project.