Kid skier animation

mxwl anim test from Dmitry on Vimeo.


In september and october in collaboration with an advertising company I had produced a short animation clip with a little boy skiing down a snow slope. There is a short fragment above which was rerendered with maxwell-render to test some unique maxwell features applied to an animation rendering.
During production I tracked time spent on each stage of work with a short task description, and as a result I had quite extensive document. There is no sense in showing it here, but I made its short analysis (with examples, see it on http://goo.gl/BA2Lw) to see which way to optimize similar tasks in future and to figure out how this work could be paralleled among several people. In a nutshell, all this work took altogether 204 hours. I'm not counting such important stages as concept art and sound work, since it was produced by client's side, also i'm not considering cpu-time spent on rendering.

character modeling took 50 hours, 70 is to test and find a proper scenario, and  the rest 80 hours was spent on its production, 45 of which on character animation. I also made a kind of estimation of how this 200 work hours could have been spread among several people based on tasks interdependence. If count on 3d modeling and postproduction-compose-vfx people, it could have taken 150 "actual hours", this way it could gave twice more time working on character animation:

These are conclusions I'm to draw from this experience:
- obviously character animation requires more time, I need to plan a schedule the way it takes minimum half of time available.
- this time could be gained from paralleling work with 3d modeler and ideally a vfx-person skilled in production render with render passes compose
- it's too exhausting doing a clip with a strict deadline by alone
- I do like such "kid's cartoon" animation style, I'll do some more animation in this style soon.



more info with examples in following doc:
http://goo.gl/BA2Lw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiDr9GgN-9U#t=151s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LAWmHkTLOY