I've had a LOT of ideas for the ident. But again, It was done at the last minute, and therefore it didn't get much time, and ended up with a rather simple logo. Though I kept it simple on purpose, due to the name. I mean, if you're afraid of strangers, you probably don't want to attract unnecessary attention, right? Therefore, I thought it was rather fitting to the concept. ^^ 

Here's the logo as it appears in the short.
 
or just been more effective

I'd really like to work more on the textures, as I mentioned in the Textures post.
I'd also like to have finished all the animation, in other words, not have to cut the story. I would also have tweaked the animation more, made it smoother and better (and eventually sharper, where appropriate). And I would've worked more on the secondary animations, as I didn't get to do a lot of that (it's mostly only in the beginning).

I would also have liked to do more with the scenery and environment, like adding trees and bushes and stuff, and maybe even some sheep on some of the other "hills".

I would also have spent some time creating a proper, and preferably really cool ident.

 
I didn't get the time to do the sound, since the rendering took quite some time.
I'd actually found really good baaahs, but there was no time for editing or refining or putting them in place - unfortunately.
Therefore, there’s no sound on the video. But then again, the criterias didn’t mention sound :3
I also had to cut out several parts of the story, mostly due to lack of render time.
So now it's more like this:

There's some sheep jumping over a fence, and behind them, there's a whole lot of other sheep waiting to jump. But in the line, there's a SMALL SHEEP. It looks around, at the other sheep, it's obviously NERVOUS, and it does little practice jumps in the line.
When it's the small sheep's turn, it hesitates, but the sheep behind it bahs and nudges it on. The little sheep starts to walk forward, but as it starts jumping forward, it stumbles, and falls facedown into the ground.
The other sheep shake their heads about it and roll their eyes. The small sheep starts to run toward the fence again, butdoesn't dare to jump, and stops and stares at the fence. It starts looking along the seemingly never ending fence, and suddenly it sees something that catches it's attention. It starts walking along the fence, and the other sheep wonder what it's doing, until the little sheep gets to a spot where the fence ends. The small sheep walks around the fence, triumphantly.

And I also only have one computer to render on, as the school computer refuses to render the scenes. Every time I tried, it closed Max and all I got in return was a "max had to close" message.
I don't get it, cause I have pretty simple everything, and as I've mentioned, I don't even have TurboSmooth in the scene.
Anyway, I've therefore had to do all the rendering at home, and since I was quite a bit behind schedule, I've actually had to animate in one max while rendering in another. And when I was done with all the animation, I used the same method for double-rendering (in other words, rendering in two Max'es at once). Amazingly enough, it actually worked. :D

 
Since I originally had planned to do the textures after I'd done the animation, I didn't get to do as much as I'd liked. Therefore, I didn't get the time to do hand-drawn textures, as I'd originally thought. Instead, I ended up using pictures and realistic PS brushes. It looks neat, but it's far from what I actually wanted.
And the sheep has only modified standard materials, with a slight falloff on the wool, since it sort of disappeared into nothing before.
For the wool on the sheep, I originally thought to use particles, like this:

But it looked like a cloud with legs and a head, so I thought I'd use little spheres for the particles (as instanced object) instead. And I was pretty happy with the result. Until I tried to move the sheep (animate it). The particles didn't move with the sheep. And again, due to the rigging problems, I couldn't use any more time trying to fix it. 
Since I had semi-realistic textures on mostly everything else, I wanted to have some wool textures on the sheep, but I couldn't find anything that was even slightly tillable, and again, I didn't have time for anything else...
I actually almost considered to use some knitting pattern textures, as that was the only tillable wool-like texture I found. And I like the style it would've gotten, like sackboy in Little Big Planet.
But then I would've had to change all the other textures to match, and that would've been waaay much more work and time. 
The design for the clouds have been alot back and forth. For some time, I thought to have them the way the wool looked at the start (fluffy cloud thingies). Then there was the Idea to just have a lot of spheres to make a really cartoony, bumpy look to them. But I wasn't really happy with what I managed to put together that way. And then I suddenly figured I could just use some PS cloud brushes from dA. There, I found some really god ones pretty much right away. The ones I used were by Xephyr and Linzee777.
Then I just put them on planes and placed them randomly in the scene. I think that's one of the parts I'm the most happy with - the clouds.  :3
 
I originally wanted some kind of semi-realistic sheep. Then I wanted really simple cartoony sheep (to make it overall simpler, considering I was working alone)
I ended on rather cartoony.
Though I wasn't really certain as to what sort of cartoony style I should go for. But as we started the project, I just started to draw the model sheet, and that's pretty much what I ended up with too. I'm actually really happy with the style, though I'm most happy with the lil' sheep, since that's the one I sort of made all the other sheep from.
The style is actually (unconsciously) inspired by the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic -series, though I didn't really think about until a friend said the sheep reminded him of the series, and that it actually could've fit right into the series^^.

Originally, I was going for blank eyes, as I then wouldn't have to animate the eyes (which was actually what my teacher suggested, when I was still working on the design. She's also the one who said they should have eyes, during the second last week of the project -__-). 
At the end, I ended up giving them eyes, and the responses was that they looked instantly much better :3 (And my sister loved the lil' sheep even more, which is good^^)
 
Okay, so rendering takes time... :P
Anyways, my sheep has got eyes now ^^
In other words, they no longer look like demon sheep xD
And I'm almost done with animation :3

Here's a little sneak peek :D
Btw, I also had to admit defeat, and remove TurboSmooth completely, since it added some serious render time, and screwed up the sheep completely. They looked so horrifying I nearly couldn't sleep >.<
And due to this, I will not be posting any pictures of the event, as all evidence has been removed (aka deleted), so that I might be able to sleep. Though the images in my mind still won't go away... >.>
After I switched over to MeshSmooth, everything has worked as it should :3

Buuut it's getting late, so I was thinking of going to bed, since my head don't want to work any more tonight anyway. Better get up early and do some serious work tomorrow instead ;)

Oyasumi nasai <3
 
I tried for weeks to make a rig (with several weird tries). And considering I don't get a thing about constraint and stuff, I was pretty pleased with the one I made. Too bad it wasn't animatable. I seems it was too complex (unnecessary bones and controller), and also the constraints was all wrong. (among other things, I had IK on the back, and on the head/neck).
I tried asking a couple of the guys from 2nd year last year (one of them is in England at Teesside atm), but they weren't able to help me (mostly due to having their own projects going on). All they were able to do/say, was that I couldn't possibly use the rig I'd made.
I figured out what they meant when I tried to start animating.
And so I tried with CAT, but I couldn't figure out the animation layer thingies >_<
I even want as low as to try with biped, but I couldn't get it into position. Though I'm not too fond of the biped to start with, so I didn't really try too hard with it.

Then I remembered Petter Burhol's presentation of his Oblig 3 (character design), and how he seemed to know what he was talking about. so dropped by his class and asked he had time to help me. He said he had some time, so he'd at least look at it, so I brought the file, and in about half an hour he had made a rather simple, yet incredibly good (and user, aka me, -friendly) rig ^^
So all credits on the rig go to Petter Burhol. Thank you so much :D
But due to my numerous errors in trying to make a decent rig, I spent several more weeks on it than I had planned, which put me quite far behind my schedule. 

But at least, as I was struggling with making a rig, I took a break from it and started texturing. If I hadn't done that, I do not know what would have happened to the texturing. 
So, yay :3
 
Finally got a rig that works, thanks to Petter Burhol. 
Gotten started on the animation, and I think it's going pretty well... :3
Promise I'll have more updates soon!
Here's a li'l render for now :3
I think it's looking rather good ^^
 
I decided to work alone, since everyone else either was already in a group, or seemed to have their own thing going on, and I really wanted to do my story (Fence'd).
That was probably one of the stupidest decisions I've ever made... 
I figured I could probably pull it off, doing everything myself, as long as I kept it fairly simple. 
I  can  not  rigg. And I'm not too fired up about animation either. 
And worst of all, you have noone else to neither share nor discuss the work with. And having someone else (who actually knows a bit about the subject) look at you work occationally is really helpful. 
Of course, I have my classmates, but they've had their projects going on as well, and most of them keep forgeting the story, so they couldn't really help with the storyline.
Most of the time, I've asked my sister (who is 10 years old, and also the main target audience) to look at it. She usually only says "aww, so cute!" or "looks nice". Not very helpful.
The teacher helped me some, but it's still no fun doing everything on your own. It gets very lonely. Trust me!

So for everyone considering to do a big project all on their own - re-think! 
It usually gets better if you have someone else's strengths to use too. Nobody can be best at everything.


-Funcact-
Xenophobia means fear of strangers. I thought it was kindof funny, since it's a one-person group. 
...It's not so funny any more... -__-  *lonely* FYI, I am socially addicted. 

 
Don't really feel like I've gotten anywhere with the project, mostly 'cause I'm doing a bit of everything at once. Till now, I've done about a page of the storyboard, the opening sequence in the prewiz, modelled the Lil' Sheep (the main char.) and started modelling the fence.
In other words, I really need to work a lot this weekend. But as I've probably mentioned before - I'm a weekend worker - that's when I'm the most effective.
Anyway, here's a render of what I have so far :3