Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25247233-20160513080632/@comment-27997419-20160519083508

SketchyOpus wrote:

As for animation, Shane was clinging to what he knew, which was Monty and Poser. Poser is a pedestrian 3D program meant for small, non-industry companies and those that need simple animations or models. It's a pain in the ass program because the poly count is high and the rendering time is attrocious. No one in the industry teaches it, so, good luck hiring qualified people.

If Shane were ballsout about quality animation, he'd be loving Maya and whatever else they brought on, because you can do so much more with it, with far less effort exerted at the end. And you can hire quality people to use those programs. Yeah, it sucks using it at first, there's a learning curve. But it's worth it to see a jump in quality.

The manifesto made it seem like he was less focused on quality and more focused on sentimentality. While that makes sense, there are other things which don't:

- Dividing the project into multiple small sections so that more people can work on it together to complete things faster, while that sounds good it sometimes kills the fluidity and continuity of certain scenes or personality traits of characters.

- Using a networked drive to store all animation work and not allowing the animators to keep a local copy, for the sake of corporate management. That is plain stupid...As an IT students I can see multiple wrong things with this...It's fine to have networked backups of the work. Maybe at the end of each day, or at the end of a week. But it's much much more efficient working from local storage.

- Shane not being allowed to work during weekends, or on projects he was not given explicit permission to. This is the creative killer. If he had a cool idea that could be later included into the series Shane could make a prototype and leave it stored for later. But to completely not allow him freedom of workflow it's just stupid.

While what you say about Maya vs Poser can be true (I wouldn't know, I'm not an animator), the workflow used in poser could still be used in Maya, as long as Shane was given the time to learn Maya. But it seems they just threw him on the deep end and didn't let him work at his own pace and create his own workflow.

That is a complete disregard for employees, and it's a shame Shane signed the agreement for it.