This subject, formally called 3D Animation & Special Effects has no paper-based exams, but the assignment loads are pretty scary: four phases altogether, so if you slacked off a bit during one of the phases, then there's a hell lot to make up for. So, even though there’s no final exam, there’s still quite a bit of pressure of the coming presentation and the hand-up of one-semester project.
Plus, a 30-second animation is required, which is a pain in the a** to produce. 30 seconds is very short when viewed, but the production can take a few days. Here's the Math: if you have a lot of textures and image mapping for you models, one frame (one still image) will probably takes 11 minutes to render (that's my scenario). For PAL-video standard, there are 25 frames in one second, that's 25 X 11 minutes of crunch time to produce one second of animation (which is like nothing to our eyes). So, 30 seconds? You need 8,250 minutes = 137.5 hours = 5 days and 17 hours of heart-pumping prayer session to do (pray that the entire stuff goes well).
Of course, there's safer way to do things: break up the animation sequence into pieces, so that you only render a few seconds now, and another few parts of the work on another day. This will help your computer to rest a bit in between those rendering processes as well.
When this is over, my computer would probably send me nightmares for what I’ve made it suffered all these days!
Some of the modeling work done by me ^o^
The CD Box cover design for the final hand-up. No no, my project is not a horror story anymore, and yes yes, the kid sitting is me when I was 4
