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Problems and Solutions

André
In Modeler, my biggest problem was learning things the hard way. Tutorials show how to do a certain specific thing, but the unspoken part is that you'll spend countless hours tweaking the model to look just right. In my case, I found that sub-patching a model didn't work too well if the polys were more than about 40 degrees at an angle to each other. Since I used character rigging to be able to move my characters in layout easily, I learned that using the side view port (right or left) is best when creating skelegons, as this will make the skelegon face forward and, hence, easier to manipulate later. In Layout my biggest problem was how Lightwave handles Keyframing (I wanted to have more than one arrangement, so I moved a few things on a new keyframe). The problem is that Lightwave adjusts the path between keyframes, which can result in things moving about where I didn't want them to, and that was frustrating. Also, I found for these still images, it saves a ton of render time and will probably give better results to just create effects in a program like Photoshop (I did them by hand) and UV map them to a flat poly to be moved around in Layout as needed. I created the smoke on the mech this way, among other effects, and you be the judge on how the smoke looks. The leg explosion also has a pulse effect on it, and that one poly made a nice difference.

Dan
The only major problem I had came when I was doing the UV Mapping on the helicopter. For a while any changes I made to the skin wouldn't save and I ended up redoing the skin on the side of the chopper three times in a row before giving up. I later determined that I had two copies of the chopper body which seemed to be switching at random which was primary cause of the situation. General problems with Lightwave and its memory usage exasperated the situation. Deleting the duplicate and rebooting the computer fixed the problems.

Robert
One of the first problems I had was that when I deformed the square polygons it caused and odd visual affect that was not at all good, therefore I learned how to delete and remake polygons, first I selected it then deleted it, I selected three points on the edges of the polygons and pressed p which creates a polygon, then I selected the other three and did the same, if for some reason on e of the polygons was backwards I pressed f to flip it. My next problems included the materials on the mech, I was pretty much stumped, so I kept playing with the tools in AURA until I got it to work on accident...

Todd
We exchanged e-mails but no real communication went about. I did managed to talk with the group in class each day to see what was needed and did what I could to build my part of the project. Everything that was in my project I made by myself, but because I only read two tutorials, my project looks like it was made a little cheaply. Being that I was the most inexperienced of the group, my last project was left a bit lacking at the end, but I didn't mind the rest of the guys fixing my errors. After all, they were more experienced than I in this type of thing.