Hello hello,
I’ m currently working with two fellow students on a small short (aprox. 60 seconds). And I was hoping for some comments and critiques.
Let me start with some background information:
We’re all currently doing a minor called imagination at the university of delft at the architecture faculty. There are 42 students doing this minor. In the first period of the semester we did the pre production work, story development, storyboarding creating an animatic etc. Everybody did this individually, so we had 42 animatics at the end. The best 13 were choosen to be actually produced. My story didn’t get through (if anybody is interested here is the animatic basicly I had to create everything in two weeks because I kept changing my story.) and we’re now about 3 weeks in to the 3d part. We now got 2 weeks to do all the animation. Then during the holidays it will be rendered and then we got january to do the post production stuff and create some additional materials that are required (dvd, poster etc).
The software that we should use is maya, because the teachers use it and because the renderfarm and scripts etc are all set up for that. However I have been using blender quite extensively for the character modelling and texturing, earning me the nickname (or actually more a ‘geuzennaam’ though I do not know what the appropriate translation of that would be) blender boy/guy.
For the animation and rendering part we have to use maya (unfortunately, for me 'cause I would have loved to do it all in blender). I hope the blender purists among you do not take offense in that 
Most of the students are either architecture or industrial design students, as well as some other fields, and new to the whole character modelling and animation. Therefor do not expect the quality of bachelor shorts from renowned animation educations, however we will definitely try!
About the story.
The story is about a hungry chef, in order to create a proper meal he travels back in time to a prehistoric era, where he gets attacked by 2 cavemen, while looking for the food he wants. In the end it turns out he was actually looking for cavemen for his recipe. And it ends with the two cavemen stuffed in a big black cooking pot.
About the team.
Our ‘director’, rimsky, (the creator of the story automatically was appointed director, so he could oversee that his ideas were properly executed) is currently doing set design, and is working on the desert/savannah scene, as well as the camera placement etc.
Bob, was originally appointed to be another character artist, but happened to be better at set design as well, which was fortunate 'cause our set needs a lot of work.
I now do all the character modelling stuff work, and with my bit of blender knowledge I’m not doing too bad I think.
Wall of text ends here, time for some pictures:
Stuff we have so far:
Character stuff (done by me)
The chef:
topology:
pretty render:
the textures of the clothing still need (a lot of) work, but I’m pretty content with the head texture so far.
The basemodel of our cavemen:
topology:
pretty renders:
Set (done by rimsky and bob)
bob:
rimsky:
most regular updates will be posted on our blog, http://blog.bk.tudelft.nl/specialrecipe/ , (which determines 33% of our mark) where rimsky and bob will post as well. I’ll try to keep atleast my stuff in this thread in sync with the stuff I post on the blog 
Looking forward to your comments and critiques, feel free to be brutally honest, it is the best way imho to really create a good piece.
Oh and on a final note, I’ll be releasing all my models /blendfiles etc under cc license (attribution one I think, the one where you can use it as you see fit as long as you mention my name) on blendswap. I can not release the animations because we are not allowed to release the rig used, provided by one of our teachers. However once we are done I will definitely try to create a properly rigged and deforming blendfile for them with rigify
