Meadering thoughts while at work

new thing on my home system (haven't done a real render on it in about a yearand a half). can do color passes, but occlusion and zDepth aren't working. have no idea why - the shaders just won't work and maya gives me a general error. last night it wouldn't even render anything - the program was just faulting out. got it working at about 1. currently trying a zDepth option in the alpha channel of the color pass to see if i can use that instead of the seperate zDepth pass. we'll see - never tried it before. worst that happens is that i get data that i can't use.

showed marta and scott (two of my co-workers) the current animatic. marta laughed - thought it was really good and funny (which was really nice). scott throught it was really noir and about 60% there (that's because none of the textures are in - changed that once i told him they were but not rendered. but he's right - its about 60% there, but because of the animation). interesting that 2 people have such different reactions (funny and noir) - either means its really working or really not. don't know which. at least they
can follow the story.

funny on the animation. yesterday on one of the shots that was killing me had a nice ah ha! moment and took 10% of what i had blocked and alll of a sudden the shot started to work. i sooo over-animate stuff. need to stop doing that, but have a hard time seeing it at the start - i just feel i need so much motion, which i really don't. one of the many things that
caused me to waste time on this. tho it isn't really wasted since i did need to do it to get here.