Not complaining but...

What is the point of kicking everyone out of a lab for a class with 3 people? Everyone is working there quietly, not making a sound. The class is so small that it isn't even a lecture format. The is the third time this has happened. None of these times was a class even listed on the board. Really kills production to reset like this.

Shot 18

After weeks, nay months, of trying, I think I've got shot 18 under control. Granted shot 14 sucks - hopefully I have time to fix, but shot 18 (where he falls back) was an unbelievable problem. The shot pointed out every single problem with the construction of the character. Not the rig (tho that could certainly be better) but how the characters waist is put together makes certain movements with the hips almost impossible with the amount of counter animating you need to do.

Week and a half

Week and a half left and I just spent 6 hours cleaning up my scene file because textures were breaking all over the place on it. Render layers in the referenced scene were causing all kinds of weird problems. Won't be doing that again, and its good to know, but was a tremendous drain on time and resources for the past month. Didn't want to touch it for fear of breaking things further. I didn't know what caused it and thought my file was tenuously holding on for dear life.

I was wrong. Fixed now, and so with a week and a half left the path for production is open. Oof.

Plan going forward

Redering scenes as they are close to complete, 3 at a time. This means that I'll have a complete set of rendered scenes by Monday eve (April 16). This gives me 10 days to fix scenes where there are problems, get some final audio going, and output the dvd.

I'm doing this so that I don't run into a situation where on the 25th I have 30 hours of rendering, and 12 hours to do it in. Considering how hard its been to get systems in the labs, it will be nearly impossible to get more than one at a time during that last week.

I want to ensure that no matter what happens, I'll have something I can call a final product to hand in (everything is rendered and lit and pretty).

While I don't expect the animation to be anthing close to polished, I think I can get it good enough to communicate the story. Some shots will be great, others not so much. I could easily spend another 2 months just animating, and the only have it about 90% of the way there.

As it is, I expect the animation to be 75-80% of the way there. It'll work, but probably won't get me a job at BlueSky. I'll have to work more to do that (to be fair, I knew that before I started).

I'm very pleased with the look and feel of the thing. Think it works well for what it is. Nice to look at shots and think, 'damn that's cool.'

New Animatic

Now with basic audio and some rendered (some partial) shots!


Download it (click here).

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.

New cut

Download it (click here).

Dunno. Seems rushed. Maybe better with audio? I'll be able to delay a lot of the holds in post anyway, so I thing I should be ok. Think its better now. Progress hopefully.

Some notes on issues - the rig is a pain. I think that one rigging class (and working on the DAN project as a rigger) wasn't enough data to really do it right. The rig is workable, but I wouldn't give it more than that. There are issues with the axes not always being oriented properly to the character. Possibly this is due to the constraints I used (there are a lot of parent constraints which I haven't used much).

1st shot

Proof of concept (of a sort) on the render layers, etc.