done and DONE (or almost done)

Good things happening last week. Senior thesisisisis were turned in on Wednesday. Hooray! It feels so good to be done! I'm very pleased with how it turned out. All I can see anymore, though, are all my mistakes. Ack! But I'm gonna go through and fix up some of them by next week when we turn in all our files to our professor. Just a few small animation tweaks for now. I love the way the renders turned out. It's so flat and painterly looking. If time and inspiration are in my future, I'd like to redo the cat's texture and make that more painterly. But I love how the plants and the yarn balls and the bookshelves turned out.
I won't be putting up the complete animation online for a while, but stills are below.

Screening day is this coming Thursday at 6. I'm very excited to see everyone else's finished projects.

I'm taking a MEL scripting class

global proc shootKellyInHead()
{

$cocksGun = "cocks + gun";
$aims = select -tgl "head"; select -tgl "gun"; aimContrain;
$fires = "pulls + trigger + back";

}
shootKellyInHead;

NURBS for teh win!

I'm creating a NURBS tea set for my old lady :-)

I am animating like a fiend. A FIEND, I tell you

My goal for tonight is to get the timing of my animation as close to the final thing as possible. It took me four days to animate my second scene (and I use the term "scene" loosely). It's the section where we first see magical things happening. 4 days! It is by far the longest and most difficult scene of my senior thesis. I'm still not done. That was just the first and second passes. I still need to go through it a couple more times before I can even think about calling it done. Now that I'm really in the middle of animating I'm finding every single problem with my rig. Gods above I am not a rigger! Not even a little bit.

btw- changing up my cameras worked out really well. It looks much better now that there are camera cuts and the like. Less floaty. Less lame.

I'd also like to say that my cat is the most adorable cat ever to see the 3D world.

Tonight I'm playblasting everything and putting it together in After Effects to make a render of some sort for Mike (my composer). I think I'm gonna put the video up on youtube and then beg everyone I know to watch and critique.

Goals for spring break:
-Get all my magical elements finished and put into Maya.
-Finally finish crap like blend shapes and weight painting (bleh). Hopefully this will clean up the parts where my rig is failing me.
-Test batch render (this is mainly to make sure I understand how to use the shiny new render farm)

because thesis isn't enough work, let's start again from the beginning

So I've decided that doing the entire animation in one shot just isn't working out, and I just don't have enough time left to *make* it work. At a later point in my life, I'll go back in and make it all one shot again, but for now it has to change.

AAAAAH I going through my whole piece and reworking the camera! blah! I'm pretty sure there aren't words in the English language for how frustrating this is. But I have to make it look sexy in 5 days for the presentation.

Goals for March 6:
- finish camera changes
- put in all the textures and lights I have
- refine the animation in the first shot and the super magicky shot where the cat wraps itself around the old woman
- have render tests

If I can get the camera done and the first shot done by Monday I can totally handle the rest by Friday.

My sinuses are infected

I've been very sick for over a week now and haven't made much progress. I hate feeling like I'm wasting my time. My mind wanders, though, and my head hurts. The strange thing is I don't feel worried about the upcoming presentation. Two weeks isn't much time, but it's enough for what I need to get done.

Maybe I'll feel differently when the anti-biotics take effect.

I've been copying and pasting keyframes and posing characters. My characters still aren't 100% done, and I'll have to recopy/paste keys, but it feels good to see them animated anyway. My mind still reels at how hard this thesis stuff is. The funny thing is I have all these ideas for projects I want to pursue after I graduate. I'll most likely be doing these on my own.
Restart progress
Return to square A

I know I complain about rigging, but I keep thinking about what it would take to rig a belly dancer. Rigging may well be the death of me, but I'm not sure I can avoid it. Everyone has their own self-destructive tendencies, right? Rigging is mine. I guess it's better than smoking.
On the flip side, I'm loving the look development part of this project. I made some sexy-looking cobwebs earlier today. This is by far my favorite part of the process. Possibly even moreso than animating. It would be nice if my job title could be "Person that makes it look pretty"

I want to go to Eastern Europe and study animation there.

There's some spectacularly awful music coming from my roomate's computer.

I think I shall sleep now.

Who put bacon in the soap?!?!?!?!?!

basically, I hate Maya.

Is it wrong to hate a computer program? Like, really wish pain and suffering upon it? Is it childish of me to want Maya in some physical form so I can punch and kick it until I'm too tired to lift my limbs?

It is throwing every curve ball it has to ensure that I will not animate a goddamn thing tonight.



In other news, I think my adventures in texturing everything in gauche is working out well (isn't the watercolor paper texture beautiful in 3D?). I also think my old lady is the cutest thing on earth. At leased one thing is going right with this project; I feel like if I can just get past all these rigging issues, everything will be fine.