This is what came of my MEL final-- a teapot creator and customizer. I may put the code up later, but it's very very special.

Haunted Church!

So I have an internship with a company called BreakThrough. They're a human rights activist group, and their US office focuses on immigration and due process issues here. I'm making an animation for them based on the Postville, Iowa raid from almost a year ago. Today I'm creating textures for the church, and got this alsome little render:

the haunted church!!!

This is what I actually have thus far, slightly less spooky version. Still a work in progress (clearly) but I'm pleased with how it's coming along:

To Siggraph we go!

I found out recently that I got accepted to be a student volunteer at Siggraph this year. I did the same last year, and it was probably one of the most amazing experiences of that summer. This year it's being held in New Orleans, which is just a day's drive from Austin. I'm very excited.

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)