 |
|
29 DECEMBER 2009
My dad decided to buy a widescreen monitor for this little computer down here which is nice so I can expand the resolution to 1080p. It gives me some more real estate to add a picker as well. I've used a variety of pickers over the years at different studios from Sony to Ryhthm and Hues to DNA. Some are better then others, but I never really liked using them until I recently started using a free "picker" at id called abxPicker which lets you easily create your own pickers. If you've ever used a picker, you know that a good layout is essential to working efficiently. Mostly I use them for selecting all controls or groups of limbs, but also for little visibility tasks and even small scripts to turn off openGL fur and things like that. I've been meaning to make one for each character on this project, but just haven't sat down and done it. So, over the past few days I made one for both the Alien and Teddy characters. I'll do the Robot a little later since I wanted the Teddy one to work on the next shot. Screenshots: alienPicker teddyPicker Usually I would include the picker with each char's loader file and use namespaces to control it. However, I wanted to be able to pick All the controls for each char from any char's picker, so this forced me to use absolute names instead of namespaces. There's not really too much of a downside to this and the advantages outweigh the negatives anyway, especially on a one man project - though I do make them accessible so anyone could jump in and animate. Essentially I reference in the picker as I would a char so that it's easy to update, but it also let me have a tab for each char which is a little easier to switch then the pull down. If you have the screen space, pickers can be your best friend as an animator. Started blocking the next two shots as well: 22 DECEMBER 2009
Christmas vacation and I'm visiting my parents in Virginia. I figured it might be a good time to work on this project so I copied all of my files to my portable harddrive as well as various programs I would need with the hopes of spending some time on this. My dad actually bought a cheap computer for downstairs and it works great. Runs Maya and other apps fine. Only problem is the monitor is an old 19" CRT I bought them back in 1998, or maybe even earlier. I put the resolution at 1280x1024, but man does it feel small. Almost feels like my college thesis project, though that was at 800x600 and 640x480 when I wanted 24bit color. Anyway, after getting everything configured on Windows7(which is quirky with avis), I blocked in a short shot: cookie_shot_14_anim_v3
30 NOVEMBER 2009
Well, October and November were pretty much a bust for this short. I had a lot of momentum from September but then kind of lost it all. Not sure if it was making the present or too many weekend football games or what, but I didn't work on this short for two months. Maybe it was the fact that Brutal Legend and Modern Warfare 2 came out in both months taking up a lot of my free time. I really hate when I waste that much time, but lately haven't felt inspired to work on this unfortunately.
4 OCTOBER 2009
I was working on a present for a friend and decided to use one of my shots as an image for it. Had to get a good rendering of the Alien and teddy with fur. Took a while to tweak and this is not the final look for the short, but was fun to do. Here are a few of the images I used: cookie_shot_13_testRender cookie_shot_13_backCover inside paper
21 SEPTEMBER 2009 Decided to take a break from the real production and work on some of the blank areas of the site. I started to fill in the History section. Not quite sure I like the layout but it's better then the nothing I had before. History. 19 SEPTEMBER 2009 Spent the afternoon rendering out the fur-ed teddy bear for the picture to right(assuming it's still there). This isn't the final fur or alien texture but I still felt like it was missing from the character. Also started splining shot 13. Decided to skip over 12 for now since it's a bit more complex. cookie_shot_13_anim_v8 16 SEPTEMBER 2009 Had a few issues with the new ik/chest mode setup and went back to fix them yesterday. Wasn't too bad, just annoying. Since I'm usually tired after work, I don't want to start splining shot 12 until I feel fully awake or motivated. Didn't want to lose too much momentum though so I began blocking shot 13 yesterday and added some breakdowns today. I actually really liked my original 2001 layout poses and tried to keep the essence of them, even though they were done in Project:Messiah. Eight years later I'm finally getting to the animation. cookie_shot_13_anim_v6 14 SEPTEMBER 2009 Almost 10 years after I started this project and I'm still tweaking the rigs. After blocking shot 12, even though I used fk, I decided I might want some more flexible ik controls.Generally I prefer to animate with fk whenever possible, but sometimes you really need to lock things down with ik. Not sure how I will spline this shot, but I wanted some options so I rigged up some constraints for my default ik controls to either be global or local to the chest as well as have both arms constrained to one object which can in turn be either global or linked to the chest. Luckily it was non-destructive to my previous shots. Should give ultimate flexiblity and I don't mind ik/chest mode so much. This also forced me to start working on the IMAGES section of this site. I may change that to "media" at some point, but for now it will do. Definitely can be quicker to pose as you can see here: ik vs fk mode 12 SEPTEMBER 2009 Started blocking shot 12 this morning then watched Notre Dame lose to Michigan on pretty much the last play of the game : ( A real bummer but I forced myself to keep blocking afterwards. Still have to do the Robot and see if I like what I've done with the Alien, but at least it's something. I think one reason I stalled out over the past few months is thinking how difficult this shot could be with all of the parent switching. I suppose I could have done some of the easier shots, however, I like going in order right now. cookie_shot_12_anim_v10
31 AUGUST 2009 Another month in the books and very little done on this project. In fact, I only did some secondary polish on shot 11 way back on August 2nd. This month just seemed to blaze by for some reason and now football season is here so I might be spending even less time on this...as if that's possible! cookie_shot_11_anim_v7
31 JULY 2009 Wow. Over a month has gone by and I haven't worked on this project at all. Kind of a bummer, but I haven't had the inspiration to do anything. Work hasn't really been too stressful, but for some reason I just have not felt like doing this. Hope that isn't a bad sign. Perhaps just too much animating at work has left little for me to put into this. I still wanted to make at least one entry for July, if nothing else to remind myself what a slacker I am!
21 JUNE 2009
Trying to build up momentum again on this project has been tricky. Blocked shot 11 last weekend and forced myself to start splining it tonight after slacking all weekend. Sometimes you just have to push yourself to do it. Really shouldn't be that way, but starting is the hardest part and each shot is a new "start" really. Actually, going from blocking to splining is another "start" in itself. Once I get going it isn't so bad to continue, but I always know how much work it is to take something from either nothing or blocking to look like something presentable. Makes it very easy to procrastinate. cookie_shot_11_anim_v6. 6 JUNE 2009 I think we are officially out of crunch mode for now. So, I should probably get back to this. Only thing I've really been doing is working on the site to make sure it doesn't break with other browsers. Also starting adding thumbnails to the shots page. Makes it easier to identify shots but produces bigger rows. As well as added the ability to play a sequence by clicking on its respecitve column. For instance, clicking on Layout > at the top of the TV Room table will play the layout for that sequence.
29 MAY 2009
Found another crazy browser bug when Windows decided to upgrade my Internet Explorer to version 8. All of my menus became uncentered because the "center" tag was now ignored in the iframe and needed to be added to the div tag. Wonderful. The bad news is that I had to spend a few hours fixing every single page so far, very tedious. The good news is that it should be more compatible with other browsers now. Quite a pain to fix, and I still have to go in and get rid of the <p> tags on the shot pages which cause an unecessary margin. So annoying, this is why I hate web design. We've been crunching pretty good at work and I've been doing some cool performance animation like my film days which has been great fun but left little time for this short. Also went to see PIXAR's Up today which was just amazing, as well as the short film before it. Really inspiring stuff. Makes me wish I would actually finish my own short. All I can muster right now is fixing the web pages!
26 APRIL 2009
We've gone into a mini-crunch at work on Rage, so we're working more hours for the next few months. Kind of makes animating at home even more difficult to get motivated for. I did manage to spend a few hours working on shot 10 though: cookie_shot_10_anim_v6 Also found another pesky browser problem with this site. If you shrink the window below the size of the site, lots of scrollbars appear around all of my menus. Grrr...spent the past 2 hours fixing that when I should be sleeping! Not quite satisfied with the formatting at the bottom, but it's much better now. Of course, why would you want to shrink the browser in the first place? I guess I just what to make sure someone looking at this with less then 1000 pixels doesn't get anything too strange.
21 MARCH 2009
Finally got back to animating after a long long....long hiatus. Hopefully I can keep a more consistent pace. Here's a link to the current shot: cookie_shot_09_anim_v11 17 MARCH 2009 Added visiblity options to hide all controls for Alien and Mark I Robot and made visibility options non-keyable. Set up buttons for selecting different controls via namespace now that I'm no longer using character sets and started converting scenes to Maya2008. Did a few tweaks to the Robot's anim in shot 9, but I really need to start animating the Alien and Teddy in that shot. 15 MARCH 2009 Added Layout shots for the TV Room sequence. Did a little render of the first pass texturing on the Alien for this home page.
16 FEBRUARY 2009 I started working on this section of my site as a way to track the progress of the film. Mostly I am concentrating on the Shots section, getting it into some working fashion where you can browse layout and animation. However, I had to establish some sort of framework to present the whole thing. Right now the plan is to do the entire Hallway sequence from start to finish, hopefully to serve as inspirtation to finish the whole thing.
1 JANUARY 2009
This website didn't actually exist until February 16th. I'm just putting this in here to test my menu bar archive. However, I was thinking that I should be working on this project during January and that ought to count for something right? |
 |
|
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|