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