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HIATUS? · 1 OCTOBER 2010 - 31 DECEMBER 2010
Well, another few months have passed where I have had very little energy to work on this film. Probably a combination of reason, but one of the big ones just being football season. Of course, that's just a scapegoat, but I really haven't had the inspiration to work either. Mostly I've been putting off modeling the hallway environment. Not because I don't like modeling, but because I know how far away I am from a finished set. Then the thought of having to surface it really bogs my mind down. I should try to keep animating while I am in this slump, but for some reaon don't want to get sidetracked doing that either. Oh well, I hope that the next year I will be able to focus more. I have done a bit of work here and there over the past three months, but not enough to post or write about. This entry will serve all three. BUILDING · 10 SEPTEMBER 2010
After a long break, I started working on this again. One thing holding me up was designing the hallway set. I've gone back in forth in my mind as to how it should look, contemporary or sci-fi. I actually started making a contemporary set a few months ago but decided it wasn't quite working. As a result, I've gone back to my original vision and started to build the set with the proxy hallway as a framework. It's a little cliche, but I just wanted to move forward after being stuck for so long. While I could continue to animate shots and may still do that, I felt like I really needed to make some progress with the overall look of this film. Still a long way to go, but it's good to at least get this going. After I had enough built, I did a few test renders to see how it looked from a wide shot and with a character in the set.   SUMMERTIME · 1 SEPTEMBER 2010
I didn't work on this short at all during June, July, and August. The main reason for June and July was that I had a very big character to animate at work. Seven minutes of dialog, facial, and acting, pretty much all the stuff I love to do as an animator. Mostly it was done the last week of May until about the beginning of August. However, it was such a large chunk of work to do in a short amount of time, I couldn't spread myself too thin by trying to work on this project at the same time. I wasn't required to do overtime, but did end up spending many extra hours working on the animation. August ended up being a bit of a hangover and I think being a little unsure of the design for the hallway sequence's environment kept my inpiration fairly low unfortunately. DONE...SORT OF · 31 MAY 2010
Took quite some time, but all of the shots in the hallway sequence have had an animation pass on them! This was one of my goals that I set some time ago and while each shot could use some more polish, they are at least presentable. My original plan was to take this sequence to a final state. That means I should start to focus on creating the "real" background and begin to surface the characters, both of which I have been putting off for a long time. This is definitely a big step, though I am not sure if I should continue to animate or establish the look. There is so much more to do still in terms of animation, but part of my thinking was that getting a nice "look" with good lighting and a proper environment would inspire me to push and finish this project. I suppose I am slightly scared to do that becaue I do not exactly know how it will turn out or what some things will even be! With animation, I at least know where I am going. When I think back to how this project started, as an exercise to keep me animating, I originally was going for a sci-fi theme. However, now I feel like I would benefit from mixing it up a bit. A little tricky with the sliding doors and button. I still go back and forth in my head as to what would work best. Stick with the plan, or introduce something different and perhaps unexpected? In any case, the last shot in the sequence has been animated. Might have to speed up the Robot's exit, and this really could have been done over a month ago, but alas, here it is:  cookie_shot_18_anim_v12 WHAT HAPPENED?!? · 29 MAY 2010
Another month just disappeared. Actually, I do know what happened. Somehow I got back into modding Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter again. Was just adding one weapon, a Mk14 Mod 0 with a shortdot attachment, but it pretty much took 4 weekends to do(plus weeknights). It was fun, but completely took me off this project. Didn't really expect it to take so long but perhaps I needed a break from this anyway. Hopefully I can ramp back up again. Just spent the past few hours adding the storyboard pages to the kitchen shots section. There are a lot of blanks since I added so many shots after I had done the original storyboard, but at least every section is complete in terms of what has been done so far. SLOW TIMES · 17 APRIL 2010
After a super productive March, April has slowed things down a bit. I blame Mass Effect 2. I actually got the game the day it came out in February, but put off playing it and then slowly got into it. Over the past few weeks, I really got consumed. Plus I finally bought a Playstation3 to use as a blu-ray player and have been messing with that as well. The weekends are really my best time to work on this film but even then I haven't been feeling the urge. I'm really close to finishing at least one animation pass on all the shots in this section, but seemed to have stalled out a bit. I did manage to do a little splining on shot 17 additions. Simple stuff but still a bit tricky. I wanted to have the focus on the Robot character and only really have the Alien in the shot for hook up purposes. His first head turn feels a little mechanical to me, might have to go back and give that some lovin'.  cookie_shot_17_anim_v12 IT'S A BUDDY PICTURE · 5 APRIL 2010
I liked the way shot 17 looked by itself, however, it seemed to not work quite right in the cut. Too much space to sell as one character only and I didn't want to zoom in any further. As a result I decided to add the Alien to hopefully hook up with the surrounding shots. cookie_shot_17_anim_v10 EASTER EGGS · 4 APRIL 2010
Another month down. Can't believe it's already April. I really had to force myself to sit down and block shot 18. It's the last shot in the hallway sequence which means every shot has been touched in animation and I didn't want to waste the weekend by not doing anything. Some shots I want to go back and polish a bit more, and shot 17 looks like it will need either a camera change or the Alien added to properly hook up with 16 and 18. I'm still facing a little bit of a mental block on what to do with the "look" of the environments for this short. Part of me is wondering if I should just keep animating instead since there are still so many shots left, about 40. At the very least I should probably try to get in one short per week. Doesn't really sound like much, but it is amazingly difficult to find the energy while working a full time job. cookie_shot_18_anim_v3 MORE KUNG FU · 28 MARCH 2010
Splined out this shot mostly. Have to do the antenas and refine it a bit more but it's coming along. That only leaves one shot for the Hallway section that hasn't been animated at all. After that I might go through and either mark cbbs or try to make them better. The original plan means I will need to start surfacing in ernest and come up with the real background. I'm still torn with going futuristic like originally planned or playing with something more rustic and out of place. For some reason I like the idea of mixing the future with the contemporary or past. March is almost over, but it's been a very productive month for this project. Hopefully I can keep it going.  cookie_shot_17_anim_v7 BOARD.UM · 27 MARCH 2010
Started adding the story boards to the shot pages. Not that my storyboarding skills are anything to write home about, but I wanted to include them anyway. Many shots actually do not have boards because the short evolved after I started doing layout and playing with different ideas to flesh it out. I couldn't decide if I wanted to add them to the shot navigation page because of so many holes, but after trying a few, it seems to be ok. It's also interesting to see how that page has evolved over time. The page is designed for my own shot progress tracking and is fun to see grow. I remember when I couldn't decide if going from text based to thumbnail based was even a good idea. Looking back, I'm really happy with the thumbnail version as it's quite useful to just recognize which shot I want to work on by just looking at the pics. I KNOW KUNG FU · 23 MARCH 2010
I've never really been sure about what to do with this shot. The layout served its purpose but always felt kind of weak to me. I've tried to bring some life to it by making the robot a little more active. I may have to tighten in on the head section a bit as well. cookie_shot_17_anim_v4 THUMBS UP · 21 MARCH 2010
No animation today, just some rigging updates and some surfacing work. When I made my finger controls years ago, I had everything rotating as attributes. That's great for bending and even splaying, but complex rotations of the thumb can be problematic. Even though I added all three thumb rotations as attributes, it just isn't easy to control that way. I had an idea to make the finger control directly be the base thumb joint and house the rest of the fingers so I can grab all nine and curl them easily. This let me have the best of both worlds and was non-destructive to previously animated shots. Basically just added another node in front of the thumb base hierarchy and presto. I retained the original thumb attributes but reordered the rest to make more sense both visually and selection wise. Since I'm getting close to real surface and environment work, I spent a little time playing with mentalRay. There are some things I like about my "old" Alien render, but I think mentalRay is really the way to go. Ran into some problems adjusting my UVs which forced me to re-bind the character. However, this also forced me to fix a pesky eyelid bug that had been bothering me. There was always a strange tear around the lid when I smoothed the character. I thought this was because of blendshapes but it was actually the "keep border" attribute on smoothing which needed to be set to "off." Easy fix for that once I found it, but I did spend a few hours cleaing up the mesh history correctly and rebinding to the skeleton due to pushing UVs around. Hopefully this will be the last time I do that. ROLLIN' · 20 MARCH 2010
Well, maybe not rolling, but moving forward. I actually blocked and splined this shot from March 14 to today. Not working on it every day of course, but when I have time and energy. Didn't really feel like making any entries though. It's good to just animate sometimes and not worry about updating this site. However, go too long like that and things get backed up here, so I like to do both as I go. Only two more shots left in this sequence and then I might start working on the "look" of this short. My plan since last year around this time was to do this sequence from start to finish, animation through final compositing. That means I'll have to start surfacing the characters and design a real background for them. A whole different set of problems, but a different work style and energy required as well. I always find animating to be the most draining. Would probably be a good idea to squeeze in as many shots as possible along the way.  cookie_shot_16_anim_v14 TITLE TIME · 9 MARCH 2010
Pretty much finished this shot for now. I even put secondary motion on the Robot's antenas. Haven't done that in quite some time. Even though no one has access to this website yet, I'm thinking about limiting the home page to the most current or recent month's postings instead of having the whole year here. I also kind of like the orange highlight titles I did for the history page and may try incorporating that somehow. While I'm hesitent to call any shot final, at least another is "in the books." Only 3 more to animate in the hallway sequence and then I might move on to set building and surfacing the characters properly!  cookie_shot_12_anim_v26 BACK IN THE SADDLE · 4 MARCH 2010
So I spent the past few weekends writing some space switching and snapping scripts. For the most part it was straight forward. After I finished the Alien character I wanted to go back and do the Robot before I forgot everything I had done. He was much easier to do, but there was one lingering problem with the Alien. My fk and ik arms weren't properly aligned so when I snapped to fk or vice versa it would be slightly off. Not a big deal but I wanted to fix it so when you switched nothing appears to move. Took some time to track down the culprits but I finally got it working perfectly. The Robot had one minor problem to work out with the wrist flipping, but otherwise was just a matter of doing everything I did for the Alien and adding all the buttons to the picker. One button snapping and switching! All this started because I knew shot 12 needed some kind of better way to animate two hands on one object. Since I had already blocked and started splining, I needed some way to switch without destroying or redo-ing too much. Shot 13 benefitted from my initial ik space additions, but for this one I really needed snapping. After those two weekends of re-working, I was able to get back to shot 12 and take advantage of my new scripts. cookie_shot_12_anim_v20
EVERYBODY RIG · 22 FEBRUARY 2010 After getting ik/fk snapping to work, I set out to do some space snapping for the different ik modes as well as the grab controllers. It didn't take too long to write the scripts to achieve this and really makes switching the teddy bear between hands much easier. It also makes switching between global, chest, and grab space super easy. I can't believe I've gone all these years without something like this. However, I ran into a huge snag which took the rest of the weekend to solve. My forearm twists that I setup years ago really wasn't the best solution for that age old problem. It reared its head with some of the ik/fk snapping. Basically the forearm twist deformer was flipping at certain angles causing strange bends in the forearm. Because of this, I decided I should re-rig the forearms properly. I found a nice little tutorial with the concept I wanted to use: Adam Metchly's forearm setup. Unfortunately this required detaching the mesh from the skeleton, which is always scary because I hate redoing something like skin weights. Fortunately I was able to write them out and reapply them without losing my previous work. Because I was adding twist joints along the foream, I would have to weight that section. That part wasn't too painful, it was getting the twist joints to behave properly. In fk mode they worked great, but once I put them in ik and posed the character at extreme angles, they started to flip out. I really didn't know why until I found the setting for "shortest" in the orient contraints attributes. This seemed to solve all my problems...hopefully.
Anyway, what I had hoped would be a few hours of work, pretty much took two days. As a result and due to some other commitments, I really didn't do any animation which sucks; however, I am fairly satisfied with the new additions to the Alien rig. Of course, that also means I will have to add it to my Robot rig, but hopefully that will be faster since there is no binding involved.
BORN ON DATE · 16 FEBRUARY 2010
I actually got ik/fk snapping/matching to work. Had to use point and orient constraints to do it, but it works! Only set up the Alien character's scripts so far as well made some visual tweaks to his rig, but one button press switching and matching will make many things so much easier. Going from ik to fk seems slightly off, but not a big deal. Still have to make a snap script for the grabs and add some space switching buttons to picker but I think I can do it using the same technique. Mostly this whole thing is useful when you've blocked or animated something with one method but decide later the other would be better for either part or all of the animation. Can also be used for initial posing and blocking. Also, just realized today marks the one year anniversary of this site. I can't decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Well, Happy Birthday project site! ANIMATOR VALENTINE · 14 FEBRUARY 2010
Spent some time working on shot_12. I've been putting off getting back to that shot because I knew it would be complex. Can't believe I blocked it over four months ago. Just started to spline the Alien and may have to switch to ik after he grabs and pets his teddy bear. Fk gets some nice arcs, but to pin the hands to the bear is proving a little tricky. I'm always hesitant to switch modes, but I blocked this shot before I had the chest and grab ik space switching built into the rigs. This shot actually made me build that stuff, so perhaps I will use it, even if just for the last section. What I really should do is sit down and figure out how to get snapping to work. I fear that may be beyond my time and knowledge right now though.
THE ROBOT PICKITH · 12 FEBRUARY 2010 With all my new screen space, I've actually been putting off making the Robot picker. I wanted to update his rig a little too, adding the ik space switching that I put on the Alien and change a few of the curve controllers. Making the pickers is pretty fun and not too time consuming. There are a few things I want to add to the rigs, particularly ik/fk snapping and ik space snapping via one button presses on the picker. Not sure how much I will need that, but it does come in handy. One of the cool things about having all three characters in one picker as tabs, is that I can have All buttons for each of the other characters in each tab. This lets me quickly pick all the controls for say the alien and teddy bear together and re-time their keyframes. GO BIG OR GO HOME · 31 JANUARY 2010
Since being back from Christmas, I've really missed having a widescreen monitor, and now that I'm creating pickers for the characters, I feel as though I need more screen space to take advantage of them. Well, I finally decided that my one 20" 4:3 monitor just wasn't big enough and took the plundge on a new 30" 16:10 widescreen. This is just like the monitors we use at work. I thought about going with a 24" and using my 20" as a second display, but the combined pixel space was still less then one 30"er. However, the physical desktop footprint would have been much larger. Unfortunately, the first one I received had a big hole of purple pixels and I had to send it back. This one seems to be working fine though. I also decided I should upgrade my graphics card since 2560x1600 is quite a lot of pixels to push. My old card seemed to work fine, but any games might have struggled even at half that size. What should have been a simple swap and drop, turned into an all day event as the card didn't fit in my case with the 3.5" harddrive bays. After some modifications including a drive adpater and an external hard drive reader for my project drive I was able to make it fit. Of course, I decided to put my sound card in a different pci slot which caused the computer to crash repeatedly a few mintues after boot. Once I got that sorted, everything seems to be fine. Talk about an upgrade from hell. The very thing I was trying to avoid! 2010? REALLY? · 5 JANUARY 2010 Looks like 2009 is in the books, so I'm wiping the homepage of those entries. You can still read them by going to the History page. I didn't accomplish as much as I would have liked, but at least things are moving forward even if very slowly. Christmas vacation pretty much came and went as well. I only managed to get a few things done, which is better then nothing. I'm getting to the point where I may need to be serious about designing the "real" hallway environment as well surfacing the characters. There are only 4 shots left to animate in that section. Though, some could still use a bit of love. My original plan for 2009 was to fully complete that section from animation all the way to final comp and then possibly take this site online. Unfortnately, I only got to around shot 16 in animation. There really is no schedule for this project(which is probably why it's not done). I just kind of work on it when I feel inspired. I am considering giving myself some deadlies to work with, but it's just so hard to stick with them. Life and work always seem to drain just enough to make it so I don't have the desire to put in some time on this. However, I'm hoping 2010 will see some more progress. Whenever I don't feel like doing real shot production, there's always stuff I can be doing on this site. Consequently, I decided I should knock out all of the Kitchen shot pages for Layout. As a result, every shot now has a fully functioning shot page associated with it. I don't know if I'm going to do the "Boards" section or not, since story boarding is not my strong point, but we'll see. |
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