SUPER CRUNCH MODE · 26 APRIL 2011
After one week at our new office with "normal" crunch mode, 10 hour days, we are going to 12 hour days with possible weekends. This will probably go through May and perhaps June/July. A little scary, but I always knew this could happen. I just hope that I don't lose too much momentum on this project. We've been doing crunch this entire year already, with Fridays being normal, but now they will be 10 hour Fridays. The weekends are really when I get the most done on this, but if I'm too tired or burned out from sitting, it could derail again like last summer when I was animating Doctor Kvasir for the Rage.

OFFICE SPACE · 21 APRIL 2011
This week we moved to our new office which makes my drive to work about 15 minutes longer. Since we are also still in crunch mode, I'm getting home super late these days, not sure how I feel about all this. Definitely don't have much energy to do much other then simple comping after hours. I did manage to set up one more shot before the weekend was over and render it with motion blur on Monday. In this shot, the characters are probably the smallest they will ever be. I remember animating the alien and teddy bear almost two years ago and was very pleased with how they turned out for such a long shot. Unfortunately, I'm not that pleased with how the lighting turned out. It's difficult to light from so far away for some reason. I will probably revist this shot, but for now I think I will move on to some of the others.

THE DEUCE · 16 APRIL 2011
I really like these two shots. They share pretty much the same camera and lighting setup, plus they are short so I was able to knock them out pretty quickly. A few problems with the fur showing black spots, but I can probably paint fix that. Overall the fur looks really nice in this closeup. I also added a lighting video for the entire sequence with mixed animation for the remaining shots. I always like seeing work in progress like this. It's great when it's playing along in openGL and then all of a sudden a pretty lighitng shot comes on.

MOVIN' ON · 14 APRIL 2011
Definitely going a little faster with lighting and rendering. I'm focusing on shots that share a similar angle as shot 12, that way I can transfer character lighting setups and just tweak from there. Still requires a bit of work and testing but all of the shots in this sequence are shorter then shot 12, so at least they render faster. Also came up with a work around for the flash "slow playback on short videos" bug. I'm just duplicating the shot as many times as needed until it's around 200 frames. Not efficient, but it works. Hopefully this weekend I can get a few more shots lit.

ONE POINT FIVE YEARS LATER · 12 APRIL 2011
When I look at some of the dates on these shots, it is amazing how long I have gone between stages, or even just one shot to the next. This shot was last touched on Aug. 2, 2009! Well, if I can keep lighting up, it might go a bit faster now that I have a basic look and setup established. Still requires tweaking and can be slower from another standpoint...render times, but in other ways it can flow faster. While I don't do lighting and comping professionally, I have always liked this part. Probably because you get to see some pretty pictures and not just openGL playblasts. On the other hand, it's a bit scary because things may not look like I had originally planned. At this point, I just need to keep moving forward.

I'm leaving shot 12 the way it is for now and moving on to 11 and 13 since they are more or less the same setup and angle. Discovered the flash bug from earlier this year seems to be worse. It just doesn't like shorter then 120 frame shots, but now it seems I'm having to make 200 frames in order for it to play smoothly more then once.

RENDER CRAZY · 10 APRIL 2011
Usually when I don't post for a while it's because I'm not working on this project. However, this time I have actually been working during most of my free time - which is fairly limited these days. The reason I haven't posted is because I broke down and bought a new workstation class computer and am just now installing a web creation program. My old system is still very good for animation, but it is limited in memory and cpu power. This new one is a dual Xeon quad core, which brings me to eight cores vs two on my old system. I only have eight mental ray licenses, so that works out. It also has 12 gigs of ram and is a 64bit OS. Rendering is so much faster now and motion blur doesn't crash. I've been experimenting with 2d post vector blur as well, but I think I prefer 3d. It is much slower, but not too bad.

In the past two weeks since I've had this system, I have been throwing many renders at it. Still the same shot, just trying to work out little kinks here and there before I go wide. Fixing UV problems on both characters and adjusting the overall surface look of the mark one robot, seperating passes for the alien's eyes, mattes, etc. It's a lot of work getting it all setup. I think I picked the longest shot of the 14 in this section too, whcih makes rendering longer. Now that I'm knee deep in it, I don't want to switch to a shorter one though.

I was planning to get the new AfterFx now that I'm 64bit for compositing, but since Maya comes with a comping package called Toxik, I thought should give it a go. After a few hours of getting use to its workflow, I am really digging it. It's a node based compositor like Shake, Nuke, and Digital Fusion. While I've used them before, I've always just relied on AfterFx layered method for comping. I am finding node based to be much better in many ways, especially for what I am doing. Still need to use AfterFx for many things, but I think I will comp the shots this way first.