COUNT IT! · 25 MARCH 2013
This whole website is designed to remind me to work on this project. However, it's just not enough! I decided to add a shot counter like we had at Sony. After a bit of messing around in php code and adding a master list of shots, I was able to use my "versions" lists to calulate how many shots have been worked on for each stage and then subtract that from the total to see how much is left. Can't tell if I'm actually procrastinating, but I do get a bit tired of counting them manually. Especially the kitchen sequence, which is the longest. The shots page has it further broken down by sequence. Hopefully this will motivate me to get those "remaining" numbers lower. Stats are always nice. Not sure if I really like what I came up with for the main page here, but we'll see how it goes

Looking at it now, as I just typed this, it looks so pathetic that I've only animated 15 shots! Laughable even. I know I can go way faster than that. I really need to get my mind into this. I can forgive myself for the rendering and comping, since that all needs to be built, but for animation, I have zero valid excuse.
ST. MEL SCRIPT DAY · 17 MARCH 2013
Sometimes I'm not sure if I'm just avoiding animating or what. During the past year or so, I've been using MEL alot at work to write simple scripts. I've been doing it so much that I'm getting pretty good at using variables instead of hardcoding too much in. Since I take such long breaks from this project, software tends to advance and make some shots I haven't touched in....years, a little obsolete.

Today when I went to look at some of the shots from the Kitchen sequence, which I worked through layout many years ago, I had some hacky things going on with the cameras to get a gate mask on them using various scripts. I actually did a pass before upgrading to Maya2010, so they weren't too inconsistent, but still have that geo mask on them. Since 2010, Maya finally built that function into the camera's attribuites. Now that I know some scripting, I spent the afternoon writing a camera script to fix my cameras and get all the settings the same.

Basically, it gets rid of any extra garbage attached to the camera, renames it corrcetly, cleans it up, sets all the attributes the way I like them, and even sets the resolution, file format and frame sequence naming. I added another feature to give the camera a namespace based on the shot number it gets from the path info and scene namespace. The scene namespace is actually hardcoded in as COOKIE, but it's still a variable and easy to change. I could derive it from the folder, but I want all caps for the namespace. I'm sure there's a way to change that via mel, but didn't seem worth it since I keep all scripts related to this project in the project Mel folder anyway.

Not totally sure this counts as working on the film, but hey, it was fun to do, and whatever gets me back in the swing of things. It really does bother me when I open up old scenes and things are "out of whack." Especially things I know can be scripted and fixed easily. Irish!
MARCH MADNESS · 10 MARCH 2013
Actually, more like, what the hell happened madness. The beginning of last year started off ok, but quickly got out of control working on DLC for RAGE. However, that was over by mid April. Things just never really picked up and I couldn't get myself back into the groove. Even when I tried in July, it just didn't take. This project has been a labor of love, but for some reason the love has been missing. I am not sure what it is. Perhaps it is just the thought that there is so much to do and it becomes overwhelming even to start one shot.

I know that when I get into something I can go full force. Just the last two weeks I spent all of my free time making a racing mod for RAGE. I guess because with that, I want to get it done as quickly as possible, and there really is no animation involved. It's just strange how "into" it I get, but not this. Even now, instead of working on it, I'm writing about it. Well, I did need to update this, so there's the webstuff maintenance. Still a bit of an exuse.