3 FOR 1 SPECIAL · 30 JULY 2013
Pretty much wrapped up Shot 20 yesterday and spent some time adjustng my playblast script so it's a little more flexible. The path was too hardcoded into expecting certain folders. I now have it just remove the scenes folder and switch from the Alien.Maya folder to the Alien.Footage folder. Everything after scenes/ remains the same. Still specialized to this project but at least lets me playblast from anywhere in the scenes folder and mimics the path and filename. Tested it on an old 10 second club shot I did in 2005 to make sure the HUD worked and that it saved to the correct location.

tenSec_2005-02_v15

After all that, I didn't have a lot of energy to work on another shot but figured I should at least transfer the layout over to animation for Shot 21. It's such a simple shot, I copied the camera into Shot 20 and started adjusting from there, the feet, timing, etc. Given how slow I've been going on this short, I think I'm going to take advantage of this animation and use it twice. Feels a bit like cheating, but hey...what are computers good for anyway if you can't get away with a little certified pre-owned animation every now and then?

cookie_shot_21_anim_v2

AUTOMATION · 28 JULY 2013
Since I've been doing a bit of mel scripting on and off at work, I've learned a thing or two. When I come home to work on this project, I find myself missing some of the tools I've written. As a result, a few weeks ago I spent some time writing a little menu for the short. Makes it easier to bring in characters, props, run camera fix scripts, etc. Basically a collection of anything I write for this short in order to speed up repetitive tasks.

A few months ago, I wrote a dailies script at work to automate the process of playblasting, naming, and saving videos. I always like the video to have the same name as the file so that it's easy to find where it came from. It also adds a bunch of info to the hud such as the animator's log in name, frame number and filename. Today when I was working on a simple shot, I found myself wanting similar functionality. Mostly because it makes it very easy to just hit a button and the file is named and saved in the correct spot, with corresponding hud info relevant to the scene and short. So, I spent the majority of the afternoon writing a similar script at home. It's not as flexible as the one at work, but it doesn't really need to be.

cookie_shot_20_anim_v3

TEST · 3 JULY 2013
This is just a test to make sure multiple webistes are working locally with Apache.