Stuffs

Well well well, that sucks, doesn't it? An entire month of no progress on my blog or on my film. Well, the good news is that I am almost done with finals, and unless I am the most thick-skulled nincompoop on the face of the planet, I ought to have gotten it through my head that I need to TAKE ADVANTAGE OF MY FREE TIME, and with this in mind I ought to be able to finish Axis Mundi and Mechanics Vs. Aliens this summer.

.....

Nincompoop is a funny word.

Oh, and also my internship prospects are still looking pretty good. Should hear for sure in the next few days if I'm gonna get to do Digital Media stuffs, for monies n' stuffs.

Sketching And Stuff

Good news/bad news time! The bad news is that I haven't gotten to work on Axis Mundi very much this weekend. I have been writing a paper for one class, and sketching a robot for another. The good news is that you get to see the robot!

It's a giant, inquisitive, nuclear powered, teleporting, exploration robot! Or at least those were the parameters I was given to work with. Hopefully I have adhered to them closely enough to get a good grade. Those little probe things are the teleportation part, by the way. The idea is that they can zap stuff into the compartment on the back of the robot, so that it can be studied by people inside.

The return of the Titanicus

So my laptop was returned to me on Monday, presumably with a new graphics card (Is there really anyway to know if it is a different one or not?). I'm really glad that it is back. The keyboard is so much easier to use. It's tactile feedback is insanely superior than the keyboards in the public lab. Oh, and editing in Premiere on my laptop is smoother than on the desktop workstations that my University provides. Yeah. It's an awesome laptop. That's why I named it "Principio Titanicus." (Don't ask me what that means, I just thought it sounded awesome.)

Anyways, hopefully I'll be able to work on Axis Mundi stuff more this weekend. Pretty small update, I know, but I just realized today that I hadn't made a post about my laptop being back.

"Swimmingly" <---How things are going.

My laptop is still gone (I sent it off last Wednesday), so I am about to head to the edge of campus where the Digital Media Center is located. I saved all my Axis Mundi files to my external hard drive, so I can continue to edit using premiere even though it is gone. And yes, I bought Premiere even though I have access to it through computers at school. I like to be independent, sue me.

Anyway, I have to say I am loving the workload as a Digital Media major. This past week the first 4/5 week work cycle completed it's first go-round. So far it is quite a bit easier than high-school. I don't have classes on Friday, which gives me extra long weekends unless I have papers to write, which I don't this weekend. So I'll be able to work! I think it's obvious that everyone wins in this situation. I get to go to college to make movies, and learn how to make better movies, and you get to watch my movies! Yay!

Animation Weekend

I managed to make 240 frames of animation this weekend. Exciting times! Maybe the film will start really moving along now. And as far as the texturing goes, I am getting used to the way that it looks, and I actually think it is quite close to what I had imagined it would look like in it's final form. By the time that I finish animating this shot and film it in RCT3, I probably will not have any doubts about using it as the final texture. Sometimes I'm not sure whether it is good or bad when that happens. By "that," I mean the phenomenon where I make something, don't really like it, but I don't change it for a long time, (possibly because I can't [like this instance]) and then later on I decide to keep it that way just because I have gotten used to it. In the worse case scenario, that would be blinding myself to how cruddy a portion of work is, and in the best case, it doesn't really matter and by letting go of my perfectionism I save time. I hope this instance is the second one.

Clear to proceed

I am tentatively proceeding with the animating and filming of the rest of the scenes for The Battle for Axis Muni. The model that I was texturing is presentable, so instead of spending hours agonizing over how I can't get it's texturing to look better, I am starting to animate it. After all, I can always fix the textures later if I feel like they absolutely need to be improved.

Your News, Sir

A while ago I mentioned how a machinimator named CD5 was coming out with an awesome looking machinima called Greenhouse: Retaliate. Well, it's out now and it turned out just as awesome as it looked. Watch it here.

In Axis Mundi News, I have finished unwrapping my model onto the UV plane, and now it's time to start texturing. To help me kick-start this process, I've baked an ambient occlusion pass onto the mesh to give some parts it more depth. Hopefully I can add enough to that so that it doesn't just look like a boring typical-3d-model thing.

Nope wasn't the X-mirror

I am so confused. Every time I think I've figured out what is causing the problem, it does something I was not expecting. The X-mirror thing was not accurate at all. The best guess I can come up with now is that its something about the way that the bone weights overlap. But its difficult to figure out exactly what the "rule," is, so to speak. At one point I thought that it was "Only adjacent bones can have common weight." But that's not what causes it alone; I did a test model of a segmented rectangular prism where weights from a grandchild bone overlapped with weights from the grandparent. It imported fine. I really hope that soon everything will become clear.

Motivate THIS!

So it has been a few days since I should have posted. This is the post that I meant to write a few days ago. As such, it is slightly out of date. Meaning I haven't worked in the past few days since I forgot to write this on the 5th.

I worked on The Battle for Axis Mundi some; it was editing. I always feel like there is room for improvement with this film, especially with the editing. I want to avoid any shot feeling out of place. I want each shot to flow into the next, and for no shot to have unnecessary, gratuitous screen-time that says "Hey, I'm just too lazy to think of something else to put here that makes sense, so I'm gonna keep showing you this shot." When that happens, a shot that could have been awesome turns into suck. And I want to avoid that and other editing/storytelling mistakes. So I filmed some extra footage that wasn't too hard to do, but I hoped would make some stuff make more sense and flow better. Who knows if I succeeded? I sure don't, (to be fair I haven't finished editing it in, rendering it, and reviewing it) but I can only hope that if I tweak it enough, maybe... just maybe... I can create something that I can be proud of.

Using that thought as inspiration, I came up with this:

That's pretty much what I look like whenever I am working, and most definitely when I am editing. So yeah... that's actually one of the most relevant pictures I have ever posted. Cause' whenever I have an update, that is basically what I've been doing.

Rigging

Today I got into the meat and potatoes of rigging, i.e. weight painting. It's a lot more time consuming painting this model than with the Warrior of Light, because it has so many more vertices. But I really like how it is looking so far. I can't wait to get it fully rigged and textured; I think that there's a lot of creative stuff that can be done with the animation of this model.

Tweaked Out

Well, I may have alluded to being close to finished before, but now it is official. I am finished modelling the model I was modelling. Now I am going to import it into RCT3 to make sure it will work. It has a lot more vertices than the Warrior of Light model. That model has 306 vertices. The model that I just finished has 8,333 vertices before subdivision, (that means 8,333 is the number of vertices that I worked with by hand) and after one subdivision (to make it look a little smoother) it has 33, 679 vertices. Using those numbers, the new model has 110 times more detail than the Warrior of Light model. That shouldn't be a problem for the RCT3 engine to handle, because I have done crazy experiments before where I have hundreds of the same Warrior of Light animation going at the same time. It does lag a little bit, but nothing that would crash the game.

Here's an interesting tidbit: at one point I was considering doing two subdivisions on the model instead of just one. That would give the model 134,341 vertices, which is 439 times more detail than the Warrior of Light model. I don't think I've ever successfully had that many WOL models in one park before (although I haven't tried), so I decided to step it back a notch for performance sake. And honestly, when it comes to sub-surfacing, there are rapidly decreasing returns for each successive division, so even if it would run in RCT3, it's a little silly to have so many vertices define such a simple shape.

So yeah. Done with the thing I started modelling ages ago. November 2010... was it? ...Nope, just checked and it was..... 0_o....... October 2010!

That's right, the model that I just finished is the model that I first mentioned in this post.

Man am I ever dragging this film out.

Modelling Minutiae

I still haven't gotten the model imported into RCT3 to test it. I kept finding little things I wanted to perfect and that took up all my time. Not a bad problem to have if you ask me, because it ended up in me improving the model.

Oh, and for some reason I'm compelled to vocalize my gratitude for my awesome chiclet keyboard and laser mouse that I am using to create this blog post. I am blessed with stuff that I totally don't deserve for reasons that I don't understand.

Mysterious Silhouette

Got to model some more today. I'm going to import what I have so far into RCT3 so that I can get a feel for what it looks like in the game engine. After I rig it, that is. I haven't textured yet; I want to make sure I like how the mesh deforms before I go to a bunch of trouble getting the UV mapping just right.

And now you get to see a small preview of this model that I have been working on for all this time:

Yeah, I know, you can hardly see anything at all, but I still don't want to give away the best parts of the film before it's done. I would suggest clicking on the image to view it in fullscreen. You should be able to make out more of the mysterious silhouette that way. Hope you like it!

Ending March

So this has been a pretty crazy March for me. I've not gotten to work on Axis Mundi much, but I think that's ok. Whenever I have breaks, I feel like I come back with better ideas for the film. It's refreshing. I'm not going to let myself feel guilty about taking a long time to make it. I'm sure that when it's finally polished and ready to go, it will be worth it.

This is the end of March Madness. We didn't break the record. Oh well.

Seeya next time.