Rigging

I have been rigging the Warrior of Light today. He is almost fully rigged and ready to be animated. I just need to do a little more weight painting. I also worked some more on my other assets that will remain a surprise. I don't feel like screenshots, sorry.

SCAD Film Challenge results

So they finally managed to post the results of the SCAD contest. Unfortunately, I was not one of the top 3, nor was I one of the top 20. And neither were either of the videos in my previous post. It seems that the judges must have very different cinematic preferences than me. Either that, or they did not pick the finalists based on actual merit, and instead chose the films which best suited the genre that they wish to promote at their film festival. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

To give an example, they chose this atrocity to be a part of their top 20. Now, I honestly can't see why they would choose this film over Caleb Diaddigo's "A Bigger Picture."

Another example is this film, which seems of markedly lower quality than the brilliant stop-motion animation "Being," by Isabela Dos Santos.

A final point of confusion for me is that not only are many of the top 20 films of lower quality than their non-placing counterparts, but a good portion of them also use copyrighted music! I don't understand. The way I see it, they are punishing originality, and rewarding cheap, lazy behavior. Well, some of the judges were from apple.

\rant

SCAD Film Challenge Update

It turns out that it didn't matter that I was gone for a few days, as they have decided to push the announcements back until Monday. So, tomorrow I'll post again with the results. For your entertainment, here are the other 2 videos (besides mine, of course!) that I would choose if I were one of the judges:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg10Fi17GOs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flMKfOTr55g

Not surprisingly, both of my picks are animation. For some reason, live action is almost always inferior to animation, unless the live action is done by professionals. At least that's my view.

So, yeah. Waiting till tomorrow.....

Done with the model

I have finished the replica of the RCT3 Peep who plays the Warrior of Light. Here's a comparison:

The guy on the right was rendered in RCT3, and the guy on the left was rendered in Blender.

Now I just need to texture it, and get it rigged up so that I can animate it. I hope that RCT3 handles the mesh deformation properly. So far I have not deformed any meshes in my tests with animated CSOs. I'm also not sure about UV mapping. In order to get the textures on him properly, I may need to use UV mapping, but I'm not certain if RCT3 supports that or not.... I think it does. And it also probably does support mesh deformation. I just don't know if it supports weight painting, and I don't know whether I will need to weight paint or not.

Anyway, sorry for all the 3D jargon. I'm kind of thinking out loud right now.

In other news, the SCAD Film festival stops accepting entries in 9 days. After that, it will be a week until the winners are notified. So keep crossing your fingers!

SCAD Film Festival

Recently it has come to my attention that Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) is including highschoolers in their film festival this year. They want original film submissions that are no longer than 4 minutes. All you have to do is upload your entry to YouTube and give them a link. There's a whole process where they judge your film and people vote on it and stuff.  I'll focus in on those details later, but for right now I am going to have to do something rather unfortunate. I want to enter Radical Racer's Run in this competition, but I want to submit a more tweaked version, and I don't want to have two different versions of the video on YouTube. That means the current video will come down.

The actual animation has not changed at all. The only difference is in the text. I feel like it needs to be perfect, and right now there are a few spelling mistakes, and the text that is used for the credits does not match at all with the theme of the video, so I am just changing it a little. Unfortunately, this means that all the awesome comments you guys have left will be erased. It also means that the upload date of Radical Racer's Run will no longer be the 3 year anniversary of the Hugest RCT3 Crash on YouTube. Oh well.

On the bright side of things, if I win the SCAD competition, they will pay for airfare and hotel expenses in order for me to come down for the film festival, which would be freaking sweet. I'll post more details about when the results come in later. I also think there's an audience choice section where anyone on the internet can vote, so I'll be sure to let you guys know how to vote for whatever film you like best... hem... ;)

Peace out.

The Plot Thickens

Yesterday I showed some of the early scenes of Axis Mundi to my Mom, and she said that the plot was difficult to understand. I really want this film to be one that everyone-not just RCT3 fans-will enjoy. So, right now I am trying to come up with a way to make the plot easier to understand. We'll see what happens. Usually, whenever I go back and rework something, it turns out a lot better than before (this has happened before with Mechanics Vs. Aliens). Hopefully this will be one of those times, and it will turn out really well. Cross your fingers.

Winter Video

My next video to be released will be released to celebrate winter. I made it at the beginning of this year, but it has been set to private for a while. I am going to go public with it on December 1, 2009. It is a live action short film, and like a lot of my videos lately, it really has no plot whatsoever (well, it does sorta, but the video ends abruptly so you won't really get any story out of it).

So, I hope you guys will enjoy it. It's main value is in the visuals; there's lots of neat looking snow shots. Until then, I'll be working on MVA episode 6, and I will probably post an update on that sometime in the coming weeks.