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.

You know, that thing where...

Yesterday I did that thing where I start and finish a short video project within one day. This is kind of for a school project. It was basically a proof of concept, showing that I can animate character designs based off of a single still Photoshop file. I basically isolated the parts of the character that I wanted to animate from the Photoshop file, and then mapped them onto identically shaped flat-planes, which I rigged up to be animated with an armature. All of this was done in Blender.

I have to say... I wish that I could find it in me to work as hard and as fast on The Battle for Axis Mundi as I did on this. I really just got down to business... even though it took, literally, all night. I finished rendering out the final animation at 7:55am, just in time to leave and go learn about Photoshop. Hahaha. When I describe it like that, I realize how much I love being in college and studying Digital Media.

Cold feet

I got a good amount of the re-edit in Premiere done this weekend. That's about it, unfortunately. I feel like I am avoiding doing the animation that I need to do next, almost like my subconscious is panicking now that I actually have all of the assets that I need to get most of the film done. It's trying to find a way for me to get stuck on some minor detail, but there aren't any details left. It's an open road, I've got a full tank of gas, but my foot nervously hovers over the gas pedal. Almost like it is too good to be true. Hopefully writing this will help me overcome that feeling.

Frame by frame

So I got my walkcycle animation set up to be properly synchronized with all the particle effects and other RCT3 factors that I can't directly control (not always an easy task), and chugged out 150 frames/5 seconds of final footage! Woohoo!

It kinda seems sad that I am celebrating over getting just 5 seconds of my film done, but hey, at least I am making progress.

In other news, my college classes continue to be ten times more fun than regular schoolwork. Using Adobe Illustrator, I am tracing over the robot sketch that I posted a while ago. I'll post that when it is finished.

Animation and editing

Over the past few days I have completed and filmed 321 frames of animation for The Battle for Axis Mundi. It could have been even more than that, but unfortunately the new model's walk cycle has me a little bit stumped. I kept re-doing it and it kept coming out wrong, so I need to figure out what is up with that. I think part of the problem is me thinking that IK constraints would solve ALL of my problems. While it is true that they make feet stick to the ground, it's not true that they auto-magically make your animation look realistic. In fact, I think it is just as easy to make an unrealistic animation with them as without them. With IK it looks like your character is a puppet who has no muscles, and without them it looks like a person who's feet don't seem to care that two pieces of matter cannot occupy the same space at the same time (note however that well-animated characters don't necessarily give a second thought to the laws of physics either!). Overall though, once I get better at animating them, I think IK rigs will make the animation process a lot easier.

Oh, and since I was having such a hard time on that particular animation, I continued working on the re-edit in Adobe Premiere. The green-screening is SO much cleaner! Everything looks better than ever!

IK, You K, We all K.

I have now (kinda) figured out how to animate using constraints, including IK constraints. Makes a lot of stuff easier. For a while I was having a hard time getting the constraints to bake, but I've got it sorted. My first animation with my new model is now working successfully in RCT3, so I'm going to go to bed and then start animating and filming as much as I can tomorrow.

Logo Animation

I did another one of those one-day video projects. Last night I modeled and animated this video. It's a pretty awesome feeling sitting in class, knowing that during all the time you spend studying, something nice and shiny is being rendered for you back in the dorm. Anyways, the video features the logo for the "Edge Club," at ETSU. The Edge Club is basically where all the Digital Media people get together and have discussions about Digital Media awesomeness. The logo that they have for the club is this alien spaceship type thing, so I made it fly around and come to a rest in the logo. I used Blender for the video, of course, and Mixcraft to make the music.

Oh, and there's more info about the edge club here.

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.

Importing problems

Ok, here's the deal. Two days ago, I went over the model that I have been weight painting and found a handful of mistakes and little things that I fixed. That was good. The day after that, I continued doing the same thing, as well as doing a little animation to test out the model in RCT3. That went well, too. The problem came, of course, when I tried to import the model into RCT3. It gave me the same ping that it gave the higher poly mesh. So to make sure that size wasn't the issue, I took a different model that imports successfully, subdivided the mesh a few times, and then imported that. This .modxml file was 12 MB in size, and it imported successfully. The model that won't import successfully is 5 MB. Clearly, size is not the issue here.

Now, at first this kind of made me regret going back to the lower poly mesh, since it wasn't the complexity that was the problem. However, it was so incredibly frustrating to weight paint the hi-res version that I think it is worth going back to the low-res version just to make the weight painting easier.

Back to our timeline: Yesterday all I did was try and figure out what the importer doesn't like about the model. The only thing I concluded was that since it can't be the size, it must have something to do with the vertex groups/weight painting. However, the Warrior of Light model uses vertex groups to define weights for the various vertices, just like this model. And there are no problems with it. I figure I just have to keep looking and I will find some strange thing that I did that causes the error. That's the nice thing about Blender. It's always something you've done. It may be frustrating, but you can always correct it. However, what's really frustrating is when a program malfunctions, and you have done nothing wrong. Then it's almost impossible to get it working right.

I'm looking at you CryEngine 2.

Should've done that earlier

So I finally did what I said that I would do a few posts ago. I tried to import the model into RCT3. Unfortunately, I ran into a snag. It looks like the RCT3 Importer doesn't like how detailed my model is. It doesn't give me any error messages, it just appears to begin loading the .modxml, deliberates for a good while, then hits me with a classic "ping!" with no accompanying message. I am guessing that it is just too big. So I'm thinking I'll just have to go with the base mesh that I modeled, instead of the subdivided one. Like I said, I think RCT3 would be able to handle the subdivided mesh, but I didn't think about the fact that it might not be able to get through the importer. That's OK, though, because I was starting to get a little overwhelmed with the weight painting of the hi-poly model. Hopefully I'll have an easier time with the lower poly version.

Small Progress

I've been making small progress on The Battle for Axis Mundi over the past few days. It's really only a couple seconds in the edited film. I only did one shot today.... but it did take 12 tries to get the timing right. And of course I had to make the animation and particle effects to film in the first place. I guess that one shot per day is starting to be a typical workday for this film.

Animating

So I got to animate some today. Got about 200 frames done in the couple hours that I worked. The frames aren't 100% polished yet, however. But it's really fun. I love how whatever I make in Blender appears in RCT3 exactly as it looks! I'm still getting used to how cool it is. Thank you Jonwil and Belgabor!

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.

Radical Racer's Run

I finished editing my Blender animation, and it's rip roaring to go, so go ahead and watch it.....

Done? Hopefully you liked it. I must admit that I really enjoy a lot of aspects of doing CGI in Blender. You have complete control over everything. You can make absolutely anything that you want, and make it do anything that you want. You don't have to try over and over again to nail a shot. The only thing that limits you is... rendering time. The rendering time for this film wasn't all that bad. Most of the time it took between 2 and 10 minutes to render each frame. Near the end, however, something went wrong and rendering took waaaay too long. We're talking 2 hours per frame, just for that red debris at the end. I probably could have fixed it, but oh well. It's all done now.

I just realised as I was writing this that today is the 3 year anniversary of my most popular video, "Hugest RCT3 Crash on YouTube." It's a bummer that "Radical Racer's Run" almost certainly won't even come close to a fraction of the views that the "Hugest RCT3 Crash on YouTube" has.

But who knows? It's possible that this new video could have 85,000 views in 3 years.

Not.

A new video, and then 5 weeks of nothing

I am close to having my latest Blender animation finished. It will be released sometime between now and June 19th. On June 19th, I am leaving for a pre-college summer program, and I won't be back for 5 weeks. That means that-most likely-I will not be posting anything for more than a month. So just get ready for that. And like I said, expect a new video before June 19th.

New video soon

I am getting close to having my Blender animation done. However, I am afraid of what it will be like if I upload it. I am still concerned about all of the fans of my RCT3 videos... Since those are the people who are subscribed to me, should I even upload my animation? I mean, it's audience will not appreciate it, so why bother even putting it out there? In any case, all comments pertaining to Mechanics Vs. Aliens, or complaining in general about the lack of RCT3 videos, will be immediately removed. If you would just watch with an open mind you might like what you see.

I would appreciate people letting me know that they understand. If you are a YouTube user who does not regularly comment here, I'd appreciate it if you would comment here-just once-to let me know that you pay attention to my blog AND my YouTube channel. Perhaps I should start making announcements on YouTube as well, so people know what is going on.

Lots of Stuff

Lots of stuff is going on in my life right now, including preparing to go to college-hopefully to study film and animation. In order to apply to many film schools, I need a portfolio. So, I am currently producing an animation to go in this portfolio. It's not taking long to make, so I'll be back to The Battle for Axis Mundi soon. I am also including clips from Axis Mundi in the portfolio, so I am kinda working on a billion things at once.

If anyone out there has a problem with all of these other projects - specifically, fans of Mechanics Vs. Aliens - then please: I am sick and tired of people whining about it. I can't stand all of the "where's MVA ep. 6?!11?!" comments. If you are truly a fan of the series, could you have a little patience, and just be happy that I have said that I am going to make more? If you can't do that, then please just don't say anything. Thank you.

And now for the few people out there who care about more than just Mechanics Vs. Aliens, here are some screen shots from my animation:

As you can probably tell, it is about a car racing.

That's all for now.

Running Man

Alright, the new animation is up! It's called "Running Man." It is 40 seconds long. I'll let you watch it, then I'll give you some specs:

This animation took about 1 week to animate, 20 hours to render, and few minutes to edit. Youtube is getting really amazing quality wise. There is hardly any difference between the HD version of this youtube video and the .avi that is on my hard drive.

Speaking of Youtube video quality, I don't know what I am going to do about this 1080p stuff. I mean, I don't have a full HD camcorder, and I don't have a full HD monitor. I really can't produce anything that is 1080p. I guess I'll just live with 720p for a while.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the video. Let me know what you think!

The Blender animation is on it's way

So I stayed up until 3:30am on Friday night finishing the animation, I rendered it on Saturday, and I'm just doing a very small amount of editing and the video should be up later today. Seeya then!

A new Blender animation

Today I finally got the legs on my boxman rig working properly, and I can finally announce this animation that I am doing. It's basically the character from the "Awesome Boxman" video running around and jumping and stuff. I'm not going to be making music for this. Instead I'll be using someone else's music (evil, aren't I?) to cut down on the time it takes to make it. I am shooting for under a week.

Here's a fully rendered frame from the first shot:

Hope you like it!