Excited

Today I got to polish off those 200 frames of animation I was talking about, and I imported them into RCT3 and filmed them. And.... oh man this film is gonna be awesome. I can't help but be excited at this point in the production. I guess that it's normal to be excited when everything is starting to come together.

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!

First Animated Scene

The past few days have been exciting because I have been doing the first animated scene in The Battle for Axis Mundi. The animation isn't too complicated for this particular scene, which is definitely a good thing as I am still learning the ropes of animation itself.

Although I have been getting some work done, some days are hampered a bit by me endlessly trawling through the sea of TV Tropes. If you don't know what TV Tropes is, then you should find out. It's Crazy Awesome.

The future is now

I feel really accomplished today. Why? Because I fixed all of the problems with my imported animations. The Warrior of Light is now 100% ready to kick Evil's butt. He is fully modeled, textured, and rigged, and, as of today, totally bug free. He looks EXACTLY like the peep I chose to play the Warrior of Light. I don't know if I have ever accomplished a goal this perfectly. It works exactly like I imagined. Speculation is now reality. What used to be the distant future is now the very real present.

Back in March of last year, I wrote an post that I entitled "The Future of RCT3 Machinima." By far, it has been my most viewed blog post over the last year (Good suggestion CzWorld!). In it, I talked a lot about Animated CSOs. Basically, I considered them to be the "final frontier" of RCT3 Machinima. At the time, though, I wasn't sure if it was possible to implement animations like I dreamed of doing. Today, I have confirmed that it is indeed..... very possible. The outer limit of what I thought might be possible, is now possible. It's the best case scenario.

Sometime this year, all of this ranting about how awesome animated CSOs are will come to fruition, and I'll release The Battle for Axis Mundi. In the best case scenario the film will be released this summer. Wait, I already said this was the best case scenario, didn't I? Well then, in the best case scenario of the best case scenario.

Back to work

So, since my Christmas vacation is coming to an end, it's time to start working on Axis Mundi again. What I am working on right now is adjusting the brightness of my WOL textures. They look great when I render them in Blender (see here and here) but they are too dark when they are rendered in RCT3 (sorry, no screenshots of that). I am also having a little trouble with my custom animations. Currently, whenever I import something animated, it's size changes to about 3 times what it should be. However, if the model is not animated, then it is the correct size. I have a theory about how to fix this that I will be attempting later today.

In Christmas present news, I got a pair of noise cancelling headphones, and a Blu-ray/DVD of Inception (great film!). I gotta say that I can't actually notice the noise cancelling in my noise cancelling headphones when it is turned on. What I DO notice when I turn it in, is an AWESOME bass boost, and a large over-all increase in the quality of the sound. This is some of the best sound I've ever heard, even outside of headphones. I used them to mull over a rough cut of The Battle for Axis Mundi, and they helped me catch mistakes in the audio that I missed on my computer speakers.