"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!

Yo dawg, I heard you like image processing.

So we put image processing in your image processing so you can image process while you image process.

That's basically the gist of Adobe Premiere, which is now my favorite NLE, bar none. I would say it was worth the $350 that I shelled out for it. I can now do the same video effects that I had to use multiple programs for (Ulead and Blender), in one video program. I also don't have to render any intermediate files, and the end result is - to my pleasant surprise - significantly better than before! And don't even get me started on the unlimited audio tracks. Ulead Video Studio 11 Plus only had 2. Yep, 2 audio tracks. And Premiere has an unlimited number. I love Premiere!!!

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.

Cruddy News

I'm going to have to RMA my laptop. Again. A few weeks ago my graphics card wigged out, and it did it again yesterday. It's definitely dying; the symptoms could not be attributed to anything else. So I'm going to have to go a few weeks with out it. Again. If I weren't so frustrated, I'd say that I'm lucky that all of my parts are failing while my laptop is still under warranty.

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.

Complete Success

I totally just imported the model into RCT3. And it worked freaking perfectly. I am happy.

I know it must have been strange reading my posts. Since I have not given much away about this model, you've had to go on basically nothing. Sorry about that.

Anyways, it is now fully imported! All my test animations work perfectly. I just have to texture it and it will be complete. I love conquering stuff. Or rather.... I like at the end when you get to step on the back of your foe's head, smashing his face into the dirt, as you strike a badass pose and gloat about how great you are and how much he sucks.

It just came to me

I think I have figured it out. And I don't see how I could possibly be wrong this time. You can't have a vertex belong to more than 4 vertex groups. That's what causes the error. I think I need to add this information to my RCT3 Animation tutorial. I should be given a medal or something for figuring this out.

I will report back when I have configured the model properly to conform to this quirky rule.