title… title.. always needing a title here?

Sometimes I just can’t think of a title to put up there!

Anyways, last week I was thinking of finishing my presentation project for career prep class with Liam right away and present tomorrow, Monday, since I would like to get it over with… but after some thinking and Liam talking to Katie and other stuff like that, we decided “why rush when we have 3 weeks to finish it?” and well, we aren’t going to present tomorrow…

Then on Tuesday I think we start the Compositing ‘half class in, half class out’ thing with Mac.

I have created a schedule for myself from the most important assignments to the least important assignments! First, my previs and colour scheme which I believe is due on Wednesday. I planned out all my camera shots on paper, now I just have to do them!

Then I’ve got an animation fight/dance sequence due Friday.

Next, I need to unwrap and texture my junkyard for texturing class and then I must unwrap, texture, light and render the candles scene for my production class.

Then there is also the character I must do for my design class! I need to make a proper character sheet for the soldier uniform and start working on it.

Oh yeah! also on Friday I helped Max from the other class make the boobs on his model. It was my first attempt at making boobs and I think I did a swell job =) All that drawing and knowing that boobs are ‘tear shaped’ and point ‘slightly to the side’ since women breast-feed and all was all helpful because real women don’t have boobs that stick straight out like Austin Powers fem-bots…

One more thing! Russel, the program head, said that my colour scheme should be more muted because in Regency everything is gaudy, the furniture, the decorations etc. so the colour scheme should be muted to balance everything.

-Sharon

industry night and demo starting

Industry night last Wednesday was interesting.  The industry people were pretty much ‘concealing’ themselves among the crowd.  A lot of the class didn’t show up o industry night though… but there were a lot more animators than here in this class.

Devon’s demo reel was really popular and I think Morgan’s demo really turned out looking good (of course he still wans to work on it and actually get the entire story in).  I collected a copy of all my friends’ demos at the end of the night.

During the evening I collected EVERYONES’ business card so I could study the designs.  Overall the New Media and Design students had WAY nicer business cards (well that’s obvious, that’s what THEIR expertise is!) I’m going to get some of my friends in the New Media program to help me with mine =D

I helped Simon make his business card although I haven’t had time to scan it yet… (been totally on and off sick this past week *sigh)

On Saturday I managed to make Morgan’s head which I plan on using for my demo reel!  But I am not happy with this head… so I’m going to make it again! The more I make Morgan’s head, the better I’m going to get at making Morgan’s head.

-Sharon

animation and more wordpress troubles…

I just found a ‘draft’ post that I hadn’t actually posted yet… from 2-3 weeks ago!  Aw man, I seem to be having tonnes of trouble with wordpress *sigh

Well anyways, with my hard drive suddenly deciding to corrupt itself and losing all my work I seem to have been having less and less time…

Well I had to redo the pre-vis for project portfolio class and the head for design class and the junkyard for texturing class and also the animation for animation class… well the blocking in was due this week.  I got an extension for the head.

Well, I’ll be working real hard this weekend for sure.

I’m glad I”m making friends with the kids in the New Media program  hehe, now I know people who can help me out with making business cards and a website!

Animation is getting easier and easier and now that I learned how to do ‘blocking in’ and ‘previs’ properly it’s all good!

-Sharon

Networking…

No, not computer networking, networking as in meeting people… I got exactly 40 when I finished my list of everyone who might be immediately involved and then I can branch out from there.

I’m glad I know a bunch of the New Media students as well as a bunch from the April group and the other class.  Well, I hope the guys I know from the April group get jobs, then I’ll have contacts who are part of a company hehe.

I guess the real obvious form of ‘networking’ I’ve been involved with recently was when I gave in to paid advertising for my comic.  I signed up to project wonderful and put my comic up on 4 different comics also on drunkduck and my pagehits skyrocketed to over 7000 in the first day (my average is about 300) and now it has settled down a little and my pagehits are averaging between 1000-1500.  My rank in the site is now well within the top 50 (out of 9000+ comics, I’m rather proud… although I’m happy that I managed to get into the top 100 without any sort of paid advertisement)

I also went home this week for my spring break and well, I took SO MANY pictures of both Beacon Hill and Mt. Doug (got pictures of some ducks trying to mate with one female so they were fighting).  The portfolio teacher said to take lots of of pictures and look at them for composition purposes.  Katie (she used to be a professional photographer) said that they were supposed to take 60 pictures for 1 good one.  Like all my teachers say, if you take 20, 40, 200 pictures, you’re bound to like at least 1.

-Sharon

my first head

This is the first head I’ve ever made, I think it turned out well. The teacher said the lady had her head tilted in the front view so it looks a little off but overall I love it

and the wireframe

-Sharon

Jung personality type and much trouble with combustion

In Career Prep class yesterday, we did a whole lot of quizzes like “how well do you work with others” and “working in teams” that sort of thing since we’ll be working in teams for industry etc.

Another quiz we did was a personality type assessment using Jung’s studies… so I’m an ENFJ ‘coach’ type… this is apparently very common among this industry.  Here are some links we looked at in class http://typelogic.com/enfj.html and http://www.teamtechnology.co.uk/workingoutyourteamrole2.htm

I think it describes me uncannily well… the teacher also said that the ‘coach’ type and the ‘crusader’ type (ISFP and INFP) are also common among industry and are similar to the ‘coach’ type… but I don’t think my personality quite agrees with that…the crusader type has a strong sense of convictions and value but I think I’m pretty malleable in that sense considering that I tend to adopt others’ values and ideas if they have a good argument/ logic to  it.

Then we got a ‘group project’ and we’re supposed to make a presentation ‘selling an idea’.  I’ve decided to work with Liam and we’re going to simulate presenting a character design idea to a group of peers.

Meanwhile, today in Compositing class I’m having troubles with Combustion… well not so much Combustion as Maya first of all… Maya for some reason was refusing to render tga files and would repeatedly render in iff and I would check and recheck my render settings and even left my render settigns window open while batch rendering so maybe if it was visually there, maya would clue in to the fact that it is SET to render in TGA!!! After much more fiddling (and grief) I finally got it all to render in tga by glaring at the computer and stating that I would hurt it severely if it did NOT render in tga… honestly I checked and rechecked my settings and that’s all I did different.

I was reminded of this quantum physics documentary I watched and they had this experiment where they put labels like ‘love’ and harmony’ on bottles of water and later, the water had different patterns on a molecular level… so lately I’ve been doing things like naming and petting my external hard drive to make sure it still knows I depend and care about it… one might ask the question “Is it working?” and I might answer “Well I think so, and even if it IS all in my head, I don’t think it will be detrimental to the hard drive so I’ve got nothing to lose doing it other than my ‘sanity credibility’ among people who happen to observe me doing it.” I mean like… my Animation teacher pets the computer screen all the time (in jest I think) and it gets a laugh out of the class so… it’s all good.

Back to Combustion… well my particle effects disappeared and then when I got a classmate to come over to help me, suddenly the particles were THERE!  Obviously the computer program goes “teeheehee, I’m not going to work because you aren’t very familiar with what you are doing! … wait, oh nos! you are bringing over someone with experience! Ok, I’ll do what you say now…”

-Sharon

advancement?

akt! I tried to take screenshots of my first completed head ever on maya but for some reason it wouldn’t go into ‘shaded’ mode on my laptop! I suppose I’ll just have to wait to do that *sigh

On the other hand, on Thursday I spent literally hours looking up reference at the library for stuff on Regency and Napoleonic soldier uniforms etc. Then Friday in animation class we got our new project, another lip-sync! I actually really love the lip sync stuff, it’s fun and after the teacher showed us the 11-second-club I got pretty excited! I wanted a more human rig since generi and bloke, while pretty good rigs are very oddly proportioned… so I thought maybe I’d use the ‘Andy’ rig but he/she is ‘broken’ sorta… the hips don’t move very well… but I guess I can deal with that… Either way, they inspired me to like animation again.

My friend Alan got a job in Toronto as a rigger (his official title is junior animator, though) I asked him if he had any rigs with human proportions but he didn’t since he said ‘humans are boring, I have bipeds though…’ I also learned that the average for entry level employees in this industry is about 40,000 a year and that’s all pretty good.

I learned another thing about a classmate of mine, Russel, he’s a model and has walked runways and was in Vancouver fashion week… this stuff is backup for when he ages out of modeling… our animation teacher said ‘well that’s pretty easy for a resume, just put a dash and an e-r at the end… model or model-er’

On another note, I suddenly want to play ‘Harvest Moon’ again… the Snes and the GBA versions…

-Sharon

rendering x3

This week really WAS rendering x3… we have a production assignment due tomorrow and all week I have spent lighting separating into layers and rendering a scene in 3 shots in 3 passes… object layer, shadow pass and ambient occlusion pass.  I finally got everything to work on all the settings I needed *jumps for joy* I don’t think I’ll ever forget how to render in passes again but really, what gave me he most trouble was caustics!  It’s supposed to be simple: get my key light to emit photons and turn on caustics in the render editor and wait forever for the render to happen because caustics make everything slow… but it refused to work and I asked the teacher on Sunday but he couldn’t get it to work either >.> and none of my classmates could get it to work… so the teacher taught me ‘fake caustics’ which is apparently what most people do anyways because it’s so much faster… so my scene is rendered with fake caustics heh.

Now I just need to composite it all together and add some music and some credits and it’s all good!

Now, in other news, we got to learn how to do some facial rigging in animation class!  I will take screen shots and post them up when I can…

I have also mostly finalized my demo reel idea, I have talked to my teachers about it and now I’ve decided to do a Napoleonic themed demo.  My 3D design teacher said he’d never seen a demo reel with Napoleon in it so that actually sounds a whole lot more doable than the Russian revolution because I know more about it.

-Sharon

trouble with wordpress and demo panicking….

well yes… I had some trouble with wordpress…. wasn’t accepting my password for some unknown reason and then the ’email a new password’ wasn’t working… after checking the forums I realized that I was not the only one suffering from the same ailment… it took me a few tries on a couple different computers and finally I have gotten back in *whew* and now I have forgotten about what I was originally going to blog about that time -_-

Now, on to the second part of my title… demo panicking, now, how I can I panic about demos when it’s barely 2nd semester? Well, I want my idea finalized so that I can really start to work on it… and also my friend in the April group are demo panicking…

I think my original idea with the rhythmic gymnast isn’t going to work around what I built around it (funny that) kind of like how ‘devil may cry’ started out as the next ‘resident evil’ but deviated enough that they didn’t want to use it as an ‘RE’ title and made a new franchise instead of scrapping the idea… SOOO, hospital room and hallway and outside of building, along with a patient, a nurse and 2 russian revolutionaries… the references for the building and environments will be taken from Dr. Zhivago once I get a hold of a copy and I shall run this idea by all of my teachers.

-Sharon

Ambient Occlusion (aka, shading)

Well today in production class we learned all about ambient occlusion and the benefits of rendering objects and shadows etc. in different layers and NOT just for saving time! Now I also know what ambient occlusion is and how it is different from ‘shadows’… and a whole lot of other technical stuff that surprisingly makes sense! I’m not going to talk too much more about that as that would be like… rewriting all my notes >.>

*gee I didn’t realize this didn’t publish when I put it up.. must have pressed ‘save’ instead of ‘publish’ so anyways… this was written on tuesday and really should come before the previous post XD