You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't quit the game...

Another week down, and another blog to write. At least this week has been different than last week. Last week so much was going on that that I hardly had time to think, let alone write a blog entry (which obviously I missed). Yet through all that I got an incredible amount done. This week has been just the opposite. Every time I sit down to work on this project something comes up. I had planned on coming home from work Friday to work on the film. Unfortunately work was hellish and I simply came home to crawl into bed. I figured I would start again on Saturday. Not a problem.

Saturday comes, and my wife wants to spend time with me before going to her parents. That's fine, I can spare a few hours. But then she gets the “day off” so that we can spend time together. Don't get me wrong, I love spending time with my wife, but I do have work to do. In the name of domestic tranquility – and everything she's been through last week – I spend the day with her and not the project. Not good, but what are you going to do?

Which brings us to Sunday. I have one other course, which occasionally I get homework for, and this was one of those weekends. I spent Sunday perfecting the look and techniques I'll be using for my Senior Capstone film. Which I will have a chance to make, if and only if I can get through Exit Strategy.

That brings us to Monday morning, wherein I find that I have overwritten several key files and spend three hours attempting to recover them – successfully – from my hard drive. Of course, then I have to stop and go to class to deliver the stuff I worked on Sunday, drive back in some nasty traffic, have a rushed dinner, and start working on Exit Strategy again. I start to animate a quick little sequence in After Effects for Hugh's face and it takes less than half and hour to complete. Hurray, I'm actually getting somewhere...

...no, no I'm not.

I spend the next hour and a half fighting with Maya over why it won't accept the image sequence I have rendered (and rendered, and rendered, and re-rendered, and....GAH!!!). Having searched and searched for an answer online, I finally notice something odd about the format of the file names that After Effects is putting out. They've got an underscore where a period should be. I change that, and everything works perfectly.

Awesome. I take a break from that, to render out some playblasts to start creating a working file for the team, and I start to see some oddities in the lengths of the shots we're setting up...

It never ends.

I'm going to post this, bang my head on the desk for a while, then get back to work. Until next time, stay tuned.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

In some ways this has been a better week than the last few, and we're moving ahead with the film, but we're still running into problems. On the plus side all the models are done, the scenery is all textured and lite, and we got textures on all the characters. The initial beauty shots of the characters in the rooms look very promising! Additionally, in the last class couple of classes the three of us had the opportunity to work together to resolve problems we were having in skinning characters. I think that helped - there was a little bit of bonding going on as we made it work.

At least, I hope so.

So this week we've gotten our assets together, created a master timing sheet, and are started to block out animation for the first 32 shots of the film. Additionally, I've done a test of the 2D animation that will go on the character's faces (see the link to youtube above for the test footage). It all looks good, things are moving ahead, and we might actually get this completed on time.

And now for the bad news.

In doing the test facial animation, and doing the blocking I've discovered a couple of things. One, the way we projected the UVs onto the characters doesn't work. The projections don't "stick" to the model and the image stays in place as the character moves. Secondly, I've found that the fingers on the characters are very tough to work. I'm not sure if this is a result of the mel script that created the bone structure o short cuts that were taken in building the characters. Finally, I pointed out a mistake all of us made in working on the characters - none of us included a name tag on St. Peter, Anubis, or Buddha. Hopefully we can resolve both of these issues quickly and re-reference the fixed characters back into the scenes. If not, our animation schedule will be out the window, and that's something I don't even want to think about.

We'll keep pushing on. Hopefully things will start smoothing out. Until next time, stay tuned...

Has It Been A Week? Feels Like A Year...

I just had an 'oh crap!' moment and realized that I needed to get another blog entry in before midnight. So, here it is...

It's been a long week. Not because of what I mentioned in my previous blog - that goes without saying. But I've put in long hours again this week and I don't know that I've gotten any where. No, I take that back. I have achieved one thing at least: I have come to realize that Maya doesn't make me angry any more. Maybe it's because I've finally had enough practice to know what I'm doing (in most cases), or because I'm better at getting correct responses from my Google searches when I run into problems. Either way, working with Maya now is no where near as rage inducing as it used to be.

What is rage inducing is the amount of work that has to be done on this project.

Which brings me to the first 'confrontation' the group had. After reviewing my time-book with my instructor I was told to make sure that Jim and Adam are doing their part too. I shouldn't be the only one stepping up and making this happen. I was to be responsible for this. So, I went back to them and asked how many hours they had put into the project. When I let them know that I had doubled or tripled their amounts, Adam was stunned and responded as I had expected. He would work harder. Jim, on the other hand, took great offense to this. When he confronted me at the next class, he was so frustrated that I thought he might cry. Well, the manager in me wanted to say 'suck it up.' But I've had that level of frustration and I was definitely not in the mood for a confrontation. I did my best to smooth things over, but I'm not sure it worked. I feel like the outsider on this team, and probably rightly so. I'm just frustrated by the situation, and don't have the tools to be able to communicate what I want to them.

I don't like being a team leader. I have always preferred to work as a second in charge. I do a much better job in support than in leading. But in this case I have no choice. I don't really want to go back and read the 'Minute Manager,' but maybe I have to. Until next week, stay tuned...

Challenges

Challenges. We all face them. Whether it is simply coming up with the desire to get out of bed or dealing with a world shattering problem, everyone on the planet deals with challenges. How we face them determines what kind of human being we are. Now, needless to say I've faced my own share, and coming into this class I thought that the biggest challenge I was going to face this semester was getting this short animated film, “Exit Strategy” done on time.

I was wrong.

In the midst of panicking over whether I could get props modeled for the film yesterday, I received a phone call that sent all my concerns and worries completely out the window. My father-in-law had been placed in the hospital following a “cardio event.” That is bad enough, but in this case it's worse – he has a preexisting, terminal condition and there is nothing to be done for him except to make him as comfortable as possible.

This is a worst case scenario come to life.

I've spent most of this night working on models, and discovering that I have actually learned something about Maya in all my time spent in college. I've successfully finished a number of pieces for the film, but failed to complete all models necessary for my first goal. That's incredibly frustrating to me. Yet in pushing pixels around I have really been wondering whether this film is that important. I mean in terms of fulfilling my end of the film making team, and getting a good grade, and learning, and practicing, what I'm doing is important. But in terms of my wife, her family, and her father – what's the point of a comedy about the after life? And that, right there, is my challenge: determining what is the most important thing to do from everything I face, and doing the best I can at it.

Work on the film is done for tonight. I'm going to post this and go to bed. I have a feeling that this is going to be a very long semester.

Post 000

This is a test. This is nothing but a test. Had this been real emergency, we would all be dead by now.