You can't handle the truth

The last few evenings have been somewhat disappointing personally, as I made minimal progress, but also didn't feel as though I took a break and I'm ready to come back refreshed. I dithered around with things that only had peripheral influence on this project; animated perlin noise and a new (to me) program, context free art. While I think both will be useful in future animations, I really need to get some movement on this project. I look forward to the weekend, where I intend to have an ani-fest and concentrate on actual animation: movement of parts and setting key-frames.

Round up the usual suspects

Another evening of marginal progress. Another scene started, some research into texture animation. It seems I just don't get much done during the week. I was thinking this mornning, a good target would be to complete the animation this weekend. That's still a big target, but I think it's achievable. In order to do that, I think I need to clear everything else out of the way, so I can concentrate only on animation.

All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up

Didn't do that much last night, but did learn more about camera mapping, which I think would give me a quick way to move from concept art to 3d model in future projects. Also added a logo with UV projection, which helped get the anchor into the story in this project and again should help my workflow in future projects.

I think tomorrow I need to concentrate on working out the missing blocks so I can really put all the animation pieces together.

Play it, Sam

I had expected this weekend to do some hard thinking and come up with a new plan. But instead, I just plodded on, adding some extra complexity, coming up with an alternate way to introduce one of the props and reduce the complexity, but most of all did some learning and managed to overcome an obstacle that had been blocking me for a while.

The problem was that I was trying to co-ordinate two animated events by hand, one of which was directly dependent on the other. It was the judge jumping in the bouncy castle and the castle movement in response to that. I realized that I needed to make the castle's movement automatically depend on the bouncing, as hand keying the animation was not flexible enough. This took me a huge amount of time, as I just couldn't get my head around the transform constraint, but I think I have something that works and a much better understanding of how the constraint works.

Also, I'm making strides understanding the non-linear editor, but I still need to go back and fix some things in my animation there.

The complexity I added was with some boid particles and for the screen time that they'll allow me to add, I think the complexity is probably worth it.

As for a grand plan ... I'm not sure, I think I'll just carry on like this for a while and see if I can make progress towards a finish.

I'm a bit stuck on an opening title too. I did some tests on something that looked quite satisfying, but doesn't really fit the mood of the rest, so back to the drawing board.

Go ahead, make my day

It's rather fitting that on the second deadline of 20 days, I did nothing in the evening. Instead, I headed out to the Sacramento Drink and Draw, which as always was refreshing and interesting.

So where do I go from here? I could just run on without deadline and complete it when it is done. But that sounds rather dangerous. Perhaps the best thing is to take stock after this weekend and figure out a new plan, since weekends are key. While I inch forward during the week, the weekend is the time I make real progress. So far I've had 3 (plus an extra day for memorial day).

There a couple of things I feel sure of:

1. I feel a drive to complete this and I believe I will complete it in the near future

2. I still believe it is feasible to do a short in 10 days, though I would like to complete a project in something a lot closer to 10 days to make sure I have the right approach and ingredients.

I shot an elephant in my pajamas

Not much progress in the early part of this evening, but it was moving forward. When I started the animating phase, I'd do a whole bunch of movements keyframes, and curve tweaks, and it would get better and better until I did something that had unintended consequences and I couldn't fix it without adding a load of corrective keyframes, which I could never get smooth. This evening, even though I was moving slowly, I seemed to be getting the hang of it, and anything that did go wrong I could track down the source fairly quickly and correct it. But it was still very slow. It seems in all other areas, you can cut corners, fake things, but the animation part it just seems it takes as long as it takes. I hadn't realized how much time this would suck up.

So to try and be a little more effective, I went back and did some reading on the non-linear action editor and I feel a lot better about it now and I hope to move a little quicker tomorrow. I have also got over the hump I had been trying to get over for a few days with cyclic actions, but with an extra layer on top.

Maybe that 10 day period is not achievable after all, but then I did stray from my original idea of using mattes and cutouts and everything is 3d. I hope to get another shot at a dummy run (assuming I can finish this one), so maybe I can figure it out with that. Perhaps I may finish it this weekend when I have more time? Anyway, I'm on Day 19 (of 10) and there's no way it's going to be finished for 20. Once that deadline is gone, I have no other targets, I just need to make sure I'm making progress and that I actually see it through. It might even help the quality as maybe I'll tweak some more stuff before it's done. But I musn't do that until I have completed all areas. Having a section ready for render but bad is better than not having it ready for render.

I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore

Bit of a stalled night. Couldn't seem to knuckle down early on, and then when I did, I got stuck in trying to patch some cyclic actions together, so the project is essentially no further on, but I've learned a lot more in the process and I think I'm getting away from the "lots of points" problem in the graphs. Even so the actions still aren't that smooth. I mustn't either lose heart, or let getting it right take a higher priority than getting it done, because I think that's why so many animation projects fail, or never get out of the stage of having a few walk cycles.

I did put a test up on youtube last night (not publicly) of a 1-second movement cycled 8 times and that was quite pleasant. Also I realized I was missing motion blur (a la vector blur) and that made it seem much more palatable.

I will finish this, I will.