I’m now sold on using blender for a long time. I have many reasons now, including the following:
The only complaint many people have is the interface. After going through a brief number of tutorials, I’m used to the interface and am sold on how it works. Everybody really did something right.
I finished up my final animation over last weekend. I had a screening of a rushed version last Friday. It still went well and the audience laughed in the places I hoped they would. It’s exciting to have a large number of people all in one room watching your own work. I will be putting up my video player on Untold Voyage tonight.
I also added a visual pun using only Trajan as my typeface for all titles. I actually like the typeface a lot. However, some poor souls are getting sick of it since it is used for almost every movie out there. My video player will have something most others usually don’t, subtitles. I actually implemented something similar to a project I had when I used to work for my university’s athletic department. Well, until the next post…
Last week I was assigned the task of designing a character. I was watching Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride and wanted to base it off those forms. And so, Timmy was born. He is a character from a cartoon a friend and I have been wanting to make for a long time. I had started drawing all the characters in the Simpson’s style. I’m now starting to lean towards this style more than the other. In any case, I’m making a cutout animation with the character this week, and will have something made by Monday. This is all being done in Flash.
In other news, I and some friends are entering the 24 hour film competition for Apple called Insomnia. We’re making a musical, and this should turn out wonderful if all works out this week. Midterms are just around the corner and assignments keep being delivered by the teachers. It’s a good week.
I’m not sure how half a month went by so fast. We reviewed regular expressions and went over context free grammars in compilers class. The traditional animation class has us designing characters this week. I have decided to work on a character from Doomination, and perhaps animate him in my final project. His name is Timmy. He’s a tiny little kid who is obsessed with coffee. More to come on that.
I’m getting together with some film friends, and we are entering the 24 hour competition that Apple is sponsoring. If you aren’t familiar, it is called Insomnia.
Well, I’ve come back from the dead once more. Here are screenshots of my final project for the semester. We had to write a town using openGL, from scratch. Obviously we only had about one week to actually work on the project. I made all the models in maya, except for the zombie. Thank you psionic 3d. I also found out the limitations of milkshape. For example, forget about importing any animation or rigging into milkshape.
I had my last two finals of the semester yesterday. So, I’m going to go see a movie. I think I’ll try out The Pursuit of Happyness. Should be good to see Will Smith play a different role from his normal comic style.
Howdy. You’re probably wondering where I’ve been for the last month. Well, I survived those three midterms I mentioned. I received a good grade on the image editor I had to write. Also, I was assigned a project to create a roller coaster that could be built in “real-time.” I used OpenGL and fltk to build the program. I had to do everything from scratch. So, I had to define a curve for the track and figure out how to orient cars of the roller coaster to the track. I spent over 90 hours in about a week’s time. It was a ton of work, and I guess I don’t mind the punishment because I’m signing up for a games class next semester.
My final project for this semester will be to build a city. It’s meant to be an experiment with both texturing and modeling. However, we are supposed to have multiple “entities” moving about. The professor will hopefully be nice and provide the base code that was given the last time the class was taught. It already has some very simple cars moving about on the roads of a little residential district. Although, the texturing sucks for the base code.
Link of the Day Creative Cow Forums
I spent most of yesterday evening working on a script. I’m nearing the halfway mark to finishing the first draft. It’s a twenty minute episode of a tv series project that I’ve been working on with a friend for the past year. I really want to go see Cars tonight, but I probably won’t. I was messing with Maya’s cloth this afternoon. It’s being unforgiving to me. I hope I can get it working so we can have some sweet cloth theater curtains. I’ll post it once I get it working. Brazil made it through their first game of the World Cup today.
I’m also writing an in browser image editor for the redesign at work. We’re storing the images in the database, in columns that are named “BLOBS.” All right, that’s it! I’m going to see Cars. I should’ve yesterday. My own projects can wait. I like “researching” the art too. Have a good week.
I’ve successfully messed around with the generi rig that most people are using to learn how to animate with maya. So, I’ll hopefully have enough time this month to learn the ins and outs of the rig, as well as animate a 10 second clip from Planes Trains and Automobiles.
