Friday, September 17, 2021

What am I Working on This Week? 09/17/21

    There's been a lot going on over the past two weeks, and this is the place I talk about it. Hooray, let's look at those things.

    I did a few things with pencil and paper. Let's look at those.
    Above is the concept art I made for an in-progress version of the time machine. I feel like it isn't necessarily something we'll have time for in the short, possibly an illustration, but probably not more than that. Brett had an idea of how I can jump off from here. Blueprints of the machine that we can have sitting somewhere, On his desk, on the wall, in the machine, somewhere. That's going to be something for future work.
    To the right is a short idea for storyboards. When Xander goes back in time, I had the idea that the picture that would have caused his flashback to how he and Emily met would be on the desk near the time machine. The camera watches the picture frame with the time machine disappearing in the background. when the machine disappears, the photo fades from being one of Xander and Emily, to one of... something else. Maybe Xander at a party... Maybe a puppy... Maybe Paul and his godsawful mullet? That would be... something... to say the least.

    Now lets look at the digital stuff I worked with. All items will be in the Laboratory scene (also can I complain again about the formatting on the insertion of pictures in Blogger? It kind of bothers me...)
    This is the Breakthrough Prize. It is a science award given for Fundamental Physics, Mathematics, and Life Sciences. It also has the WEIRDEST design to it and that took me, like, 9 hours to figure out. But eventually I did, with the new Sweep Mesh tool, which is SO COOL. It creates a nurb curve with a polygon attached, and when you stretch the curve it lengthens the poly to stay along the lines of the curve.
    This is a chair. This particular chair was made by Gabe for a short animation. Not sure which one, but this chair is rigged and pretty cool. But with the deep cushion and the arch support and the high headrest, the chair is very obviously a gamer's chair...
    Which isn't really Xander's style, so I gave Gabe's chair a once over. There's still a bit of cradling in the backrest, and I might have to deal with that in the future, but we're doing pretty good here. Little bit of work to do... But it is still rigged nicely. I'm about it.
    A computer monitor. It's simple. This was modeled by Gabe, and we're reallocating it for Xander's desk. I resized it a bit and zeroed its spacing to the zero point. May need to tweak in the future as needed, but we'll look at it on the desk in the lab to see.
    This is another Gabe model. I uh, haven't actually done anything with it besides set it to the zero coordinates. I do have plans to create a separate numpad based on the same design., but that is something I'll get to later this week
    Also, turns out me and Gabe have the same keyboard, but his does the RGB shifting thing, whereas mine stays red, which is annoying... I like the color shift. That's beside the point.

    Anyway, I am at a point right now where I need to figure out how to reallocate my time with being back in college. I'm starting to slip behind in almost all of my class work, not just this. and this still strikes me as more important than other classes, what with it being a direct line into future careers. 
    I also need to find time to work on my own projects. Work school life balance should be a thing, and I'm too much into the work and life portion right now. Need to reallocate.

Friday, September 3, 2021

What Did I Do?

 So... Summer was a thing that happened. And to be totally honest, it was not as eventful as it should have been, especially not on the production front (though I did take a nice General Astronomy course over the summer, that was pretty great). But now it's time to start buckling down and finishing this project. So first thing's first, a list of items I'm currently working on. We're plugging away:

  1. Concept art for the time machine
  2. Ideas for pictures to tell the flashback story
  3. Miscellaneous items for various scenes (including but not limited to)
    • The PPoS
    • Science awards
      • Breakthrough Prize
      • National Medal of Science
      • Milennium Technology Prize
      • The Nobel Prize
    • Other things probably
 This past week (how has it already been a week?) I started and scrapped the PPoS 3 different times. I don't know if I was being hypercritical of the work, or if it was actually bad, but I'm starting to find a school/production/work/life balance. Hopefully I'll be able to keep that shit up all semester.

 Anyway, in the first week we came up with a new direction for the short, that the whole team seems to be excited about (and we don't have to animate talking, thank the gods). With the Help of Brett and Howard, we decided to go a little more(?) emotional with the story, but that does mean that we need to start adding and removing content to make it different. We'll get there, and it'll be fine.

 Also, Tom hooked us into a thing called Monday and we're going to be using it for the time being to keep on track, and it's going to be great. Have I said that too much? Maybe I have.

This is not a 2 page .pdf

Less Than Two Weeks Left

 This one's going to be short and sweet since we're less than 14 days out. We've been going hard on animating the last couple we...