Work in progress: April 2008 Archives

So April is almost over and I'm still modeling the bathroom. Aggravating, but not a surprise considering last week was a total loss due to unnecessarily long work hours and some personal issues that needed taking care of. Things are about to change for the better but making that change has required a great deal of attention lately, in addition to my being made the owner's personal designer on a last minute project on top of my already time-consuming duties. By the time the weekend got here I was exhausted and spent most of it sleeping. Now I'm up late again, but at least it's for the right reasons. I decided to do the subdivision surfaces tutorial tonight to remind myself of the workflow, and now I'm considering redoing the sink again. But not before I model the toilet. Then I'll consider it. Knowing me, I'll probably end up doing it. The faceted polygon approach taught me a lot but left me with... well... facets. And subdivision surfaces would probably serve me better.

I have a new schedule due to some of the changes about to take place in my life (which I can't talk about yet). One thing I know for sure is that I'm going to SIGGRAPH this year. I booked the flight and the hotel, but I'm waiting until closer to July to register so I can spread out the costs. It makes sense now to set my deadline for August, and that means I can relax a little and take my time doing this right. I can really make it good if I can keep from rushing through it. There is no longer a sense of urgency about this, although there is a definite desire to make consistent progress and not continue to lose entire weeks of my life due to others' lack of planning and respect for my time. I will explain everything in another month or so, but for now, just trust me. This is a good thing. I can't predict what will happen at work over the next few weeks, and there's a lot I can't control, but at least I've started again, and I'll keep going until the next stupid thing happens. One stupid thing at a time.

Ok, that's a pun. I'm not in the same frame of mind I was in my last entry, mainly because I've had sleep and I have tomorrow off. I'm sure I'll be right back to thrilled tomorrow night. However, I have yet to recover from the frustration of losing so much of last week on this project. Sometimes all it takes to feel better is to start working again, which I've done, but it's not enough this time. I was all set to get back to work Thursday night but we had lightning (and worse) all evening and I didn't feel like I should be working on the computer. So last week was shot, and this weekend is going fast. I wanted to have the whole bathroom modeled by the time I quit tonight but I don't. I should be happy with progress though, and I have made progress. I finished the sink model; it's posted in the slide show. I did start a second time on the sink bowl and I'm glad I did because the model makes a lot more sense now. I'm much happier with it than I was with my first attempt. I guess I am getting better--the bathtub took four tries and the sink only took two. Maybe I can get the toilet right the first time. Then there are faucets and a light fixture. After that, piece of cake. Right?

I ordered a book on mental ray and it came on Thursday, so I'm reading that when I get in bed at night. By the time I'm ready to do some real rendering I should have a decent grasp of it.

Worry is evil. Staying awake all night worrying that you won't get to an early morning meeting on time is ridiculous. But it's easy to do on the heels of two nights of questionable sleep for other equally stupid reasons--at that point, your brain is pretty much out of control. It's also easy to do when you have a 20 mile commute down a crowded highway and you feel like the people you work for are just waiting for you to screw up. So this is Wednesday and I feel like I've already worked a week... unfortunately, not on what I would like to. I was hoping to get back on the bathroom project tonight but I hit the wall early. I had to go get a prescription at 8 and I felt like I was too tired to drive to the CVS at the end of the block. But I managed to accomplish a little something anyway. I was finally able to add a "blog" link to all the pages of my site, which has been on my to-do list for some time. It was a good night to take care of some mindless tasks, including rearranging my schedule to accommodate my loss of sleep and inability to function. Hopefully I will make up for that tonight and feel normal again tomorrow, which can be described as frustrated, impatient, trapped in a seemingly endless negative work situation, but at least semi-conscious, depending on what time of day you ask me.

I got to the meeting on time, by the way. And I got my prescription. Gotta love allergy season.

So I reworked my schedule and now I only have milestones set for the bathroom project instead of all projects. When I finish that I'll schedule the next one, which will either be the car wash or the character. I'm determined to finish the modeling this weekend, and I'm thinking of starting over on the sink bowl. The pedestal is fine but I think the bowl can be better. Modeling isn't my specialty but I want to do it right, at least as right as possible.

I had an idea for a character today that's loosely based on my grandmother. It actually came from an idea I had for an animation last summer when she died--it was sort of a coping mechanism that helped me find humor in a bad situation. I let it go after a while without any real plans to produce it but I still think of it on occasion. My grandmother was someone who could always laugh at herself and would laugh even harder if you were laughing too. So in that spirit, I think my character will be a sort of affectionate caricature of her, one I hope she would appreciate and find funny. Stay tuned.

The main part of the bathtub is done! I learned (or re-learned) a lot about modeling this week just getting that one object finished. I'm wishing I had taken the week to go through the Maya tutorials instead, maybe I would have worked more efficiently. I'm impatient though. But the more I think about it, the better off I'll probably be if I do just that. It's better than starting a bunch of bad habits and getting stuck with them. Maybe I'll tackle some of those tutorials after dinner.

The tub is in the slide show on the bathroom page. I'll keep adding objects as I get them.

I'm working in Maya again! And I'm not as lost as I expected to be. However, I've tried to model the bathtub four different ways now. At least I feel like the fourth one is the charm. I just have a sliver of a tub but I think I finally have the right approach. Hopefully I can finish it tomorrow night and get going on the rest of the room. I had a feeling my first deadline wouldn't be realistic, but I'm still hopeful that I can have the room modeled by the end of the weekend. I might not be able to rest on Friday night though.

Major client presentation tomorrow, must sleep now. How annoying.

Well, I made a schedule. I doubt it's realistic but it keeps me moving. In fact, I took an example from the day job and signed up for a free account with Basecamp. It's an online project management system that lets me track to do lists and milestones for my project, and it emails me 48 hours before a milestone is due. Pretty cool huh. I set up all my to do lists and milestones today and now that it's all written down somewhere and saved, I feel like I have a better handle on it. Even if it's crazy. For example, I'm trying to get this all done by the end of May, despite the fact that I'm lucky if I have 3 hours in an evening to work. I'm putting a lot of pressure on my weekends and I'm even trying to take Friday nights off, but I have a feeling I'll be playing catch up on those nights. At least I probably will in the beginning when I'm trying to get the hang of Maya again. But I had to schedule a night where I could pay bills and do dishes and clean the litter box. Otherwise none of this matters. The cat and the creditors will come after me.

So now that I have an idea of how ridiculously hard I have to work to make my end of May deadline, I made some actual progress tonight. I sat in various painful positions on my bathroom floor drawing sketches I can use to start modeling in Maya. I didn't do details like lights or faucets but I have three pages of the larger objects, which is enough to get me started. They're posted in the slide show on the bathroom page.

Tomorrow I actually start using some software. Actually, that would be today. Yikes.

I won't go so far as to call this a wasted weekend but I didn't get done what I had hoped. Saturday was worthless. I had no energy at all, couldn't sleep enough. I guess three weeks of sleep deprivation finally caught up with me. So I wrote that day off hoping Sunday would be more productive. And it was, for chores like laundry and cleaning the branches out of the yard, but suddenly it was too dark to go back to the car wash and get new pictures, and a run through the Deep Ellum Arts Festival took too much out of me to start on my bathroom sketches when I finally had time to do it. It occurs to me though that if I don't create some structure soon, the chores will always win. So I'm going to make a schedule for myself. We had to do it in 617 and it was a great exercise. Tomorrow I'm going to try to figure out a realistic deadline for these projects and maybe some realistic hours to work on them. And hopefully I can keep enough flexibility on the weekends to at least do the dishes and get out of the house a little.

One cool thing happened though... I was driving home at 4am Sunday morning (don't ask) through Princeton and I noticed the car wash had two street lights shining on it, one orange and one white. I decided then and there that I definitely want to set up a night scene with street lights. I had the camera and the gazing ball with me (because you just never know) but I couldn't see getting out there at 4am by myself shooting pictures. But this will happen. Something to remember when I set up my schedule tomorrow.

By the way, if you're wondering what the deal with the gazing ball is, it will all become clear when I start doing some lighting. So stay tuned.

Finally! I got Flash to work with Movable Type and I got all my reference photos posted. Next, I will do some drawings of how I want to put all the pieces together. The photos show more detail than I will probably use, but at least it's there if I need it. We'll see how the sketches turn out. Check out the bathroom work in progress page to see the slides.

Sounds like I'm remodeling, doesn't it? Not quite. I took a ton of pictures tonight for modeling references but I'm still trying to figure out the best way to post them. It's hard to solve these little problems in the small amount of time I have in the evenings and get any work done on the project itself, but once I figure out how to do this, I won't have to figure it out again. It's frustrating though. It's almost midnight, I'm sleep deprived as it is, and my job is taking up WAY too much of my free time. I'm not giving up though. I'm going to get a slide show up here if it kills me. (It better not.)