Work in progress: August 2008 Archives

So I took last week off. I can't call it much of a rest though, my mom was here through last Wednesday and then my dad came to visit on Friday and left Sunday. If I'm not going to rest, believe me that's the best way to do it because I don't see them enough as it is. But despite very little time to myself since the conference it's time to get back to work. And to that end, tonight I posted a fixed bug ship to the reel and stills pages on the main site.

It took me a couple of days to figure out what happened but it's really pretty simple. At first I thought I had lost the link to the texture but that wasn't the case. Actually it had to do with two things. First, when I set up this project years ago, I didn't do the specular pass right. I used it solely for the sharp highlights on the windows and tentacles and left the sheen on the rest of the ship in the diffuse pass. Second, that came back to bite me when I turned off the specular component of the lights in my diffuse pass this time around. That wasn't an option in Maya 2 and 3, but it is now, and usually that makes a spec pass a lot easier to do. But when I turned it off, I lost that shiny surface as well as the sharp highlights. I'd like to think that if I had been getting more sleep a few weeks ago I would have caught it in time but who knows. The important thing is, I caught it and I fixed it. It's not on the DVDs--I figure I'll get rid of the ones I have before I make new ones, unless something drastic happens--but it is on the site.

The next thing I want to accomplish before working on anything new is posting the entire hippo animation on the site in addition to the excerpt that's in my reel. I'll have it as a separate link on the reel page for anyone who's interested. This is going to be a little more difficult though. There are a lot of intermediate QuickTime movies that have to be recreated just right to work in my Final Cut project from a few years ago, and I'm not sure that's going to happen so easily. I might be facing an editing nightmare. In fact, I really should re-edit the thing anyway because it doesn't necessarily need to be that long. I don't know. I guess I'll make that decision when I see how long it's taking me to do it.

So that's it for now. I'm going to start rendering the frames I was missing in LA and then go to bed. Oh yeah, I'm getting somewhat decent sleep now. I like it. Perhaps I shouldn't get used to it.

At least three pages are up. I like the home page. I did a different light setup for the potato so he would show up better on a white background. I really need to render the room just by itself because it's the only interior I've ever lit and it needs to be seen. At the same time, I need to re-render my bug ship, composite it and edit it, then dig up the hippo and tweak the shadow color and re-render that, then edit all this into a DVD as well as something that will work on the site, then gather some compositing stills to go on the site, and don't forget the potato in his environment... still stressed. Four more days. Stressed. Sure is nice to go to bed before 4:30 though.

This is as far as it goes. I'll be spending the rest of the week getting my site together and polishing my old compositing projects to put up there with this shot. This was a good lighting and shading project but not so good for compositing, so by the end of the week I should have a good range of work to show off once I fix some problems on the old stuff. I have the files, only one won't open but I don't think it's a disaster yet. I'll know for sure soon enough. I guess I won't be sleeping until tomorrow night. Or I guess that's tonight, it's just 4am now and the two hours ahead of me aren't going to help much. But I'll take what I can get. I think lunch tomorrow (today) will be nap time.