Results tagged “gazing ball” from Rendered Speechless

This weekend was an experiment in time management. Friday night, I thought I had the whole weekend to complete this model. I was really looking forward to it. But then I tried to start my car. Bad idea. Dead battery. After an hour of fighting an intermittent car alarm that suddenly couldn't be disabled--apparently the one thing the battery still had enough juice to run--I finally disconnected the horn and gave up, knowing my Saturday morning was gone before it started. On Saturday I got up and with the help of a neighbor, pushed the car out of the driveway enough for him to try to jump start it. Didn't work. So we pushed it back and waited for the tow truck. By 2pm, after a new battery, state inspection, replaced tail light and a new drive belt (it's never just one thing), I was finally back home, broke and pissed. So I took my newly healthy car for a run to Princeton to take some modeling reference shots of the car wash.

I spent the rest of Saturday trying to get as many lighting reference shots as I could. I only have about three left, and those are tough ones. A sunset should be easy, but my entire neighborhood is in shadow. I'll have to find another place to set up the gazing ball and just deal with the crazy looks I guess. The foggy morning is going to be tough. You don't get many of those in June. A cloudy day might be doable in the middle of next week if I can get back from Austin in time, and that's only if the weather forecast is correct. I had a cloudy day for the first half of Saturday, but by the time I got back from the Toyota dealership, there wasn't a cloud in the sky. It seems I can never spend less than three hours there at a time anymore.

So that left today to do some actual modeling. I have the walls, baseboards and most of the window finished. It's gotten a lot easier, it's just tedious. So many small parts everywhere. And I'm a stickler for beveled edges, as there are no hard CG corners anywhere in real life. I have to have edges that catch the light.

I'm taking two trips out of town this week, but I hope to still get all the modeling and texturing done by next Sunday night. It might happen.

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.

Glenn and I drove around a lot today looking for interesting outdoor environments I can model and light. The guys I talked to yesterday said I could just use someone else's environment (giving them credit of course) and light it, but since I really want to get back into Maya, I decided I'd spend the extra time and effort creating something from scratch. We finally found this abandoned car wash on 380 in Princeton. Not too complicated a model, and it has some nice qualities, allowing light to pass through and providing a good amount of shadows. Today was pretty cloudy, which is one of the lighting scenarios I want to explore. We did some shots with my gazing ball but they didn't come out very well, so I may go back out there next weekend and try again. This is a good start though.