Facelift »
Moving Up in the World
So graduation is literally right around the corner now… coming down to the wire and Pahket’s not anywhere close to being fully completed, but I’m still pretty sure it’ll get done in time. Might take a bit of cramming toward the end and some prayers to the deities that control how nicely Flash behaves, but I think I’ll make it. I did some math at work and figured I have roughly 100 stills and 14 animations left to render. The animations should total about a minute to a minute and a half, which is 30 frames per second times ninety seconds, or an additional 2700 frames tops, for a total of 2800 total frames left to render. Now, you might think that’s an insane amount of frames left to complete in the time I have remaining, but when you take into account that the computer I’m using at school can crank out a still frame in about 6 minutes on average (as opposed to the 25 minutes it takes on my desktop), that equates to 11 days of render time. If I use both that computer and mine, that cuts the time down even more, and I still have about 18 days before presentations are due, so I think I’ll make it. The way I’ve been rendering things so far, I can compile what I’ve already got into Flash while I’m waiting for the next batch of stills and animations to finish. Whee.
I’ve given up on the hospital, because nobody has ever called me back about the job and I don’t want it badly enough to go pester the hell out of the HR people day after day. A potential web development job which sparked the completion of the Revision 1 Studios website also seems to have fallen through since neither myself nor the teacher who pointed me at the job have heard back from the guy since the job opening was posted. Le sigh.
I plan on asking Hutchins if I can sneak back into the lab after I graduate and put together a demo reel, since I don’t really have the ability to compile one here at home. I’m going to take a lot of the stuff I’ve done in the past, spruce it up a bit more, and put it together in a video showcase of my work. I plan on having as many of the modeling projects as I can collect from Hutchins, plus I think I can recycle most of the biped animation from my Animation II final project with Izac acting all Return of the King-ish ;). I’ve re-built him considerably since then, so it’d be nice to use the updated version of him in the scene rather than the clunky-but-still-fantastic-for-a-first-try mesh that’s currently being used. Hooray for my decision to torture myself into learning how to use Biped… I think that one’s going to pay off nicely. I will have to re-work the feet in the animation, though, ’cause the original mesh didn’t have seperate bones for the toes and the new one does. Whee. Still, re-working the feet is a lot better than rebuilding the whole thing. And re-doing the lip-sync will be cake. That’ll take all of about 15 hours total (by contrast, animating the body took a LOT longer than that originally).
What else? Oh, of course, obvious stuff! I’ve got an oscy coming to visit for my graduation, yay!!! And I basically am taking 5 consecutive days off of work for the end of the quarter between graduation stuff and going to pick up oscy, double-yay!!!!
I’ve been trying, in between sleeping (that’s become a problem of late for me, as some folks may have noticed…), working, going to school, and working on my project, to get my room cleaned up, because it really really needs it. I’ve made significant progress, and I think I’ll have it in a somewhat livable state by the time March 1st rolls around and Ash arrives. Huzzah! Whether all of the furniture will be moved back in is entirely questionable, but whatever.
In other other news, I am, much to Ash’s faux-horror, looking into getting a Mac. I’ve tossed around the idea of getting a Mac mini, and I might, just to get a hang of the OS and the apps. Eventually, though, what I’d like to get is a G5, ’cause I intend to do a lot of multimedia stuff on it, and that kind of power is a definite boon to productivity. At that point the mini will probably go to my brother or something. The other thing I’m after is a Cinema Display, because I’ve determined that staring at a CRT monitor for long hours is becoming seriously detrimental to my eyesight, and my CRT is beginning to fall apart. I had to drop it down a notch in esolution back to 1024×768. Now, this is a 19″ monitor, I shouldn’t need to be running it at such an obscenely small (from a graphic designer’s standpoint) resolution. I should be able to keep it at at least 1280×960, if not 1280×1024 or higher, but nooooo… So, I’m eyeing a cinema display, both for immediate use and for later application on whatever Mac I end up getting (which means Tim will be getting the 19″ POS that is currently sulking on my desk at that point). I’m almost tempted to just pitch in the extra cash and get an iMac, I dunno. It’d be kinda nifty having the whole computer in one piece rather than screaming at me in not-so-silent fury on the floor and taking up the vast majority of my screen space… plus the iMacs have G5 processors in them, while the Mac minis only have a G4. I dunno. Anybody with a Mac who wants to give me some pointers is more than welcome to (I’ve already been advised and had intended before being advised in the first place to upgrade whatever Mac I get to at least 512 MB of RAM).
Seeing as how it’s after 5 in the morning I suppose I’ll go ahead and wrap this up… probably have considerably more to say in the near future though.