It’s Just A Flesh Wound…
So I spent an unprecedented 12 hours at ITT today working on stuff to put into my portfolio. The tail end of the demo reel is already finished because it’s largely a slideshow with a couple of animated clips from older projects at ITT thrown in for good measure. I’ve been putting it together in iMovie on the Mac I currently have on loan to me for the web development gig I’m doing.
Anyway, despite having spent 12 hours at ITT, I only walked out with 10 seconds of completed portfolio content in the form of a Pahket fly-around render (ala the Age fly-throughs in the Myst games) that I had to re-start several too many times for my own liking because I wasn’t paying close enough attention to what I was doing, and so a 3-4 hour render ended up taking the whole 12 hours to complete :P.
Part of the reason why I only walked out with that one 10-second clip completed is because I was trying not to rush the rest of the buildings in the Levee scene, though I dunno how well I did on that score presently, and there’s still more to be built.
The other part of why I didn’t get much of anything else done is because of Izac’s character model. I have a feeling the biped became corrupted when the application crashed on me last night while I was rigging an animation with him in it, because his neckline started acting all weird-like shortly after that. The problem later expanded to encompass his neck and shoulders, and was starting to worm its way down his upper torso by the time I called it quits. The biped is definitely messed up though… and I’m probably going to have to re-build Izac from scratch to ensure that this doesn’t happen again the next time I try leaning him up against a wall all cool-like. However, such a drastic move does have its advantages… as he is right now, Izac’s rather difficult to animate, he tends to fold in ways normal being shouldn’t when he puts his arms at his sides, and trying to actually put a texture on him is like trying to paint a hyperactive gnat with a toothbrush. I can take this opportunity to revise his mesh so he’s more fox-like, so that his ears don’t continue to collapse into his head when he gets sad or scared, and so that his chest doesn’t look like it’s imploding when he puts his arms at his sides. And I can make him easier to texture, as well as easier to animate… some pieces of his anatomy just don’t work very well, like his hands (thumbs especially), and I’ve been wanting to re-build his limbs for some time now to enable him to have more realistic muscle bulges when he moves. I also want to actually *attach* his collar to him this time instead of building it seperately and then trying to act surprised when I see his neck clipping through it in every other frame.
At least the brief nightmare on DPWR has taken care of itself… yesterday we lost almost 4 months of stuff from the database, and I get a response from my host saying the SQL server crash took out the machine with the most recent backups on it as well, so they weren’t going to promise anything as far as getting my stuff back up. So, I went to school rather annoyed this morning around 10:00 am (after I got everything sorted out with DPWR), and later logged on to check on how things were going I saw that the site was down again. So, I changed the database login back to what it was before the crash knocked out my first database username, and was pleasantly surprised to see that everything was back to normal again. Whee! So, moral of the story: make regular backups.
Have a lot to do with the web dev gig this coming week… can’t go into details, but it’s gonna be a rougher ride from here on out than it has been, so hopefully the rest of my life can calm down long enough for me to crank this job out on time and bug-free. I’m pretty certain that IPB is going to be upgraded to version 2.1 before I’m done though, which means I’ll probably be splitting my time working on getting DPWR updated and getting the skin (which, although very nice, is slightly inconsistent in its design and needs some general revising) updated, as well as installing the latest (still to be released) version of Invision Gallery.
To quote Blazing Saddles, “Work work work, work work work, work work work.”