Kicking and screaming.

Well it was a very long weekend that seemed to just fly by. I say that because I worked on a lot on things this weekend. First I have to say Thanks to Anodynamic for posting the easy to find link on Virtual Dub as it saved my project this weekend. In laying down the sound to my final animation it went to total hell at 24 FPS as nothing synced any longer. No Big deal with Virtual Dub though. A few setting adjustments and Bam! Project completed, turned in, and passed.

On to The color wheel. Well I spent many hours on it and found this assignment to be a hell of a lot harder than I thought. After exhausting my brain to the point of exploding I turned to the class where I was informed that it only took 6 nodes to complete. Well all I could do was laugh. Here I had spent countless hours trying to figure it out, had a screen full of conditional nodes, and I am told that only 6 nodes. Well I think I was led in the right direction and have it starting to work with 4 nodes, just a little erratic, but I think I am on the right track.

So after walking away from the color wheel for a while I dove into the Abduction Project. First thought was “No, no, no, no, not NURBS, please god no… after getting the ship and the Alien done I am now thinking “Fucking piece of shit NURBS, DIE, DIE, DIE!!!”. Nothing against Buzz or Zak, they actually gave me an understanding I never had about the Rules for using them. You see I knew a lot of the rules, but never really understood why I did them. Now you could say that I understand why I hate them so much.

So why do I hate them you might ask, well I like to play around with my models a LOT. The main reason is the difficulty in getting them to work right. I have created several models 1 human, and now 3 aliens, with NURBS and always hated every minute of it. Then I found SUB-Ds and it was like this golden ray of light shining down on me, a choir of angelic hot super models caring me to a feast, It was a freedom to create that I had never known. Really it is the reason I prefer Photoshop over paper. I can experiment and its so easy and quick.

My plans for the Abduction is to add a mouth and do a little lip syncing to the animation. Well I got the curve on surfaces created easily enough with the make live function, then duplicated surface curve deleted history and duplicated several copies to make a nice little tube like mouth. Well I say nice, but it still looks like crap as I am adjusting the heck out of vertices. This would be so easy with Polys :(

Oh well, will work on it some more tonight.