Oh the a-go-ny...

I was at the point on Sunday, where I was trying to decide if I should just render it out and turn it in and move on. Yeah I was tired of looking at the little fella, and then I would tell myself that if I was doing this for a living then I would just have to grin and bear it and finish it up. But then I would counter with the fact that I don't do this for a living, and it is the one opportunity that I get to decide when I am done. And it went on and on while I spent half the day yesterday delousing the house because my two little girls came home with a head full of the most vicious little critters you could ever imagine. Been there before and it can be a real bitch to get rid of, so we take no chances anymore....

Anyway the decision was… (insert drum role here) to take Wednesday off from work and add to the animation all that I can. I really want to get really comfortable with the connection editor, hypershade, and especially the hypergraph. “It will hurt me more not to do it” was all I had to tell myself to make the final decision, so off I went to add some really annoying music (you know the kind we appear to like in clubs to get chicks :) and start adding some dancing balls. So I spent several hours planning it all out and am now back in playing with the nodes as well as trying to add an actual velvet shader to my scene.

This turned out to take up a lot more time than I thought it would. After searching the net for examples, they were either too “fluffy” or the one I liked was mapped to incandescence, and well, lets just say that glow in the dark curtain highlights was just wrong. But it did introduce me to a nifty little utility; the sampler info (yeah I had to go look up the name in the hypershade, what about it? :) which lets you map attributes based UV coordinates, facing ratio, and other attributes that I am struggling to understand :D

Anyway back to work for now. Damn this is some fun stuff.

Lessons learned:

The hypershade is like a woman. It's really sexy, and I can't wait to get into it, but sometimes I wonder if I will ever truly understand it. Ok not really a lesson learned, so I would have to go with: Jason and Zak know what they are talking about. Don't scoff at the power of the hypershade and say "those rendering nerds can keep it". It really is very sexy and makes me wonder if Maya likes being on top.