Crunch Time? What’s that?

Well it should be crunch time and I should be going without any sleep what so ever to try and get this all done in time, but I guess I need to fill in the rest of the world on what deadline is. Oh well, I would be stressed if Buzz or Zak had made any definite remarks about the absolute end of the class. All they have really said is that because we have been so lenient with them and getting the whole class together, that they would work with anyone who was working hard. And that Is something I have been doing.

Haven’t updated my blog because of this in fact, well except for all the distractions, like getting sick, friends coming over, and things of that nature. But I have completed all the animation and am very happy with the character animation towards the end. You can really tell that I was getting the hang of using the really crappy rig I made because I found very sloppy ways to get around it. Such as a host of buttons on the shelf to select each cluster in the tentacles. It may be sloppy, but a hell of a lot easier than trying to find them in the view port.

Lesson Learned 1: Learn MEL quickly. I will not only iconize every rig I do form now on, I am going to make quick pick UIs as I like being able to go back and forth between the two for whatever fits my needs. I will also learn to write a pick walk script because it would have been a huge time saver to just be able to hit an arrow key and move to the next cluster in the chain, or another arrow key to move to the same numbered cluster on another tentacle. Bottom Line is I am going hard core into MEL and learning to be my own TD of sorts.

So after all the animation was completed I moved on to pain effects. I have played with it before but only how to make default tubes and the such. Could never really figure out how to change anything. Now I know, and knowing… Battle… Yo Joe! and all that crap.

Lesson Learned 2: Well not really a lesson learned, just frustrated that I have to composite my scene 2 if I want to use paint effects because I have my ship flying all over the screen and the glow from the tractor beam will apparently break down because of it. Will have to try it out, if so no big deal I guess, I will just render to TGA files, and bring them into work to composite them together if V-Dub won’t do it.

I also spent quite a few hours last night tweaking my aliens skin texture. Man this is a complicated texture and it keeps getting more and more complicated. There is like 7 billion nodes in it and growing to try and get it to look just right. If I don’t finish it pretty quickly tonight then I am going to simplify it greatly. Oh well, this texture alone taught me a butt load about the hypershade and I am very comfortable in it now and getting to the point that I understand the connections that need to be made to get a certain effect. A good example would be plugging a ramp into the cell color of a leather node to get a color to change over the surface yet still having the leather look to it (Which by the way I am using to plug into incandescence to get the glowing on the dark parts of the skin).