Buildings, Buildings, Buildings - All in fabulous grayscale!

...I am aching to get out of flat, gray animatic world.

Got a fair amount of good work done today, moving cameras around the city, pacing shots, trying to figure out if the first act of the film works at all. I think it does, but not being able use the girl made some shots hard to evaluate. Right now, unpopulated, only the shots where the camera's moving look good. The locked shots, where the girl will be moving look, well, dull.

In the grand scheme of things that's no big deal. One big part of this phase of the animatic is to establish topology. At the moment, all the streets are dead flat planes. There's not even a degree of elevation which calls a lot of attention to the unreal-ness of the space. In a real city there are small rises, hills that were never razed, depressions, streets that are banked for rainwater run-off...that's the next thing to add to the scene.

In between shots I've been surfing the CGSociety.org forums, particularly the character modeling threads and my next project, after this, is gonna be some whacked out game/movie character.

Will probably post a screen of the city tomorrow.

Didn't get much done tonight

I'm blaming it on a late start and residual tiredness from the week.

I sat down around 11:30, intending to block out the first few shots and output some playblasts - thus starting the animated part of the animatic. Early on, 2nd shot of the night, I ran into some trouble with the mesh on the main character model. It's not a show stopper, but I'll have to move on without the model over the course of the weekend.

James is lead char. modeler/rigger/char. TD on this thing and I'm pretty sure that if I tried to dive into his mesh/rig, I'd screw it way more than I'd actually help it.

Eh, c'est la vie. It's just past 1am now and I'll probably try to figure out one more shot before I call it a night. More tomorrow. Much more tomorrow.










(Image is my little workspace, active camera on the right. The end of the move on shot #02 is what's framed up. At least, it's what shot #02 looks like as of 1am this evening.

Oh, and all the geometry is mad-low-rez, for blocking purposes only. Once we figure out what buildings are actually in each shot, they'll be rebuilt/textured/lit, etc.)

why the blog?

I'd planned on writing some rationale, but who knows if I'd end up sticking to it.

So screw it. Here's my blog.

first!

And probably last.

(Seems there's no way to delete posts, at least no way that I've been able to find just poking around the interface. Later on, perhaps, I'll simply edit this post into something brilliant.)