Staying Productive

It's been a quiet few days on the blog front, yet work's been progressing on the first shot. It's been progressing somewhat more slowly, but progressing nevertheless.

As neither James nor I are working on this project full-time (due to those pesky day jobs demanding our attention), what we get done is what we can cram into the few hours between work and sleep and then on the weekends. It's a lot of time, when we're both using it optimally but sometimes optimal just doesn't happen.

Tonight I'd given myself one task only, to tag all of the reference photos we have that relate to the industrial landscape we'll be seeing the background of the first shot. A simple enough task but with this, that and the other thing, it's 10:15pm before I'm even getting started.

But they're tagged now, thanks to Bridge, my favorite application of all time. I Bridge so much, HERE's a link to all of the Adobe Creative Suite Video Podcasts that relate to Bridge. Damn, I can't wait for CS3. But even the CS2 Bridge is brilliant. Live Collections are revolutionizing the way we're collecting photo reference. Because of the Collections and how they're basically just saved searches, I'm totally not sweating having some sort of elaborate, multi-tiered folder structure.

I can imagine trying to organize photos without Bridge and having something that looks like

Exterior > Buildings > Residential > Building Details > Roof > Roof Tiles.

But then a photo that shows some great roof tiles, might also be great reference for wires running between buildings and then a reference for those cool little windows that are up in the peaked roofs of little Euro buildings. Do I have three copies of the photo in three different folders? That's dumb.

With Bridge, the one photo has three tags and it's in all three sets, my Roof Tile set, my Wire set and my Cool Little Window set.

Lovin' it.

The end of the weekend

Screens posted, as promised.

I had nearly no time at all to get work done on this thing today.

The biggest part of my day was spent at the rock gym, setting in the bouldering section. I climbed pretty well, better at least than I've climbed lately. After a couple rather large falls, though, my back is utterly pretzeled. Ugh.

So all that was fun, but it wasn't the film. I forced myself to open up the file and start painting up geometry. I only worked on one shot, which crashed the hell out of Maya when I first started. Ultimately I figured out that I had to turn everything off before subdividing my mesh. Polycount on the scene has gotta be out of hand, but for some reason it doesn't show in my HUD, so I don't really know what it is.

Anyway, I painted in a hill and lattice-transformed the appropriate buildings. The reference shot for this scene is:


















which isn't mine, but something I found on Flickr. Flickr = the best photo-reference site in the world. I'm browsing Flickr nearly every day looking for shots for either the film or for work.

So, yeah, the geometry in the scene is pretty crap-tastic, but that's kind of the point. Everything that we determine to be in-camera, once the animatic is finished, will be rebuilt much more cleanly. A keen eye will note that every window and door is identical, that'll change too.

...So, bummer that I didn't get more done, but I'm happy with what there is.

More to come.

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.)