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.

Building lots of buildings

This first shot is gonna have a fair number of buildings in it.

I'm only about a third of the way through breaking down the scene into discrete units and I'm at 16 buildings that need close-to full modeling. It's no Coruscant, but it's gonna be pretty damned poly-dense.

In order to streamline the actual design & modeling of the buildings, as we have no dedicated concept artist, I started building a couple "schematics" or visual quick-references for how our buildings will look.

These are still very much WIP's but they're the beginning of our town and they've establishing a few rules for how things will fit together.

One of the next steps is for me to start organizing our photo reference library and creating meta data tags for each picture. Bridge is the "asset management" tool we're using and I'm totally a fan. It's turning our huge dump of photos into an easily searchable database of references that should allow us to quickly find modeling and texturing references as we work.

How we're doing it is as follows:
We have a central folder of images, mostly grabbed from Flickr, numbering somewhere in the hundreds and growing every day. This folder has plenty of sub-folders and the photos are all accurately named. For a while I thought that would be enough, but that's not turning out to be the case.
So what's happening now is that all new photos and, slowly, all our older photos are getting meta data tags, examples being "window shutter," "cobblestone," and "drainpipe." The really brilliant thing with Bridge is that it allows you to create live sets, like iPhotos Smart Sets, that are dynamically created every time you access them. What that means is that when it's time for me or James to model some window shutters, all we need to do is click on the live set labeled "Window Shutters" and every photo we have that's appropriately tagged will be referenced in that set.
Eventually we'll have live sets for every aspect of our models and textures right at our fingertips.

The most recent version of the reference folder lives on my iPod and I sync it to both my work and home computers a couple times each week, so that we've got copies. It's not failsafe, but it's better than nothing.