...sigh...
Have no updates or progress to show for the last little while. Seems like that's the story for a while now but the project is not dead. I repeat: It is not dead.
Just sleeping...
Showing posts with label busy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label busy. Show all posts
Monday, June 18, 2007
Friday, June 8, 2007
The GUI saga continues
This week has been just as busy as the last, meaning work on this thing is lots of little fits and starts and very, very little sustained attention. I'm really ready to get this GUI nailed down and move onto the next part of the shot, especially as I did have a little bit of a breakthrough while doing sketches for the central clocktower. Hopefully I'll have the chance to scan my drawings and post them up before too long. I wouldn't call them final concept art or anything, but they've got me excited about the tower. I'd been feeling lost on it for a while now.
As ready as I am to move past the camera GUI, one thing about it is really nice, and it's that I'm taking the time to build this thing correctly, right from the start. One of the difficult things about working in production, on "one-off" sort of spots, is that so many of the elements we build feel like hacks. They're built just for one shot, or to be used at only one angle - fake 3d stuff, for example. These hacks are fine most of the time, but they come back to bite you when the client wants your 2d ribbon, faked to look 3d, to wrap around the star of the show, or push in a completely different direction. Had it been 3d in the first place, no sweat, but it was built in 2d by the designer and used that way in animation.
Often enough to be frustrating, the hacks used because someone felt like there wasn't enough time to do it all-the-way, end up costing the same amount of time on the backend.
All that's a long way of saying that it's fun to put the time into this GUI right at the start and build it a bit more fully than it really needs to be for the shots we have in mind. I'll try to post a new screen of it soon, but this weekend looks very rough in terms of free time.
As ready as I am to move past the camera GUI, one thing about it is really nice, and it's that I'm taking the time to build this thing correctly, right from the start. One of the difficult things about working in production, on "one-off" sort of spots, is that so many of the elements we build feel like hacks. They're built just for one shot, or to be used at only one angle - fake 3d stuff, for example. These hacks are fine most of the time, but they come back to bite you when the client wants your 2d ribbon, faked to look 3d, to wrap around the star of the show, or push in a completely different direction. Had it been 3d in the first place, no sweat, but it was built in 2d by the designer and used that way in animation.
Often enough to be frustrating, the hacks used because someone felt like there wasn't enough time to do it all-the-way, end up costing the same amount of time on the backend.
All that's a long way of saying that it's fun to put the time into this GUI right at the start and build it a bit more fully than it really needs to be for the shots we have in mind. I'll try to post a new screen of it soon, but this weekend looks very rough in terms of free time.
Monday, June 4, 2007
Too, Too, Too Busy
Work on this project has nearly, but not entirely, ground to a slow burn. Not to a "halt." I didn't say "halt" and I'm not going to.
I'm still in GUI mode and I'm somewhat embarrassed to show how little progress I've made in the last three days as it only represents about 3 hours worth of work. Nevertheless, I need to stay in the habit of posting here, so here's the updated GUI.
There's what, three extra controls on there?
The Wander on the camera is a really nice effect that I grabbed from Richard Morris over at The Jackal's Forge. He put up a great tutorial on building a very detailed, multi-variable camera shake utility. The Wander I'm using here is actually what he calls "Destabilize." Of the four shaking functions he describes, this is my favorite. It gives the camera a very natural-feeling sway that you don't really notice until you turn it off.
Moving on from here I'm going to add a couple of sliders to control the frequency and intensity of a more traditional "jitter" camera shake. That's not a ton of work, assuming that I can get a block of time to do it in, and from there it's back into the scene proper, using this rig to nail down the camera move.
Cheers.
I'm still in GUI mode and I'm somewhat embarrassed to show how little progress I've made in the last three days as it only represents about 3 hours worth of work. Nevertheless, I need to stay in the habit of posting here, so here's the updated GUI.
There's what, three extra controls on there?
The Wander on the camera is a really nice effect that I grabbed from Richard Morris over at The Jackal's Forge. He put up a great tutorial on building a very detailed, multi-variable camera shake utility. The Wander I'm using here is actually what he calls "Destabilize." Of the four shaking functions he describes, this is my favorite. It gives the camera a very natural-feeling sway that you don't really notice until you turn it off.
Moving on from here I'm going to add a couple of sliders to control the frequency and intensity of a more traditional "jitter" camera shake. That's not a ton of work, assuming that I can get a block of time to do it in, and from there it's back into the scene proper, using this rig to nail down the camera move.
Cheers.
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