Not Dead Yet

Over a week since the last post, that's not great.

But I've been working on the scene in my free time and I'll have a new building or two to show pretty soon. I spent so much time earlier on modeling the clocktower (which I fear I will have to substantially rebuild) that I never got to model any buildings. So now, whether or not it's truly necessary, I'm giving myself the chance to kick out a couple of apartments. I'm quite enjoying it, though I'm having trouble integrating some of the steampunkish elements into the buildings. All of this means little without pictures, so I'll try really hard to have a picture post up this weekend.

Cheers.

Arrrgh! Weekend Work

Absolutely no progress to report from this weekend.

I spent most of Saturday finishing some animations for FX and right now I'm in the middle of doing styleframes for a new talk show on...I don't remember what network.

I'd hoped to get a brief written for a concept artist but once I'm done with this work, I really don't want to keep sitting in front of the computer. About the most I think I'll be able to do is to sit in front of the television for a while with my sketchbook. If I can get a page or two of sketching done I'll be happy.

Hopefully I'll have a brief Monday night and I'll be in touch with some artists over the next week. After the brief, my next task will be take a second pass on our storyboard. We have a new beat sheet/outline of the major scenes (did that last week) and it calls for some small revisions to the board. That's fun enough work and it'll be good to get done. I am so ready, though, to get back to modeling.

Maya on the Mac

...I don't know why I install Apple's software updates. All they do is f-up my Maya experience. Oh, and Logitech's dropping the ball too.

Yesterday my right-click button stops functioning properly. "Huh, that's odd," I think. "Maybe I should check to make sure that I have all the correct drivers." Bad idea. After updating my Logitech drivers and restarting, my middle-mouse button's not working. A quick trip to the Logitech forums shows that there's a known issue with their most recent software and the most recent Apple OS update.

Christ on a crutch.

My next computer is either a dual-booting Intel Mac with a copy of XP Pro, or one of those sweet Dell M-90's.

For the record, I am accepting donations for the new computer fund.

Broken Cam

It's no longer being called "TricksyCam." It's now "BrokenCam."

I've not been testing the changes I'm making to the script as throughly as I should've been. Now, several steps on down the path, all sorts of transform controls are conflicting with each other.

The major issue is that the motion path is messing with the pivot points for Roll, Tilt and Pan.
The pivots are staying at 0,0,0 - the place where the camera was created. When the camera's offset by the motion path, the pivots should leave 0,0,0 and go wherever the camera is. Centering the pivots doesn't work/change a thing.

This has to be a problem plenty of other people have dealt with, but it's incredibly frustrating to meet right now, this far into the process.