IxD and Assistive Technology
Work I’ve found myself struggling to come to terms with the modelling side of Maya this week. It really seems like we’ve entered a completely new world of CG. Obviously we could have spent a lot more time learning these concepts and in fact I …
Inspiration After the relative ease of dealing with the dice last week, I looked at some architectural ideas for my modelling project. I have always been a fan of minimalist design, and the seemingly simple, geometric shapes of minimalist architecture sounded like a perfect direction …
Thoughts I’ve found myself falling a bit behind this week after a dose of the flu, a few exciting new tests at the doctors and The Finders Keepers markets… Not attending the lecture or tutorial was always going to put me behind the 8-ball for …
Classwork Speaking about different treatments for Red Riding Hood in class made me think about our script in another way. I realised that it was not necessarily important to find a text that fit within our time limit and other restrictions, but instead to find …
Thoughts After my complete spat last week, this modelling tutorial ended up feeling like a walk in the park. Maya decided to cooperate and, dare I say it, I possibly even enjoyed the process! Unfortunately though, I have found myself behind the eight-ball after losing …
Thoughts There seems to be two camps on licensed software (well, three if you include those who choose to avoid the license altogether). There are those people who believe that they are getting a high quality product, because they have forked out their hard earned …
Classwork One down and one to go. Our documentary seemed to be fairly well received, with some really helpful constructive criticism. I really appreciate being told where I’ve gone wrong, when there’s reasoning and alternative suggestions behind it. But without any time to rest, we’re …
Thoughts I really didn’t expect to spend so much time fine tuning my animation over the past week or so. In the end, I think the movement I attempted was too complex and the many keyframes I added early on made the later stages more …
Classwork I’ve found that film-making can be a difficult process. Not for the massive technological, financial and sanity issues, but because you need to work well with others. I’ve long known that I’m something of a control freak and like things done my way, so …
Work The transfer from video reference to my five key poses was my focus for this week. Taking what I saw as the primary positions for my animation and wrangling with my biped character, I found pretty quickly I was working from the wrong starting …
Development Unfortunately, the weather didn’t really turn it on for us, so lighting within the warehouse wasn’t quite what we had hoped. Whilst we had the Dedo lighting kit to help us, I think in retrospect, a bigger wash light would have been more helpful. …
Work We were finally handed a biped character this week. Actually creating the character ourselves is something not yet in our grasp, so we’re simply attempting to animate it in a semi-realistic manner. From what I’ve learnt so far, the trick with character animation is …
Class Work Our pitch was received quite well during the last class. With a degree of trepidation, we stepped up first, expecting to be grilled. But instead we were guided through a ‘to-do’ checklist of our planned shoot. I think our pitch went smoothly in …
Thoughts The infernal bouncing ball, indeed. I stole that title from this excellent Idleworm page: a fantastic tutorial on how to get the bouncing ball look, through the eyes of a cell animator (warning, weird Flash errors might occur). It’s quickly becoming clear how important …
Class Work Dropping into my first Digital Video tutorial in week 2, I had to get myself up to speed, as well as finding a group to join. The first project of the semester requires us to create a short documentary, which will obviously be …
Thoughts I should precede this post by mentioning that I really have mixed feelings about doing 3D modelling and animation as part of my course. At this point, i’m quite interested to see how my thoughts about the subject evolve over the semester and looking …