Somewhere Over the Rainbow!!

Am I online??? Oooh! I'm online again!! Well...I am for the moment at any rate. I realize I've been AWOL for quite a bit and for that I apologize. I swear I have good excuses! Well, not really, but here's a quick summary of what I've been up to: got a new job in early December, pondered it for a bit, accepted it, quit old job, traveled up and down the NY-NC stretch to visit East Coast buddies to make true old promises that I'd visit, moved cross-country to Seattle, started new job. Wheeee!!! Somewhere in there I got two colds (need to buff up my immune system) that still won't go away (bah, colds suck!) and my laptop died. Woe!

So I arrived here last Thursday rather partially unsure of my decision to pick up and move, but I knew I was rotting a bit in NC and that moving to a city would be a good change. NC was nice with the sunroof weather and mellow folks, but I had few friends and family there and was horribly bored in the sub-suburbs...that's what I like to call places where it often takes 40 minutes to traverse 8 miles of potholes home from work and where there are zero gas stations and grocery stores along the way. My only qualm with the change was that I didn't quite want to move clear across the country just yet, but Seattle did sound awesome, the new job offered tons of opportunity, and I'd have been a total fool not take it.

Anyways, I know I've only been here a bit...not even a week yet...but I'm already totally loving the place! Living in a city makes a huge difference. Just looking out the window is a different feel. There's tons to do and I love the air here. It smells good :) Work is incredible too. The job promised smart people and plenty of exciting new stuff, but man, I just started three days ago and I feel so stupid! Hopefully that will twist around into good thing.

The only notes of suckage so far are just unfortunate: this darn cold I can't seem to get rid of and the computer thing. The worst part about the cold is that I think I'm starting to freak out my new team mates with the amount of germs I appear to have. The other downside is that everyone might think I'm super shy or awkward or something since I haven't been talking because of that no-voice-due-to-bad-cold thing. Gah!! Any suggestions there?

The laptop death, on the other hand, proved to be a blessing in a way. When I tried to turn my laptop on the morning after getting here, I was greeted by total hardware failure. It wouldn't even boot to BIOS! I think I then proceeded to freak out completely for awhile over what to do about AM (I know, I'm such a dork...first thing to freak out about being homework and all). Finding internet access for lectures and QAs couldn't be too bad (haha, I'll try again this week...and gah, still can't get enough internet time on a computer with Flash and QT to cruise the campus), but finding a computer with Maya wasn't so likely. Then Mai, a student from Class 3 who's absolutely awesome and super nice, invited yucky-snotball-me over to her place all day Saturday and let me mooch off her computer so I could turn in my assignment last week. It was just great to work with another AM student side-by-side. Go instant feedback! Then today, she lent me a bunch of screwdrivers and helped me figure out how to pry the panels off my dead laptop so I could find out what's wrong. My dear friend Google helped a ton too. I just have to reiterate though...this community's so amazing!!!! Mai rocks!!!!!It makes all the difference in the world to be greeted by such sincere hospitality, especially after moving to a new place. I'd kill all the laptops in the world to hang out with you Mai!

Oh yea, I don't know about the title of this entry. If I'm still awake, it has got to be the Sudafed typing. Wow, how long have they been asking people to fork over ID for cold medicine? Something about these things being cheap ingredients for crystal meth? Wow, should I even post this entry? It's kind of surreal. Acck, whatever, I owe it to anyone who still reads this after a month of random absence. Tra la!

Roombas and Dysons in Red! Oh My!

Uhhh, I just spent half an hour staring at and comparing vacuum cleaners. Ever get one of those "Darn, I feel OLD!!!" or "Darn!! I feel domestic!!!" moments? You know...those lovely moments when you realize you've actually been paying attention to infommercials on accessories for household appliances. Yea, I need to reel myself back.

And my what a difference a some lighting makes! I do need to learn about these things.

AM.3.11 Sincerity

~Creative Block vs. Technical Block? Pick Your Evil~

So far this semester, I had been feeling pretty good about getting beyond the major technical hurdles of 3D animation. However bad my first assignment was, I was at least grateful to the feeling that I could pretty much get the computer to reflect what I saw in my head (problem there being my mind couldn't see too much then). This last assignment, in comparison, has flowed far more smoothly in the acting and creative departments. I'm not exactly sure what clicked between assignments ~ I think I just decided to let go of the excessively conscious preoccupation with clarity, avoiding first instincts, avoiding cliche, and all those super important points that I was too focused with in my first assignment. I had overthought those concepts in my first assignment, rendering them complicated and practically incomprehensible. Letting them go to the back of my mind as a checkup/finessing pass after running brainstorms without limits in the planning stages worked magnitudes better for my workflow in my second assignment. It's too bad I figured that out pretty late, and I'm not sure it would work for anyone else, but I'm glad it hit me on the second half of the course.

Ooops, I got rambly...but that's what blogs are...back to my original point. Thanks to the better initial flow (and also to the server outage before Thanksgiving ^.^), I got plenty of much-needed time to really review my animation and ask for critiques on the splining and polish stages. My classmates offered awesome ideas and suggestions (thanks guys!) and I got a ton of "ohhh, ah ha" moments, but as I was finessing my arcs, spacing, and overlaps this round, I found it incredibly hard to tweak things to get exactly the kind of movement I was looking for. Peter's been suggesting for weeks that I try throwing in a better arc on one of my arm movements and Samy and Fernanda suggested that I offset the twinning. This week, I finally got around to re-animating those frames and spent a couple hours doing so, but when I was done, it looked exactly the same!!! I redid the whole thing, but even I can barely tell the difference. In the process, I also managed to freak out the rig a bit (where's waldo: spot the exploding elbow on one frame o_O;).

I'm back to that sort of frustration where you know what you want in your mind, but you can't find the right control to tweak it. On the plus side, I guess that means I've gotten way beyond the stuck brain points of the last assignment. And I have to admit that creative block was infinitely more threatening than technical block. Hmmm, I'm not sure what this post was about anymore...but I'm going to go run through campus now and check out all the crazy final anims everyone's turned out! These guys really rock!

AM.3.10B Multi-Character Shots

Ooops...uhhh, backposting....



Great Jason Schleifer lecture!

AM.3.10A

I didn't really get a chance to work in all the suggestions people had last week and this still needs a ton of work. I think I did manage to smooth out the first arm movements a bit though so they're less whippy. Hmmm, maybe it's still too whippy. I can't tell anymore. I haven't caught the lecture yet either since the site was down for a bit last week and we've restarted week 10. Though, it's certainly nice to get an extra week to work on this stuff. Plus, it gave me the chance to head home really late on Friday for a short weekend in MD ^.^

Lego Hair

Hmmm, the more I look at it, the more I hope it doesn't look like a butt. I really can't tell how this looks anymore though ~ what do you guys think? I have no modeling skills, so figuring out how to make Lego hair was fun. I took the basic geometry off the free model on the right over here and then pounded it till looked like a bob that would fit on Bishop's head. Oooh, and I stole the ears off Aja's hairmet from the AM props repository. And huge thanks to everyone who worked on and contributed to that! I'll be uploading this one as soon as this it's showable (whenever I can figure out how to mend the giant deformities and holes that are currently in the back of her hair...or maybe this will just be a front-only hairdo).

Otanjoubi Omedetou!

I just like the way that sounds :) Thanks for all the bday wishes! I'm so horrible at remembering others' bdays that I feel bad (though very happy too) when you all remember mine.