All of us in this program are quite fascinated by cg, that’s why we are here. The games, movies, animations, etc., are amazing. One can’t help but be overwhelmed. But being a girl of the past, traditional animation still has a place in my heart. It was 2d that first introduced us to mimicking reality. Even when just done on pieces of papers, it still made us cry, laugh, emphatized with the main character and hate the antagonists. It was special, still is. I thought that eventually, such style of animations will be forgotten. Oh well, changes. However, things turned out differently. It appears that different film companies have been making animations that look like the traditional ones using these modern tools or programs. That is lovely, and i think, ironic at the same time. It’s like the pursuit of making the designs to seem more like of the real world which led to the development of these cg programs are now being use to create 2d style animations, the difference is that it’s better.
Last Week for Project/Portfolio and Career Preparation
Yep, no more career prep and project/portfolio for us hahaha! Heyyy, I am not happy because i do not like those subjects, it’s just a load off my back. Now we only have to deal with four! but I really wished that we took compositing earlier on the term though. The last class on both career prep and portfolio were fun! i really enjoyed it. i didn’t realize it was the last class in portfolio until it actually ended.
We watched each other’s previs for portfolio, we cracked up each other with our demo reel ideas but all that in a good way. It seems that the majority of my class is going for environment modeling. And then there are few that want to do a kick-ass animation. Cheers for them! It’s really good to know where your fellow classmates are heading, what they’re aiming for and the steps they’re taking to achieve those. Those wills, their wills, become a part of what drives me to do good. I deeply hope that we could do the reels we want, no hindrances…take them all!
Career prep this afternoon is as much fun as the last class in portfolio. We had our presentation. for my group we did informative presentation about how women are portrayed in video games. I was actually amazed how many games there are that portray women negatively. especially this game that was released in 1982, it was called Custer’s Revenge. The main goal of the game is for Custer to have an intercourse with a large breasted native american woman who were bound to a post. The entire class was laughing seeing that Custer was wearing nothing but a hat, boots, and a bandana. And of course this Dead or Alive extreme beach volleyball game where it is filled with scantily clad women in bikinis. Personally, I don’t care about those games, but issue arises when children got a hold of those games.
And the winner of the day??? Jenny and Serena’s group! they nailed it! Their method was so refreshing. They did a bit of acting…”ahem”, a bit??? it’s everything but a bit! Jenny was totally in character until she opened the door to leave…Mak Abdel-Hai was outside that startled jenny and made her laugh. Apparently we were so loud that we were starting to disturbed his class.
The course has ended but not blogging. Well yeah because i still need to do three more entries before tomorrow night! But really, i intend to keep on blogging…:)
Wide Awake…
It’s 5:33 am and I still couldn’t sleep! Caused by 2 cups of coffee??? maybe. Anyway, finally i’m done animating my previs. I just need to put them into one video. It’s not that hard but not that entirely easy…it’s annoyingly boring…eh, well, for me who never used the software for animation. I’m so used to xsi wherein I could select everything and hit the “key” button which I just can’t in maya. In maya I have to select everything!!! One by one!!!! and then set the key. But i’m pretty sure there is an easier way to do that.
After doing the previs for portfolio, I modeled a frozen river. I was after the icy effect on the water so the model was very simple, I just used procedurals. yep…lousy texturing too, but like what I said…it’s the ice! Unfortunately, I didn’t get the result I want. It still looks like water. Oh well i’ll just tweak it later i thought and i just played with the renderer. I thought of adding a fog to the scene but what it does is negate the texture…but, it also made the ice looked like ice…hahaha! I posted the images here anyway so you’ll be the judge!:)
I am so sleepy right now…
a bit of blogging before school…:)
Long time no post I guess. 
I spent two days working on my face modeling assignment which is due this thursday, and as we all know, mistakes can’t be avoided. I was so excited about playing with the eye textures that I smoothed my model way sooner than I should. As a result, the following extruded faces can no longer be smooth. of course you can’t have a head of different smoothness…right? If I do smooth it again, my maya will crash! Good thing I have my incremental saves on, only…I have to do the eyes again, but it’s no big deal anyway. Lesson learned: NEVER EVER SMOOTH YOUR MESH UNTIL YOU’RE DONE WITH MODELING!!! Am happy that it didn’t take much for me to learn that!:)
Oh yeah! I got my USB back! Turned out that one of my schoolmates, Angelo, found it. He read my entry about it and informed me. hahaha! So blogging does really work eh?! Networking!!!
I talked to our program head about my demo reel idea. I had it figured out ever since first semester but after getting through these lessons, i’m kinda wondering if it is possible now. You see, my demo reel includes animation, rigging, weight mapping, modeling, texturing, lighting, and even dynamics! But Russ said that they won’t be that bad, it could still be achieved. So he advised me to set my targets and deadlines. I know he’s right. I already have something that needs to be done this april!!!cheers!:)
The thing that’s bothering me right now is softimage xsi. I SHOULD learn to love that software! But it is soooo hard! It behaves really really weird! Like when you’re animating bones and then all of the sudden it snaps! And here’s this thing that when you open a scene, the pose was really different, annoyingly different! I don’t know why it does that, or maybe xsi is really like that. I spend more time trying to deal with that weirdness than actually doing my animation. So I put off anything that has to do with xsi last. 
It’s just that i’ve been told that xsi is really better than maya. That it has modeling tools that are better and that it’s really good for animation than maya. I really really want to animate the characters but xsi doesn’t cooperate well! GEEZ I LOVE XSI!!! I REALLY DO!!!
Catching up!
Woah! I haven’t posted for two weeks! what happened to me??? haha! so…yeah, ugh…hmmm…just smile!:)
The truth is, I didn’t want to write because a lot of crappy things happened and I’m not going to write being in that state. I can’t make my sentences clear and I tend to be sarcastic…would not make a very good entry for my weblog. But everything’s fine now.
On the fourth week of this term (which is last week), in almost every subject we have a project due, we were cramming. It was not really bad since, somehow, I enjoy the feeling of being busy, like you feel most alive but, losing your USB where you keep your files, is not really pleasant. NOT AT ALL. I was really confused, whether to start everything again or keep on hoping that I’ll find it again soon. For a while, I was a mess. After all that whining and ranting I just realized that I didn’t really lose that much (hahaha! realizing how I whine and complicate things first before actually pondering over it!). I was just being dramatic for a not so big of a reason. It made me feel grateful because I usually do not save my works at school, I always put them on my USB. But something made me save the hardest project which is the modeled character at my H drive (felt blessed for that). Yeah, it makes me smile until now. I still miss my USB though, my pink and white kingston USB and of course all of my files! I remember I have lots of files there, I just don’t remember what they are for, guess it’s better that way, hahaha! I am so used to seeing it plugged on my computer while working(sigh..).
That was the thing about the USB, next is my health. In cases like these, where I need to finish a lot of things, I stay up late…sometimes until morning, sometimes I get no sleep at all (I bet a lot of us do that) and by doing so, my health retaliated against me (haha!). I missed two classes last week. It really made me sad.
Oh well, it’s all my fault anyway. CHEERS!!!:)
Blog: an on-line diary eh???
Hmmm, I know I should be doing some modeling right now but instead, I ended up blogging (well at least I get something done while I am being lazy!;D). Sooo, what to write??? Nothing special happened today, and I have no intention of making this blog like a log book of things that I did even though it’s called weblog! Oh here’s an idea! They call this an on-line diary, right? Right! Well diaries is where you write your thoughts, personal ideas that are not that easy to share with someone…just for yourself, I know because I used to have one, and as far as I can remember, I only allowed two really close friends to read a few pages…and now, the idea is to share it with everyone! Even to people you don’t know, it’s there for everyone to see!
How does it affect thee, let us count the ways. If you’re writing a blog, you are opening yourself to the public, for criticisms, for compliments, and perhaps recognition. The first two I consider good, but the latter is somehow difficult. You get recognized by what you write. People judge you or label you through your writings, they are your words, your ideas, your beliefs. I know that it really feels good to be heard but, as a person who writes those words, you have to stick to them. It is like presenting a formidable you, and there’s no going back. I guess you just have to be sure, I mean really sure or certain about what you are going to write because you can no longer change them, it’s like changing your mind and you can’t do that. It does not say much about your character if you yield. Well yeah, nothing is permanent but change and we tend to alter things that we value, or our opinions, but you wrote it already. You can’t just delete them for doing so will make you a liar, you could edit it and hope that everyone who had read the original will take the time and read it again, which is improbable. Hahaha! or maybe you shouldn’t care since those people don’t really know you personally:)
For the sake of having a decent grade in Career Preparation, one has to keep on blogging. Cheers to all of us!!!:)
Going Against the Flow???
After spending quite a bit of my leisure time (oh yeah I do have leisure time) reading the blogs of my fellow animators, I noticed that almost all of us…with a definite exception of one i guess, are bound to write about animation. I am not sure if it is because it is the first entry or, just because there’s nothing else to write. Well of course there is no saying no if our marks depend on these blogs but, ”This class is all about you” “it’s hard to fail a class that is about you”. Remember that??? If those words were not heard by everyone, then atleast all of us in my class did!:)
I have nothing against people who write about the program, but surely, one would rather read something new than something that they already know (uh-oh, flawed reasoning, well most people would!). Just want to know other people’s ideas, may it be their rants, hopes or expectations.
A Requirement for Animation
As the title says, a requirement, we have a subject that requires us to have a blog. At first I thought it would be great since I write a lot but now that I am doing it, I really have no idea what to write here. It’s totally different from what I do, not the narrative poetry or elegy that I love doing and I am still forcing myself to think of what to say about the program since this entry should contain 50% about it and the other half about me, hmmm… guess the title of this entry should be “Digital Animation and Me” eh? I think the purpose of this blog assignments is for us to practice communicating well, see if we could express ourselves clearly in writing, but I am just writing random thoughts here, just first things that come to my mind (and of course glancing from time to time on that word counter below which does not seem accurate anyway). I should have done this blog days ago, and there is still my half done biography that needs dealing with. I really failed that time management stuff. Digital Animation, what about it? Oh yeah, my favorite program (that does not sound truthful at all. Better try again I think) “Oh yeah! My favorite Program!” Haha! it might sound fake but it really is my favorite! It is really what I want to do. I am a fickle minded person, I change my mind a lot, I do things half-heartedly just to quit or give up at the end but once I realize what I want to do, I stick with it. I took BSBA in Computer Information System back in the Philippines but after three months it felt that it is not something that I see myself doing everyday, it felt like I was just wasting time and considering the high tuition, I really need to get out of that. My parents suggested taking Early Childhood Education and since I was still confused and have not really made up my mind about anything, I ended up in that program. It was okay, for awhile I thought I am actually enjoying it until we have to leave for Canada. Everyone expected that I will continue my studies here but, I don’t know…trying to foresee myself as a pre school teacher was not really that exciting. Then one day I saw this commercial about Digital Animation and I said to myself instantly, “that’s what I want!”. So here I am, feeling grateful that finally I have something planned out for the future, although slacking from time to time and usually procrastinate until when projects are due. (Hmm, this entry made me looked really irresponsible)
Hello world!
Sooooo, this is my newest blog. Made especially for my Career Preparation Course. Most of the entries you’ll find here are about that subject, or whatever topic we are told to write about. I have another blog though, snowprincess1386.wordpress.com.
