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!!!