Thursday, August 21, 2008

it is down to 2

A lack of images in this update, necessitated by the fact that I'm finally on vacation. The summer production effort is over, and there are exactly 2 shots still needing to be lit. I would have used an exclamation point back there, but I'm using a German keyboard and apparently the Germans, besides switching around z and y, also seem to shy away from the exclamation point.

I'm probably going to try and find a few independent study students for the fall to address the CBBs and get these final two shots done. Anyone interested should get in touch with me directly.

Thursday, August 7, 2008

bitfilms and youtube

Thanks to the (relatively) new "watch in high quality" youtube option, I've decided to go ahead and put some bitfilms stuff online. Here are two old films, embedded for your viewing pleasure...

Catch



Displacement

Sunday, August 3, 2008

13 instead of 10

Ouch. Not our best week, at a time when we need to stay pretty sharp. We finished two by last Wednesday, but then we hit a bit of a sticking point. My DSL connection from home has also been acting up; combine that with the complexities of even our simplest shake comps, and it effectively eliminated my ability to final shots from home. I feel like I'm back in the 300 baud days. Click... wait. Click... wait.


This is a fairly typical shake node graph for this show, from shot u7_22 which I hope to final shortly. Some static layers, some animating layers, some paint. What is killing me is that each FileIn node in this graph takes years to transfer from the disk at Hampshire to my machine. Even with "aggressive" caching set in shake, when I try to go back and forth with the arrow keys to ferret out pops and such, it becomes unusably slow.

I'll post again early next week with some final frames. I'm expecting a run of finals within the next 24 hours, including the 900-frame first shot of the show. Hoping to get us to 10 left as soon as possible.