June

Damn... Now it's already june. Time passes sooooooo quickly.

In one week I planned to hand in my short movie - that means on the 9th of june.
I can't say that I have done nothing but I definitifely can say that I need to do much more.
Sometimes I wish I am a kind of 20 japanese workoholic mangaka & animators but even with a slightly split personality I never managed to become more than one physical person.

Here's a nice Screenshot ;-)

BLA BLA BLA...ish... ahh my brain hurts like a bread filled with chillies!

BUUURRRPPHHHHH...AHHHHHH... yeah it's over.

First BG Shot ever - scene02/shot01

Yupphhhhhiiiiii - here is the first shot for a background. Its atually the establishing shot at the beginning of the film where the camera enters the head and ends in the brain.

The cat is gonna jump in to the frame soon but not here 'cause its only an Image and not a film... hahaha...

But seriously - there are still a few problems with this shot.
1. Glow with Vpost does work on planes with alphamaps on it BUT if there is something behind the plain it also gets the glow (;-) ...get the glow in the flow, man... shut up... strange voice in my head! I have to work!)

2. In the left side of the frame are some overlapping planes also with alpha channels on them. First they rendered well but then in my infinite curiosity I did something and now the most forward plane is the brighest while the planes more in the back are darker.

3. The edge of the rock in the forground is very sharp 3d programm sharp - that's bad

... there are still more problems but at the moment ai cunnot rimemberrrr itshhh tooo baddd ahir quwallity in 105...

SILLY BILLY - Textured

Ufffffhhhhh... its done!

Silly Billy has all the textures on it and I even got his eyes glowing as I wanted and without rendere intensiv attenuated lights in his eyballs but symply the 3dMax VideoPost function (thx Andy)

...oh, but I see right now that I forgot the lantern tip... bah... Tomorrow is unfortunately Background Day - so I don't work on the characters...

Synapses - a render time test

Modeling:
Very basic, bacause its a background item. So Its a hexagon extruded along a spline. The top polies are extruded and scaled manually to get the supper shape.

First I had some problems with smooting because its so low poly modelling. I tried the smooth modifier but somehow it didn't work for me so I found in the poly sub selection group of the object also the smoothing group panel and was able to assign them propperly.
But I found something even better! In the Subdivision Surface Panel in the top- or polyoutroll there is "Use NURMS Subdivision" I set the render iterations to "2" and left the display iterations at "0" for faster display.

To test if the nurms don't take to long to render (as turbosmooth would do) I just made 1000ish copies of the synapse modell, threw a middle complex texture on it (standart OrenNayarBlinn, with falloff to 40 and Index of refraction at 1.3 in the ext. Parameters rollout - all other numbers stay as they are...) and hit the render button.
And it took only 16sec!

HELP! Did I change to a NERD allready or is it normal to think about things like this?

SILLY BILLY RIG

Today is "Rigging the Fish"-Day YUPPHHHIEEE!!!

It goes on quite well but my attempt to finish it today will fail. Damn, damn... I am still to slow!

But I always say to some unspeciefied part in my mind: "Hey YOU! Don't panic. Stay calm and just go on"

So far the newest development in my project.