we're watching Mezzo in lab...
"Shell of Memories" (episode 6)is about a guy who starts going out with this really sweet (typical japanese anime airhead) girl...and then one day she runs out of batteries!!! he takes her to her "father" and then busts up the lab where they are keeping her "alive" for one last conversation...they download her into a memory stick! so, he ends up with his girlfriend on a "USB key"...!!
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Sunday, April 22, 2007
ad campaign
because the school will not be printing a schedule, and there might not be a .pdf version available on-line, I've created ads to post around the school in order to promote the 3D Animation Short Production class. This is a course at an unusual time, during the MayMester, which is in-between the Spring and Summer semesters.
model: Ivan
model: Adam
model: Elizabeth
model: Albert
model: El
model: Jessman
model: Ian
model: Ivan
model: Adam
model: Elizabeth
model: Albert
model: El
model: Jessman
model: Ian
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
denny's: the cliche
Ron and Ivan went out to "dinner" with me after the game development class tonight. Neither of them are in the game class, but both are interested in the 3D Animated Short Production course that I'll be teaching over the Maymester at Collin College. (all these terms will become familiar to you after a few posts...) Both of them are also the calibre of men that accomplish things and lead others to accomplishment, yet are still looking forward to the next accomplishment.
So, we discussed the various ideas for the upcoming class. Will we be doing any pre-production work? Who is interested in taking the course? Will we be able to polish the piece after the course is done? Who will be the intern?
I laid out my incipient ideas for the structure of the course, the production schedule, the ideas of fairness versus credited roles, volunteers being treated as if they are paid, the cycling of duties so everyone gets experience and exposure. Ivan is busy fitting this into his own plans for commercial and community production and success, increasing his speed and quality. Ron and I discuss dispositions of various students, and how to keep everyone happy, motivated, and productive. The task looms large, and we want to front-load the process with the few weeks we have until May 14th. But, we cannot let things magically appear in class, since I want to have students thoroughly investigate the short production process as it happens.
I tell my story about performing uncoveted tasks by torturously long means in order to finish the G.I. Joe movie at ReelFX. But, it is difficult for me to judge, because I do not really despise any part of the 3D production process. My contribution to computer graphics terms is "polys per pixel (ppp)" and describes the bottleneck created by unnecessarily heavy geometry when it comes time to render! I hoped the term by it mere necessity would sufficiently scare the director, the modelers, and the rendering and compositing crew. Suppose you have a scene with 9,000,000 polygons in your geometry (which we did) and you are rendering for NTSC at 720x486, so that you have 349,920 pixels on the screen. That means there are 25.7 polygons for every pixel you actually render. In construction terms, that's a cube (6 polygons) with 5 extrudes (each producing 4 additional polygons) for every pixel! Or, you're only seeing, at most, 4% of the actual information present in the scene (if each pixel were just 1 polygon, which is still inefficient)! So, we found another way to render all the establishing shots, by rendering one still hi-res undershot, and painting mattes on top of that. those undershots took hours to render, one small swatch by one small swatch, on large numbers of machines after hours, saving often and recovering from memory crashes, even after simplifying much of the geometry . (this is the uncoveted task by torture...) The goal is to complete the task by any means.
I mention to Ron that I don't want people to do all-nighters and the class is officially from 9:15am to 5:00pm. But, I'll be there from 9am to 9pm, to accomodate everyone's schedules. We want to work remotely. We want to log each task, each day, and all of our experiences. So, we need an electronic presence. So, 3dasp.blogspot.com!
future topics (for me):
*6 years ago there were 10 guys who started to make an animated short...
*Why can't they get the name of the course correct in the schdule?!
*pre-production momentum
you see where this is heading, don't you?
So, we discussed the various ideas for the upcoming class. Will we be doing any pre-production work? Who is interested in taking the course? Will we be able to polish the piece after the course is done? Who will be the intern?
I laid out my incipient ideas for the structure of the course, the production schedule, the ideas of fairness versus credited roles, volunteers being treated as if they are paid, the cycling of duties so everyone gets experience and exposure. Ivan is busy fitting this into his own plans for commercial and community production and success, increasing his speed and quality. Ron and I discuss dispositions of various students, and how to keep everyone happy, motivated, and productive. The task looms large, and we want to front-load the process with the few weeks we have until May 14th. But, we cannot let things magically appear in class, since I want to have students thoroughly investigate the short production process as it happens.
I tell my story about performing uncoveted tasks by torturously long means in order to finish the G.I. Joe movie at ReelFX. But, it is difficult for me to judge, because I do not really despise any part of the 3D production process. My contribution to computer graphics terms is "polys per pixel (ppp)" and describes the bottleneck created by unnecessarily heavy geometry when it comes time to render! I hoped the term by it mere necessity would sufficiently scare the director, the modelers, and the rendering and compositing crew. Suppose you have a scene with 9,000,000 polygons in your geometry (which we did) and you are rendering for NTSC at 720x486, so that you have 349,920 pixels on the screen. That means there are 25.7 polygons for every pixel you actually render. In construction terms, that's a cube (6 polygons) with 5 extrudes (each producing 4 additional polygons) for every pixel! Or, you're only seeing, at most, 4% of the actual information present in the scene (if each pixel were just 1 polygon, which is still inefficient)! So, we found another way to render all the establishing shots, by rendering one still hi-res undershot, and painting mattes on top of that. those undershots took hours to render, one small swatch by one small swatch, on large numbers of machines after hours, saving often and recovering from memory crashes, even after simplifying much of the geometry . (this is the uncoveted task by torture...) The goal is to complete the task by any means.
I mention to Ron that I don't want people to do all-nighters and the class is officially from 9:15am to 5:00pm. But, I'll be there from 9am to 9pm, to accomodate everyone's schedules. We want to work remotely. We want to log each task, each day, and all of our experiences. So, we need an electronic presence. So, 3dasp.blogspot.com!
future topics (for me):
*6 years ago there were 10 guys who started to make an animated short...
*Why can't they get the name of the course correct in the schdule?!
*pre-production momentum
you see where this is heading, don't you?
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