Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Current Project in the Works

Well I'm going to be vague,
I am working on an animation using Blender.
So far it seems promising,
I purposely kept the whole thing simple,
yet rather cool looking.
Josh Melling is trying to keep me from compromising as little as possible.
Some things have had to be trimmed down,
it was taking 40 minutes per frame to produce perfect lighting,
I trimmed it down to 20 minutes per frame and the results are nearly as good.
That is on my Quad Core 2 and it was maxed out.
I'm utilizing Yaf A Ray, it seems to be from past experinces and this present one to be very quick and reliable although it's integration with blender is not that great sometimes.
The only issue that is worth mentioning is that the bump mapping
doesn't work well in Yaf A Ray, sometimes it works other times it won't.

Anyways I'm hoping for the best,
if not it's yet another project to add to the 100,000 I never got around finishing that would have looked sweet if finsihed.

However since I've committed myself,
plus the intensive forethought I think I can pull it off.

Another Gimp Flame Wallpaper

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Gimp's Flame Filter

                Some fun with Gimp's Flame filter! I created these 
          in Gimp using the  render/flame filter and a custom gradient


                        Feel free to download as backgrounds and use!
                                    Josh Melling (Repatition)

Friday, January 29, 2010

The end of computer animation by hand?

I have thought seriously about doing computer animation as a profession.
The industry is very interesting to me,
bringing characters to life, different animation styles and overall it's just plain fun.
However after lots of research on the subject,
calling a few colleges and looking at what the future of the industry is I decided against it as a career.
With motion tracking getting as good as it is the industry is shrinking,
with technology growing at such an exponential rate a MoCap system optical,
magnetic, visual or otherwise will be affordable enough that it will phase out most of the need for animators.
Pixar comes immediately to mind that they do not utilize motion capture,
Monster house for instance and many other productions utilize mainly Motion capture.
They will still be needed to do physically impossible animations, to clean it up and do cartoons within the spectrum of loony tunes, however the future seems rather bleak.

I will still mess around, I will sometime do a nice animated short and make almost all aspects of the short nice, however right now I'm focusing on my education.
I'm wanting to earn my Associate of Arts before I'm 18 and proceed with my business degree,
I'm hoping to get the latter by the time I'm 22 possibly 23.
Many people have more than one degree, maybe just maybe there is the opportunity of getting a job in animation after I have a "real" secure job, I mean I can dream right ?

Friday, January 22, 2010

Busy

Currently I have not had the time for a project,
with college right now I'm trying to score high enough on my CLEP tests so I can earn 12 credits for my month of study.
However I really want to do something with Josh Melling and Brandon Gomez for the local media class where you enter in a project.
I love animation,
unless I get some killer idea I won't invest my time into something that's not so good.
It can take around an hour a second to make good 3d character animation that looks realistic.
I have some ideas, however until they are nearly done or I know that they will be finished I will hold off from posting about them.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Continuing work on my Tremulous map

Currently named Terminal 2, here are some screenshots from the in-game engine.






Currently working on completing unfinished parts of the map.