I'm not dead, yet.

Oh what a very busy month I have just had. I have just finished the year and now on my so called holiday. Us teachers get nice long breaks. Right now I would love to be enjoying finishing the Mastering Maya course but I have a huge problem, my parents.

My parents have come to visit me from all the way from New Zealand. As this is their first trip anywhere they basicly need to be held by the hand at all times. They a pretty good though as they are willing to give me some time to work on the course.

It has been slow going. I have just completed shot1 in final render. Now I need to finish of shot two and shot 3 in lighting and then render the sucker out and I am done :)

I have learnt so much from this course you would not believe.

Tomorrow I am off to England until Monday so nothing will be done during that time. I hope today I can knock out all the lighting for shot 2 and three and get it ready to render.

I will update again on Tuesday Morning.

Long time no post

Well, I know it has been a long time with no post but I have been busy with non-Maya things. Work has taken over. It has been so busy that Maya has had to take a back seat for a few days. This does not mean I have not been doing anything but I have not kept to my 3-4 hours a day plan which has been a disappointment.

Now that work has become less of a stress and I have more time I will be blogging what I am doing again. I find I am lacking motivation in the last few days. Last night I only put in 1 hour of work and I would not call that quailty work either. I have just about finished my animatics and I must finish it all by tonight.

I am still waiting for my videos to arrive. They should have been here by now so once again I am a bit dissappointed.

As you can see I am a bit grumpy right now so I will end this little blogging verbal shit and get back to what I should be doing.

Tomorrow expect a much happier and more detailed post.

Secret Squirrel Mission

Mission : to build animatics of interesting type.
Completion: Very soon.


I have changed what my scene is going to be about. And sorry some people might have thought last night in the chat area they found out. nup, it all changed and I am not telling.

Want more news? Well bad luck cause I am not going to tell you. It’s a secret.

Captain we have a problem!

I love nodes. I say this because at last I have learnt how to use them without being told.

In the alien model that I have just finished I wanted the eyes to focus. Being new to all of this I had no clue. Then while watching a video on rigging (which was completely off topic on rigging the eye focus) it hit me.

It was a simple link up. First I made a new attribute in the Alien control called eye focus. Basicly I linked (using connection editor) it up to the ramp that controled the eye. When I first did this it was very hard to control so I made a few changes and this time using nodes. I grabbed a set range node and gave myself a buffer for easier control.

What a great feeling. Working out how to do something with things that just sounded scarey for a long time. We were first introducted to nodes with a few hours of video. For that we had to complete an assignment just using nodes. I completed this but I still felt that I was unsure what I was doing. Next, we built the earth and here we used more nodes. Slowly I was starting to understand them. Now after rigging this very simple eye focus I love playing with them. Great, great feeling.

I am off to complete some animatics today. This is where you make a little video of what your scene should look like using stand in objects. It is a quick dirty way of testing the scene.

That's all folks.

Why, When, Where and What the fuck!

School reports.
How many parents out there? If you a parent and you get school reports, all I can say is sometimes they are just an exerise done just to fill in boxes. I am finishing my reports for my class. Since I work at a private school I am expected to write more than I really need to. Each report is 11 pages long. All I can say is, I have better things to do. They have been a complete waste of time. The crap that teachers write is unbelievable.

Maya, I have been so busy I only completed one video. Not happy at all. Why can't I be a millionare?

Sorry not much more to say. My energy level is at 0.

Day 12,865,964

Time, do we have enough in the day? I am thinking of asking God if he can extend the day by 6-10 hours and night by around 10 hours. I like my sleep and I don't feel like giving it up.

I am really loving this course. last night I just chatted on Buzznet trying to solve the problem of animated textures. After about an hour of discussing we never came up with an easy way. I think you could just use files like the console shaders activity and then just keyframe what textures I want to use. I want to see if you could use an avi as a texture. I found that you could by using the movie node but I could not find for the life of me where the frame extendsion on button was. I need this to turn the avi file on. When I told it to run by an expression I had no problems to start the avi but I want to start the avi running at a set time. Any renders that I did with an avi just turned out very poor. As I am making this, buzz has not explained how to use the movie node I was really just shooting in the dark. In the end I became fustrated and just left it. I am sure to come back to this soon as I am going to need it for my alien project.

From the course all I did was the cluster weight painting. I had to restart it three times before I started getting the hang of it. I watched the video more than once and found the trick that Buzz was using. after that it was much easier. I am by no means am I now a pro but it is not as hard as I first thought.

Not sure what I will get done tonight as I have work to finish by Thursday. Since work pays the bills they have to come before enjoyment. Damn it, why can't I just be rich so I don't have to work. :)

My plan for the alien project:

Space ship comes into view over Earth. I am thinking about have two spaceships but we will see there. The alien looks at a sign bobbing in the air pointing towards the Earth saying "earth pop: 6,000,000,000" He gets an evil thought and speeds off to the earth. (I did want the hitchikers guide to come out but I want to finish this project this year so I canned that idea)

Cut to the yard. The beachball is sitting in the sand pit. In bounces the talented ball right up to the beachball. he looks at her lovingly. Cut to under spaceship, doors open. cut back to the yard. The light goes on the beachball. talented ball pushes the beachball out of the way and gets dragged up (fighting all the way). TB (talented ball) get sucked into the alien ship. the ship flys off ... alien not a happy as him and TB are fighting (scene above the earth).

I have cut many ideas from this as I have to keep it short.

The day after yesterday and the day before tomorrow

I have continued to work very hard on this course. I should get a picture of all the post-it notes I have through my note book. It is so much easier to read now.

I have seen some people not sure if they should take the course on the 3DBuzz forums becuase of the amount of time that this course takes. I can't lie, this course will take up a lot of your time but so far I have found it very do-able. I have a full time job where at this time of the year I am very busy but I have kept up with the work load.

I am working as hard as I can. I need to finish this course earlier than the given time. So to those that read this are worried about the speed that things are getting done, stop it and sign up now. If you think you can commit 3-4 hours a day then you will finish this course. I am not saying it will be easy but it will be a lot of fun on the way.

So far I have rigged the spaceship and rigged a lot of the alien. I just need to do a lot of tweeking tonight. At one point last night I found myself not understanding anything that Buzz was saying so I just went to bed. I guess doing 4 hours of learning can do that to you.

In the rigging videos it is just Buzz talking. I still find it interesting but I prefer to have zak along for the ride as they work very well together, it also keeps me awake after a hard days work. I'm not saying Buzz is boring, just that you get used to listening to 2 people, going to one if just different. Still learning, still much more to go. I'm dreaming Maya (damn you Buzz)!

I am loving this course.

If you are reading this and thinking of taking this course and you have a full time job, if I can do it so can you. Sign up!