I am a bull in a china shop of computers.. crashes, mistakes, lockups and most of all programs behaving in ways that I nor tech support can figure out. My brother jokes that I should hire myself out as a Quality Assurance guy because I have the uncanny ability to find things that programs do that no one has ever seen. I’ve stumped Adobe, Macromedia and even Apple at times over the course of my journey through computers. It’s most likely because I’m self-trained and I do things differently than the software companies intend. I don’t follow procedure. The story of my life. I’m the salmon of animation swimming upstream against the current and against my own better judgment. Anyway, I am still working on The Fireside Chat.
3D animation is full of procedural things that have to happen in a certain order so that you get the results you want.
Well, I have been learning that the hard way this past week. I have rendered and re rendered and rendered again sometimes the same scene and yet somehow I always manage to screw it up in one way or another. these rigs that I’m working with were made a certain way, the final model you see of Cubesteak and Ribeye is way to detailed to animate with so there has been a low resolution version of the model parented to the skeleton as well so I can animate the low rez-version and the high rez version (which is hidden) performs the same way. Sneaky huh?
Then when I ge the animation the way I want it, I unhide the High rez version and render it. the problem is that while you can see the Low-rez model as you animate it is set not to render so it doesn’t show up when you render the scene and if you’re not careful to follow PROCEDURE, like me, you find yourself with a rendered scene with no characters in it! Notice the pic top the right… Cubesteak didn’t render. 9 hours of work down the tubes! AHHHHHHHHHH!
If you notice there is also a loincloth that Ribeye is wearing and that has some cloth simulation on it which is great but it needs time to attach itself to Ribeye or it won’t work.and it just sits in the scene alone, ghostly and disembodied. This requires me to render at least 30 frames prior to the animation I want so the cloth simulation knows where it’s got to go. It looks really cool but it’s a pain because it forces me to throw away frames form my rendering which is a waste.
Still, it’s worth it. Well this week I learned a valuable lesson about 3D and how you really have to s
et up a scene correctly for rendering or you will not get the results you want. Twice in a row I rendered my newest scene with out the loincloth showing and wasted two full days of rendering in the process because I rushed it and did not go through the little checklist to make sure everything was ready to go. Two days wasted from my inexperience. Ahhh well. what can I do.
Now you must know that the Pros don’t do it this way. Pixar doesn’t render an entire scene in Maya. They break it up by rendering the background then the shadows, then each character and composite it in a program such as Discreet’s Combustion or Adobe After Effects or something like that
(Actually, they probably don’t use After Effects because they’re Pixar and they probably have something much cooler, but it’s probably similar to AE).
Anyway, I haven’t figured out how to do that correctly yet; render separate layers, so if there’s anyone out there that knows how to correctly do that, I would greatly appreciate some advice. That said, I have finally finished two more scenes for The Fireside Chat and I’ve added them to the film. It’s coming along nicely.. again, not great 
but I’m pleased with it for my first 3D film. You can see the latest cut here.
There’s a few things I hate, one being that the lighting changes from scene to scene and I’m not quite sure why because it’s the same exact light in all the scenes. I’ll figure it out eventually but I just know that it will make me have to rerender the whole friggin’ thing. The other as always is my animation. I’m getting better but it’s still not the best and I know it. But I am learning in droves.
In other news my friend and partner-in-crime Harry Mclaughlin has finished yet another book called Badhat abut a guy that mistakenly becomes sheriff of a town. It’s his own solo creation and he is doing the interior illustrations himself as well. I wish him well with it! He also informed me last night that the 2nd Ribeye the Bullbarian book will be available for sale in two weeks! Amazing! I can’t wait.
