A neat mess

Moving along, way slower than I would want of course. Hit another snag last night. It turns out Mental Ray does not like to render a few hundred interpenetrating polygons. Gee!

Stumped

It is a bit silly, but I could not help noticing two things when this imaged popped up while I looked up a word on Merrian-Webster:

1. Why did it make me think of Sarah Palin (I do not particularry enjoy that thouight)


2. Why is this lady holding a Wacom pen? Did nobody notice this graphic designer fetish?

Just an early morning thought. Or two. Back to work.

One neat, one messy

Judging by this blog it might seem that I have not been that busy, but I have been creating quite a few intermediate renders for my next Multi Dimensional Eye Virus animation. The process involves a lot of image textures rendered into image textures rendered into&hellip ad infinitum (well, not quite, though that would be great)

I just rendered the first tests for the next dimension. To the left you see a neat version, to the right a messy one. The final shot is probably going to be somewhere in between. And with more lights and some unexpected action.

Going HD

Manhattan
Originally uploaded by Wobbe F. Koning

I went to an electronics store to buy a WiFi adapter and came home with that and a tiny HD camera.

In unrelated news: This morning one of our resident groundhogs was stupid enough to walk into our live animal trap

Animation Stand

To test the copy stand I have been setting up for our program I put my sketchbook on the stand, resulting in this sequence of the opening scene for ">Hello World"

Fingers Crossed

A hopefully minor setback: The aforementioned Blue Screens started appearing more consistently and seemed to point at a failing hard drive. The occasional loud clicking sound was not encouraging. I had just about decided to go and buy a new drive, and install the entire system again: it is the system drive that seems to be dying, when my wife asked if it could be a loose cable. Well, theoretically, maybe. Opened up the machine, took the drives out, put them back in and booted up the machine. It finally finished the diskcheck (/repair) I had asked the system to perform, and has been rendering for four hours straight since (it had been crashing within two). So, fingers crossed!

Update: After chugging along nicely for the entire weekend, this Monday morning (June 14) it actually finished the two renders I need to move on, a total of 574 frames! I bought a new hard drive anyway, since I was thinking of re installing the system before the crashes started as the system was getting sluggish. Better to no re-install on a flaky HD, right?

Small Steps

Tweaked the head a little and created eyes. Looked at this tutorial for reference, but I do not want the eyes to be so cartoony, so Bugs Life. Looked at quite a few more reference images. Question now arises: how realistic do I want this fella to be?

Normal Issues

Because a Plug-in I'm using does not work on my 64 bit laptop, I changed a shader today without being able to actually render it. Looked pretty good at first when I could render it tonight on my desktop (running 32 bit XP) but I have the feeling something is off. Will figure that out tomorrow.

Gave my desktop a task to render. Went to check a few minutes later and was confronted with the blue screen of death. Maybe it did not like me pulling out the network cable. Oh well. Restarted it.

BSOD BS Update: And it crashed again. Not at frame 4, but at frame 49. Another nice Blue Screen starting Memory dump. Restarted it from frame 49. Still going strong at frame 63. I had rendered the same scene at draft quality before, with no problems. What the Fietspomp!

Full Head

Updated the head model. Getting there. I think.