Animations… and more!

Moving some files around, I stumbled on this old animation test reel of our hero robot and one of the robot extras. I was wanting to make sure the control code I created for them worked, so I had them prance around like little prom princesses. WooHOO! Nice, shiny robots in action! Yeah! Okay, they’re not really prancing, but you get the idea…

Progress for the set is slow but steady. Mostly slow. I’ve hit that point where I’m just splitting hairs with some parts of the set, and ignoring parts I actually need to begin staging and blocking. So, I’m putting on my Producer’s hat and kicking myself in the butt. “Get busy, you! Quit yer doddling around!!” Thanks, boss, I needed that… anyway, there are some props I’m going to concentrate on over the coming week, and then finally we can set up some cameras…

Since all high-falutin’ galactic societies of hoity-toity, super-advanced rust buckets think they need greebles to decorate every last doorstop and bathroom fixture under the sun, I coded a subroutine in POV-Ray to create the lovely greebles like the picture above. These will go on the walls of our set, although the final color and texture hasn’t been decided on yet. It’ll be interesting seeing what the parse times are for four walls covered with these things — if it gets too nutty, I’ll make a bump map out of them, and just use the actual greebles for any closeups we need…

This past weekend was a time crush to finish inking on Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog, so I held off doing much of anything else.  In spite of that, I did manage some progress on a few other movies:

• I made out a to-do list for adding the detail enhancements to the robot movie’s first set, and started a prop list, too.  I’m guessing I’ll have another flyby video with enhancements at the end of this week, if not sooner…
• Looks like I started some pencil roughs for several scenes to Evolution a few months ago — found a drawer full of various dinosaur drawings on Sunday and got them all scanned in.  So, for not picking up a single pencil to draw, I managed to get a lot of drawing done.  Sweet!  Hmmm, I wonder what else is hiding in my filing cabinet.  Hopefully no forgotten electric bills…

As far as our Scary Monster movie goes, before I take the coloring plunge I need to do another edit using the inked images I just completed.  I want to trim a couple of shots, and I want to see how all the inked drawings actually look in motion, in case somebody’s eyes wander all over the place or a leg mysteriously vanishes for a couple of frames.  Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened…

WooHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

…

Pardon me while I collapse…

Here’s another video flyby. If your media player supports it, loop it

Today I added some support columns to our room, and some more doors. Went to a baseball game tonight, so I didn’t spend as much time working on it as I wanted. However, I’m thinking the dimensions are about right, so now I can start concentrating on adding some detail…