The Bulky Panel Hurdle

Okay-

I laid out the panels and played a little bit.
Lemme say- THAT SHIT WAS HARD TO MOVE AROUND...

But I knew that was going to happen, right? I said so in my first post.

WELL-

Now I'm thinking that there has got to be a way to create the walls and turn the greeble off to animate.

The other thing was- when I saw the panels together- I was like: "Oh SHIT!- These are much bulkier than the Death Star's panels! I'm a failure. A FAILURE!!!"

Here is what they looked like:

















I was playing with different rendering techniques already- :)

A little silly I know but-

I was pretty unhappy with the bulkiness of the situation. :(



Then- after a day and a half of reflection, I decided to watch the run on the Death Star, again.

The Death Star was plenty bulky, yo.

See how these hurdles hurt you? I was messing myself up.

I'm going to continue with the Panels but I think there is a way to make them to where I can turn the greeble effect off- It would be worth it to give it a shot. And it seems to be a problem that can be solved with organization...








Yeah. I'm fucked. I know.

The "Can I Be More Efficient?" hurdle...

When one creates an animation- maybe even any creative outing- you often stop and ask yourself "Can I be more efficient?" or "Am I tweaking this enough?"- or "Have I over tweaked it?"

This is just a hurdle- Sometimes these hurdles are hard to get over- or even crash the creation completely. The way to deal with them is to fix it- or realize you can't fix it and press on- the answer will come eventually.
Still- hurdles suck.

I'm kinda having one right now as I build these panels.

My dilemma is- I'm building like 16-20 different panels- I will then lay them out like tiles- repeated and rotated so that they look like the surface (and trench) of the Death Star.

Now, each panel has hundreds (if not thousands) of polys because they are all greebled.

When I put them all together- they are going to be one MASSIVE slowdown to my system because I'll have all these polys to calculate...

Greeble actually has a mode that allows you to turn OFF the greeble effect especially for the purpose of being able to animate easier.
That would be great EXCEPT for the fact that I'm going to have 16-20 panels- remember? Repeated and rotated. Some of them are made up of multiple greeble settings.

Hmmmmm...

WAIT! I GOT IT!

I'll make a pseudo surface (one with only a few polys) and place the panels on top of it. THEN, when it's time to animate- I'll HIDE the real surface and animate over the pseudo surface.

Awwwwwww, YEAH!
Maybe this blog IS helping my process!


Here is an example of the panels.
This one is where I'm really getting
comfortable with greeble's effects.

Other panels have more...uh bumps?
Like this:

OMG! Cool Idea!

So.

I've been working on my tiles- Which I could TOTALLY Greeble in 10 minutes, but I want some of the shapes to look original and I also kinda want to pay tribute to the work that went into the actual Star Wars film, so i continue to labor at it.
More about that later*.

The whole time I've been working on this video, I've been thinking of... well,
Some of you may remember that old Star Wars arcade game from back in the day?-








Yeah. THAT arcade game.




Well, you may remember that as you move up in levels, the Death Star trench run would get harder and harder. At first you would have pratically zero opposition.
Then there would be more turrets lining the walls of the trench.
THEN, there would be these bars that you had to manuever through as you flew down the trench and dodged the barrage of asterixs that came from the line of turrets on the wall.

Like this:











Now, I remember when I played the game- I thought it was an abomination to the real thing- but it did make the game hella fun!
So all this time I wanted to incorporate those walls in the Mac-Star.

I'm already going to be stepping away from the real thing because I'm going to have to line the floor of the Mac Star with some Neon tiles in order to explain the Apple-esque glow around it's center- so I thought- So what if I add some walls for the ships to fly over?! It'll add more action to the whole thing.

But I could already hear people going:
"Dude! What's up with all the barriers in the trench! That wasn't in the movie!"

But I wanted to pay tribute to the game somehow. Hmmmm...

So I was doing (REALLY ROUGH) sketches:



This is the Mac Star- that I will rebuild- You can see it as it is now on the Sith Vicious Myspace Page





And HERE is the IDEA!





What I'll do is that when Sith goes to use his "targeting computer" he'll look into the visor and "see" the video game as the graphic.

Then the graphic will have him level up to level 3- and the walls will have turrets and barriers appear.

This will surprise Sith- and he will look out at the ACTUAL trench and then he will see the actual walls and turrets in real life.


It's PERFECT!

So I will be moving on to working on that animatic after I get the trench done.




Now I have to decide at what point that will happen in the video.

To blog or not to blog...

It's been a long time- ABOUT TWO FREAKIN' YEARS- and over the time I've been thinking-

What the hell am I doing a blog for?

More than anything else- it's a distraction. I mean, nobody's reading this thing and I'm just writing in it to feel like I'm working on my projects more than anything else, right?
It isn't like I need ANOTHER distraction- between being a husband and the father of two- Work, Netflicks, Facebook AND Xbox- I GOT enough distractions.

You saw that? I just got REAL on ya'll! Ha! Ha!

Of course, since no one is really reading this I'm just doing a little self therapy.

So anyway- a couple of years has gone past- I have completed a project or three- mostly videos edited- and I haven't blogged a lick about it- to no ones loss.

The other thing about blogs is...you gotta have one that looks worth a damn if you're gonna be posting about graphic art and all that.

That means that you have to spend s decent amount of time designing it- which is fun as hell- don't get me wrong. And then teaching yourself the latest CSS tricks to put it up the right way and all that- I could spend a week just laying it out!

THAT'S the problem- That is a week I could have spent actually working on a project as opposed to designing a blog that no one is going to read anyway.


So I was teetering on shutting this blog down.

What drove my feelings home was when I was researching how to build a Death Star surface for my latest project and I stumbled across this blog:

http://animwatch.animationblogspot.com/

I could totally see where this dude was coming from (and I didn't even put a tenth of the work into my blog that he did his.

At the same time I was saddened this site, that had not only showed me how to create my Death Star surface but also seemed to be chock full of cool little animation tidbits, wasn't going to be around anymore. I mean, I would have been a reader if I knew it was around...

So the question weighed on my mind- To blog or not to blog?

I thought about the projects I'm working on and the ones I have in mind- and about how maybe someone somewhere might stumble upon my crap and maybe learn something.

I was leaning- but then I put it to Dave who said:


"I think blog entries can help nudge you to get
something done and
gives you a yardstick showing how far you've progressed...it
also
can provide feedback from people reading it. I've got
several things
that I'm working on that have been made a lot better because
of
suggestions."

I guess he's right.

I decided to blog BUT only under two circumstances:

1. My blog would have to be PART of the project process. It's going to be a yardstick and a DEADLINE.

and

2. It has to be reader friendly.
Meaning I have to post regularly and the post has to show progress or have something interesting for the viewer such as a tutorial or sketches and designs or what have you.


So that's my deal. If I can't keep that then I'll just kill this blog and keep on truckin'.

My first goal is that a week from now I will have my 16 different surfaces built for my Mac Star Surface.


The other thing is I ain't gonna spend a week redesigning this site- I'm just gonna sabotage some premade template.

Well. Maybe I WILL make a jpg. to go up top eventually...