Sky Hye Report

Update: Here is the paper rolling up transition put into practice. I'll be able to reuse this trick a lot, so the work involved was worthwhile:
Poser did the job (see previous entry). Here is a quick example of the animated paper...

After feeling pretty darned pleased about my progress last week, I'm disappointed with the results I'm getting this week.

I've been working on an important section about the artist's body. Measuring requires position awareness. One of the toughest things to convey to students is that there is an imaginary projection plane from which measurements are taken. The section I'm working on now is where I convince the viewer that movement by the point of view, the projection plane, or the subject leads to trouble. Depending on what moves, and in which direction, a) scaling discrepancies, b) surface visibility alterations, or c) a combination of the two develop. It's all tedious material, and while memorization is not required, the listener must not zone out. To be effective, the explanation must be short but complete. Deciding what to show and what to say is harrowing. You see, I feel under pressure to make progress right now, and since this particular section is key to the premise, the pressure is heightened. This has got to be nice. The right music will definitely help, and there will be text overlays, which will certainly re-enforce any important points. I can't work on music or text overlays until the script is finalized. :-P

This clip is a demonstration of just how unformed the section is right now. The timing is too fast. The voice over is not properly placed -- mainly because it's still in flux. When I figure out the best arrangement, the solution will seem obvious. No one will guess that this part was troublesome. The window structure in this clip is the projection plane, materialized for demonstration purposes. Normally, the projection plane is imaginary. Placement of the imaginary projection plane varies according to the measuring technique.

It's been a rough week, dvd-wise. In spite of having a clear direction, it was slow going. The main trouble was knowing what could be done, but not knowing how to do it. I whacked at various filters in Final Cut Pro for a day but failed to make a feathered, masked image move properly over another image. The next day, I used Photoshop to create the scene in a 65 frame animation, but it ended up ugly in the timeline. That brought me to dinner time. Rather than fight into the night, I gave it a rest. Nearly every time I hit a wall like this, then get a decent night's sleep, things fall into place the following day. Sure enough, yesterday morning all the tools seemed crystal clear to me, and my motion sequence came together in a matter of minutes!

That's not what I'll show this time, though.

With one animation problem solved, I was able to turn my attention to something easy by comparison. The poses were fun to create and I'm generally happy with the renders. Plus, they look fabulous in the timeline on the color video monitor!

( The illustrated story unfolds behind the cut... )

I'm sure I will be posting quite a bit about my dvd here, so I think it's time to introduce my animation characters.

Each 3D character was altered from its default state. Each went through Silo to make it just so, then exported back to Poser as a morph of the original character. Each also received new or modified textures to go along with its new persona. It took quite a bit of time to work out all the problems that developed. It would take a very long time to describe every aspect of the entire process. But I want to discuss it with you, so this will provide enough info to spark specific questions. Behind the cut, you can see the original models, just as they look when first loaded into the scene, side by side with the final characters.
( See all the characters behind the cut... )