Animating is like being in jail

[sky_hye]

I've been adjusting to my new computer with new software, finding various bugs and issues. Although a slow process, I find rendering is fast, so once everything is ironed out, things will move along smoothly and quickly. However, I can see my finish date has moved out to at least summer 2011.

I created an animation of 1000 frames which turns around a close-up of my artist model. The model is made of a head from one character atop the body of another. An unavoidable seam forms between the two. I'm currently in the process of blurring the seams in all 1000 frames, which is tedious. On top of that, the result is not attractive. Since each seam must be blurred individually by hand, small differences are detectable across frames, making the animation jumpy around the neck. Yesterday, thinking the seam was caused by a surface orientation difference, I made a smoothing bridge between the head and the neck. First, I built the bridge in Silo, then I textured it with Photoshop's 3-D texturing module. It looked great attached to the neck in the Poser 8 scene, but when I rendered it, there was a clear abrupt seam on both edges. It would double the work to repair, so I lost an entire day of work in the name of saving time.

Here's a picture of the seam and repair on my digital model's neck.

Comments

[submarine_bells]

That sounds almost as tedious as the stage of data analysis that I'm up to, which involves running statistical analyses of a bit over a thousand small batches of data, then mucking around with them in a spreadsheet to identify and hilight outlier datapoints for each one. Ugh. I thought it'd take a few weeks and it's taking *months*. Yuk. I will be so very glad when that bit's done.

[sky_hye]

I can certainly sympathize. I hope for my diligence I'll get some sort of equivalent benefit to the PhD you are aiming for. This project is as involved, but with unknown outcome.