Guy meets Girl.  They’re young, fall in love in a quick spiral and the next thing they know they’re married and not long after popping out kids.  Girl isn’t happy with herself and parts of her marriage, cheats on Guy with Boys.

Guy and Girl get divorced.  They’re cool though, and eventually settle into something more akin to sibling relations than anything and like that.  Their kids dig it, cat doesn’t mind having a place to herself and all is well.

Guy dates Women.  It doesn’t really go all that well at first, and Guy is kind of shocked to find that somewhere in the last 10 years he traded in his old self with someone that’s confident and actually—dare he acknowledge it—good with Women.  He takes pride in this, though he dislikes how being good with Women makes him feel and pulls back on the frequency of dating.

Guy has Girlfriends.  It’s a serious deal to him so it’s not quite as flippant as thing as dating was at first to him, yet he finds he is particularly picky about who it is he is seeing any kind of long term potential with.  He has two Girlfriends before he caves in and accepts that he knows who it is he’s meant to be with and decides he’s going to pull back and be true to what he wants.  So, Guy pulls out of the dating pool.

Honestly, Guy’s getting a little sexually frustrated by this choice but he figures that’s a sort of necessity for the whole thing as well.  He’s tempted to try to take part in a sort of friends-with-benefits thing, but then worries that it’s taking advantage the potential partner and decides against it.

Guy does his thing for awhile.  By this point he’s somewhat skeptical of any female prospects, partially certain he won’t find the sort of kind-nature and family-oriented one that he envisions in his mind.  Guy reasons with himself that he is, in point of fact, both kind natured and family oriented and logically concludes that there must be others like that, but then the small bit of pessimism he has in him reminds him that it might be a male-versus-female thing.  Coincidentally, this rides entirely on the observed conclusion Guy has that women aren’t actually romantic at all, it’s the male half of the species that is romantic…women appreciate the romantic gestures, but do not actually offer them in return. 

This lone fault in Guy’s pessimistic side leaves a backdoor wide open for the romantic in him to be awoken, through little more than a romantic gesture being received at the right time.

Guy meets Lady.  The title up until now has been reserved for the special females in his life; much like one calls the leader of the United States a President, it’s a sort honorary or formal title Guy uses to describe how he feels about her.  This one, however, simply is a Lady.  The first time he sees Lady he’s actually expecting to roll his eyes and laugh a little, the circumstances of their meeting somewhat unusual and creating much doubt in his mind…however, upon seeing her he is taken aback, as though he’d just been struck in the chin.  As if fate had chosen to reiterate the point to him, Guy shows Lady’s picture to friends and they universally say something along the lines of “yeah, she’s cute.” 

To Guy, however, she’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.  Physically, or symmetrically, or however one defines the corporeal attraction between two beings…yes, she’s gorgeous, but that’s not what he’s stuck staring at for days after.  What stuns Guy is the kindness he sees in her eyes.  The more he sees of her he sees a sort of perceived strength or confidence he finds attractive as well, but it always comes back to the warmth he sees in her.

“My cup runneth over,” he sighs to himself, wondering if he finally found that kind natured, family oriented female.

However, it would be far too simple for the story to then progress to them meeting and falling in love, happily ever after.  No, much as Guy hates the reality of the situation there is—like any good story—a major conflict that must be resolved.  Namely, they aren’t actually able to be together at all due to their current situations.

Guy is dismayed, finding himself standing at something of a crossroads.  He is intrigued by Lady, no doubt.  As he runs through the possible ways he can think of to win her affections and overcome the situation that would keep them apart, he sees the fork in the road forming and knows that it won’t be long before he must make a decision.

On the one side he simply cuts his losses.  It’ll drive him mad for the rest of his life knowing the Lady is out there, and he’ll always be left wondering…but he knows he can move on past that.  It’s not like he had gotten used to be around her, after all.

The more “interesting story” side of the road though is uncertain, and seems exponentially risky to him the further down it goes.  The security he feels now in every other part of his life would be uprooted, routines changed and plans altered to make it happen.  He thinks he can do it…part of him says it knows he can, he’s done anything he’s ever wanted to when he really tried.  With the proper motivation, he can make anything happen.

Overwhelmed by it all—and fearing he’s being far too dramatic with the entire situation—he decides to allow fate to be the deciding factor for the time being.  Fate hasn’t always been kind to Guy, but Guy loves where he is now and trusts putting his faith in fate’s hands…if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.  So he’s simply himself with her, enjoying their conversations and allowing the smallest bit of hope to slip in there now and again.

Still…unaware to Guy, the backdoor remains.

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This was a dual purpose desire, and I think part of what stalled it for so long was that my initial desire was to make a sort of “all inclusive” portfolio piece…I could give this animated short to a prospective employer and say “hey…I made everything in this.  Characters, environments, rigging & animation, visual effects…all me.”

Not exactly the most creative reason, and so trying to fit a story into place just never came naturally—if you ask me, that’s how a lot of lame Hollywood films end up getting made.  Some jackass says “we need an action flick, that’ll make us this amount of dollars,” and it’s done.

I had a couple of ideas starting to swim around in my head some, here and there, but it wasn’t really until my trip to Europe that the ideas truly started pouring in.  More specifically, getting to visit Montserrat just outside of Barcelona, Spain.  The place was just amazing to me, and instantly I could see these little clips of the animated short to be playing out in my mind’s eye.

Of course, the other thing…the main thing, really, that’s held me back is my computer.  My old, dying computer that can barely run the software I use to make stuff like Kaiyra…that single image above took almost a full week for my computer to be able to render (run the simulations of light bouncing) all of the layers out, and chugs the whole way through.  I used this as an excuse to not get started at all, knowing even if I made every single piece of art I’d need for the animated short I could never actually animate it or render it out.

Eh.

I’m going ahead anyway, started working on the short’s first asset—her ship—which will take me a plenty long time to model out in detail.  When it gets too big for my computer to handle it, I’ll just break off a piece and work on that one and so on.  Worst case I can take those pieces to work to put them together on my PC there to make sure it’s all lining up properly.  It won’t be easy, it’ll be frustrating at times (the chugging…the god awful chugging of my computer trying to catch up to me while I work), but its never gonna get done if I don’t do it.  May as well get a headstart!

Anyway…just feels good to get started on this finally, had to make a note of it!  G’night.

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She’s not perfect, and she’s not “finished” yet (I have to revisit her hair, and I still need to setup her deformation points…what lets her smile, frown, yell, etc.), so he’s helmet-only for the meantime.

Funny enough, the above image was actually her second one.  For her first one, I wanted something a little bit more dynamic…but then I hadn’t realized until later in the night when I went to composite the image that I’d screwed up the knee armor on her right knee, and seeing as how it’s past midnight last thing I was going to do was wait a couple hours for another render.

The first one showed off her weapons, more or less…

I didn’t end up doing much to it, so it’s a fairly raw render as it is since it’ll need some re-working.  It was fun working with a wind gravity warp and the cloth sim though, I used to hate that damn cloth system in Max but after sitting down and doing lots of tests I understand it’s nuances a lot better.

So…from here, I have to get some work done on her hair.  Here’s a little test render I did a few weeks ago that shows her finished face and the hair I’m looking to replace…

Now, granted, this image shows it looking like wet plastic…I’ve done a lot of messing with the hair shader (in 3d modeling terms, that’s what determines things like reflectivity, glossiness, roughness of the surface…basically what makes metal look like metal, or cloth like cloth), but the problem for my own eyes is that the hair is modeled versus simmed.

Part of me blames Tangled for having such good looking toon-like hair.  Fuckers.

Also, I need to setup her deformation points for her face…it’s where you make a whole bunch of copies of the head and do things like closing eyes, winking, grinning and roaring and each of those become their own “channel,” so to speak.  Then you get add 0–100% of the channels you want to get your facial expressions—if that’s confusing, once I do it I’ll share a render of them all on one sheet.

Whew!  Alright, I’m heading to bed now…talk to y’all later. 

G’night.

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I’m still not all that great at it, though I’m aware of it now at 32 and can put it to some practical applications at times.  I have to resist the urge when excitement mixes with my interest in something though, I guess that little bit of child-like wonder that’ll glaze my eyes over in certain situations will always be there in shape or form.  Where I find myself changing the most is being able to recognize, especially in my own trade, where I’m not being patient enough and then being able to take a step back and breathe.  When I don’t do this—when I am rushing myself—it ends up being like a slow poison that will kill my interest in what I’m doing or simply turn out a crap result.

For example I offer up my Kaiyra project (it’s been a long time so here’s a clickie), I was starting to cut corners and rush certain parts of her which then started frustrating me…which led to disinterest and then just not working on her anymore.  It wasn’t actually stemming from laziness—it rarely does for me—it’s more an impatience to see the end result, and while I can see how confusing a statement that is it’s just how I am!  It’s as if my mind thinks it can skip B and hop from A to C.  So I rushed Kaiyra’s detailing so I could carve her up and get her into Mudbox for her high poly mesh/generating normal maps…which caused more work for me, because she wasn’t done and thus wasn’t ready for that step.

I pulled her out and blew the dust off yesterday, forcing myself to take a few steps back and finishing all the detailing I’d planned on doing in 3D Studio Max before taking her over to Mudbox…turned out to be a significant amount, from belts to armor pieces and leather straps, quite a bit of work.  I just have a little bit left, namely picking her blaster and making a holster for it, and then she will be ready for Mudbox detailing.

Heh, this post was going to be far more profound originally before I went off on a tangent about modeling.  Ah well, I’m tired dammit.

G’night!

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It was sometime in the future—far future I assume due to the technology—and for whatever reason I was relocating to a colony world near the outer rim of human exploration.  There was nothing fancy or tech-crazy about this world, landing in a space shuttle outside of the welcoming center here was about as exciting as getting in a taxi to me in the dream.  What was even cooler was I just knew a lot of the stuff about this world…it had been terraformed, had a large population and was becoming a really big center for entertainment industries.  I may have even been going there for a job like what I do now as a visual effects artist, I dunno.

I had my son, Gavin, there with me.  His mother was moving there too, just as now we were friendly but divorced.  Oddly Mia wasn’t around at all, and I’m pretty sure she had just never been conceived in this reality as there was no sense of loss or concern as to where she was.  We were in this huge kind of fancy promenade, exotic trees all around and fancy landscaping with paths everywhere guided essentially by hip-level walls that doubled as planters on top.  We moved with the crowd into the welcoming center, which was much like an indoor shopping mall inside of an airport, only more spread out and with a coherent design about it.

Gavin gets a nasty cut on his leg somehow, his mom and I both confused how it happened and I ran off to get bandages of some kind.  Oddly I just tore into a box of band-aids I found before being scolded by an employee of the small store, prompting me to buy the entire medkit and then giving me a lecture about not being able to give stuff away for free.  I bought it to shut the guy up and ran back to Gav.  It was busy inside now, so we headed outside to a more open area of the promenade where a lot of people were gathering to see the planet’s sunset.

What was crazy was I understood that the planet was unique.  The sun was super massive in the sky, it was an elder star giving off a fraction of the heat you’d expect and was being kept alive artificially by humans.  The planet’s orbit was quick and it completed one rotation during it’s orbit every four hours…this made the planet a very fancy place to live as you could watch several sunrises or sunsets a day, and with how massive the sun was in the sky it was a spectacular sight.

So we sat down out there, I patched Gavin’s leg up real good and we watched the sun very quickly disappear over the horizon.  The sky’s brilliant warm colors washed out before our eyes, the cool blues of evening replacing them as if it was ink dropped into a cup of water.  I could hear the crowd chattering with excitement, it was all so very peaceful.

Suddenly, a plume of smoke or dust (or both) shot up from the distant city skyline ahead of us…couple of miles away maybe.  Everyone seemed bewildered as the sound wave finally reached us and shuddered through our bodies.  Explosion.  More sounded off, growing more rapid and in a direct and deliberate path of destruction, smoke and dust now clouding the sky and blowing toward us as a massive glowing eye—or perhaps just lights on some massive alien walker that looked like an eye—moved about behind the smoke.  I could make out a form, but no details.

It let out a horrible, terrifying mechanical roar that sent the crowd into panic and everyone started racing towards the welcome center.  I’m not sure what happened to Kelly here, one moment she was there and the next she was gone…I assumed she had been pulled away in the stampede of people and so I grabbed Gavin and raced away from the crowd where I somehow knew it would be safe.  We came up to a guard station of sorts and hid inside, I looking out the windows for any signs of attackers and Gavin just sat there sobbing, confused and shocked.

The dream kind of went into fast forward then (I think I was waking up), but I know I found some patrol gear I could use in the station and geared myself up, and determined I had to find a flight transport I could use to get Gavin and I off of the planet.  I think we headed in to the welcome center at that point, and I don’t remember seeing it but I know we were finding ourselves very, very alone.

Crazy dream!  I’d love to turn it into something more though, have a few ideas running around in my head.

G’night.

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