Stop it! You’re preenting me!

Last week of TAFE 2009 (formal lessons at least) and since we don’t have exams in our course, it’s all the sweeter. The excitement is palpable.

Our papercraft Link has been printed and is ready to be checked to make sure we have all the parts. This is no easy task and I’m still not sure how we can come up with an accurate syste of doing so, but at least it’s printed and considerably scored for us.

As usual with the last week everything becomes a blur and the students work on things when they can and more or less ignore and lesson structure or class times, favouring the ‘just sit and work until it’s done and handed in’ approach. Not long now and we can sit and finally start to piece this Link thang together.

Andaroo suggested that we film the creation process and create a time-lapse style video. I’m all for it but we are still figuring out the logistics of the task. Namely having a releable video camcorder than can record hours of continuous video. The prime candidates are the iMacs that have the in-built web-cam but we still have to be able to store the video and have access to the iMacs in the first place. Oh happy days!

New Website Up.

Thank the merciful kitten overlords, my website is up. There still seems to be some issues with the streaming videos but most of the necessary content is there.

Imp Gate Portfolio

Hmm, not sure if my gallery images should be larger, I’m trying to keep the load times down for people on slower connections (like me).

Web Update

Ironed out some problems with my website today. Specifically the main site pre-loader wasn’t worked as it should and the videos on my page were not loading correctly, if at all.

These problems now appear to be fixed and I hope to have my new website uploaded and fully functioning by lunch time tomorrow. Maybe even tonight.

There were some physical space issues today as we shared our room with another class, which caused some issues when coupled with the fact that we were without an official teacher for half of today. Normally, this would not be a problem but the lame ass Macs were being difficult and everyone had questions that needed answering.

Oh well, I had noodles and cake this evening and there is only another week or so left until the exhibition.

Think big, print small.

Today we had a breakthrough with the papercraft Link. We got some test pages printed. Unfortunately, the stock it was printed on was not suitable for sticking or scoring. But we at least proved that the printer could interpret the artwork we had set up and also that it could score effectively.

Later on in the day we picked out a suitable stock for printing on that we can score and glue with ease. We now even have the correct artwork set-up requirements. But best of all we have the go-ahead to get it printed. So one of my priorities is to get the artwork printer ready. This basically means artwork that is 4-up on a sheet and has the correct colour and stroke type.

It’s looking to be an exciting couple of weeks as this beast finally starts to come together!

Cutting, Scoring, Linking, Snoring.

Today, I mean all of today, at TAFE myself and Andaroo worked diligently on finishing the artwork preparation for the papercraft Link. Some 60 odd A4 pages of artwork needed to be set up with cut and score marks. Ironically, it now looks as though the large format printer will be unable to be cut the artwork for us. I still hold out hope for the laser cutter, although it would be time consuming and correct registration would be a bitch.

The good news is that we have the official go ahead to get the Link printed on the large format printer, and on a matte-like stock. All good news. It is also becoming increasingly more likely that we will not be able to assemble this monster until the Contact Exhibition week, only three weeks away. But it will look quite striking in our exhibition room or in the hallway.

Our personal website is due next week, so I look forward to finally sitting down and having a solid crack at getting my website portfolio together, if all goes as I plan (like it ever does) it should help give me an edge over competitors in the job market. I also have a couple of more website references that I’ve collected over the last couple of weeks. See below.

The Mutant Chronicles
I liked the effects with the rollover menus on the main page. I’ve been focusing more on media intensive websites that run well on my average internet connection but still look good.

Michael Moebius Portfolio
I think that the scrolling ‘mask’ effect on the main page was a very snappy idea, and easy enough to do. There are also some very slick transitions and rollover animations in the gallery.

Edit: Schweet Jeyzus there are a lot of widows on this blog entry! Perhaps it’s just my monitor resolution screwing with WordPress.

Toasty Twofer Tuesday

We carried on with our storyboard animatics and 3D modelling today.We also learned that there is virtually (pun intended) no way to keep vigilate people from downloading your site content from the internets. This, of course, includes videos. It’s best ot be aware of this fact and consider that ‘streaming’ videos are not really any safer than ‘progressive download’ videos.

Also when we provide the .html versions of our animatics as an .flv is would be best to include an interface of stop, pause and a timeline ‘scrubber’ to seek through the length of the animatic. This functionality can be added automatically and very easily in Dreamweaver or Flash.

Other than the above I carried on tracing the artwork for the papercraft link and preparing it for print.

Kumon Topomi

A free-for-all today. We spend the two lessons doing whatever we felt was necessary. For my, it was adding some greyscale values to my storyboard and then animating and exporting a quicktime file from Photoshop. I they craftily used Adobe Media Encoder to convert the file into an .flv for later web use.

I also discussed my proposal for a revised animation brief with Kraygus. He kindly agreed to all my terms and suggestions, so here is a rundown of what we students have the option of now doing:

• A 30 second ‘showcase animation of our 3D character (or characters). ( for example, we could do a simple turntable animation of our character)
• The animation could feature movement or relatively simple animation for some interesting effects, and we could do whatever we want to ‘fancy it up’.
• We are still required to produce a storyboard, animatic and script. This is good because it offers an appreciation of the production process.
• We still have to ‘bone’, colour and texture our High Poly model(s).
• The second 3D character is optional, but is necessary for gaining a higher mark for the subject.

I think that this revised plan is going to make the final 5 weeks of term go much smoother and vastly increase the likelihood of a professionally successful result at the end of the term.

F.T.P., baked beans and spaghetti. It’s time for dinner.

Today we covered uploading your VVRM website to the internets via Dreamweaver.

As an added bonus my website is now unblocked at TAFE so I can finally view my VVRM website that I uploaded some time ago. I still plan to make a couple of changes; i.e: scrolling text box, and perhaps a different coloured b.g.

I also found a couple of new references in the holidays for effective website design. See below:

Dan LuVisi Art
I particularly like the text on the rollovers for the thumbnails on this page. The artwork he creates ain’t too shabby either.

Jon Foster
Just cannot beat the functionality of this site. A great way to show off a portfolio. I never felt confused or as though I was missing something. The use of an optional slide show was also a nice touch and the pull down menu allowed for some easy navigation. All the navigation in one structured area. My personal website will be more graphic heavy, but I certainly admire the interface of this website.

Pining for those by-gone carefree days of last week

Holidays are over. Boo! Hiss! Now it’s time for the final 7 week stretch.

Hopefully we can organise to get the papercraft Link printed or at least print some stock samples on Thursday so that we can begin work a.s.a.p. Ideally we will be able to print and assemble the papercraft. Doing this would negate the need for creating a vinyl or clay figure of our secondary character frmo our 3D animation. This would mean that we have met a learning outcome, learned something new and had a helluva lot of fun in the meantime.

Today we also covered how we can take our animation storyboard and turn it into an animatic. You can digitize your storyboard in Photoshop (either by scanning, photos, drawing directly, etc) and then export the layers (each containing a frame) to separate files using Photoshop Scripts.
Next you can import the frames into a new Premiere project, adjust the timing, add SFX, VO, music and then export an .FLV file for later uploading.

I figure my script is going to need a revision before I begin story boarding.

Cut, Score, then do some more.

Made some headway on the life-sized paper Link today. Seems the best approach would be to perform test prints on the older large format printer so that we can avoid any major cock-ups towards the end of the year which is mega large-format printing time.

The large format printer should be able to score the artwork, although it is in imperfect and somewhat imprecise method. But in reality I’m happy to sacrifice some quality if it means I don’t have to multiple score some 800 odd pieces of paper. More importantly, the printer will not be able to cut out shapes because it will cause jamming of the printer (due to it’s back and forth paper feeding motion). However, if we can calibrate the printer to create deeper scores around the cut lines than we should be able to just ‘punch out’ the pieces when the printer has finished it’s handy work.

The best part is that, at this point anyway, everyone seems eager to test out the large format printer’s capabilities with a project of this relative complexity. But before we get too excited we have to create the artwork necessary for the printer to read cut and score lines. This means tracing over the existing Link artwork in Illustrator. Still, it is a small price to pay if it saves us individually cutting and scoring every piece of the papercraft model.

Below are some images of the two papercraft models we’ve already created. These were intended as test runs to establish the feasibility of creating a large scale papercraft model.

Yoshi. Printed on semi-gloss heavyweight stock at TAFE and glued using a standard glue stick. Very time consuming and he looks somewhat ‘abused’.

Koopa Troopa. I assembled this little guy at home. Printed on 200gsm matte texture stock and glued together using PVA (hobby) glue. He was more rigid and much easier to put together.