End of Marking Period 1

Intention Definition & Exploration of Ideas: At the beginning of the year, I decided that I wanted to focus on art and nature as well as human nature, I think I wanted to explore the relationship between the two. I stuck to 3D animation, but I also wanted to continue working with the 3D printer. So I began the first animation of the year based on the Conodoguinet Creek and fall colors. Halfway through the marking period, I came up with an idea for another animation which was prompted partially by the crisis of college essays. The second animation is based more on human nature and ideologies but I had to do some research to figure out how to portray it in blender and I'll be completing it in the next marking period. 

Planning: As expected, I started working with particle systems pretty early on in the year. My basic idea for the animation was two girls rowing down a river in fall. I started off creating a tree and then remembered about the existence of the tree sapling generator. I created a variety of leaves and figured out the particle systems. I also came up with the idea of creating a master armature. That way, I'd have a cache of actions and I wouldn't get stuck creating basic things like walk cycles over and over again. It was a good idea in theory but it had some problems in practice. I also tried to figure out how exactly I'd execute my idea for the next animation. It's based on post-modernism/modernism as well as the idea of personalities: whether our "beings" are simply a combination of others--and our own--perceptions of us, or if we have a concrete "being" that exists separate from others' ideas. I also worked quite a bit on the 3D printer. For this, I found some good referential youtubers that I can turn to when I have questions about the printer

Producing: As usual, some stuff went wrong. One of the first problems I met was that the leaves on the trees weren't showing up due to them being a particle system within a particle system. I turns out that to get the leaves to show up, I had to convert the trees to meshes. However, this meant that they'd all have particle systems which would infinitely slow down the entire process. I left that step till the end but it caused serious lagging and I wasn't even able to do much of anything for a couple of hours. Secondly, I could not get one of the actions right at all. As a result, I seriously reworked the animation and gave it a more somber mood instead. I turned it into an animation about parents leading their children through their life until the child has to leave and lead their own life, because why not. As for the rendering, the file has become so slow that I can't even get it to render at this point, I'm either going to have to delete some trees or something so I can get it working enough to render it. Another thing that troubled me was the oar, but I ended up making it follow the armature's right forearm and that worked well . I was initially trying to get it to sync up with the armature's movement and that was just a whole nightmare. Of course, the most issues came with rendering. The plan for the leaves to show up was converting the trees to meshes, which meant converting 1000 trees and children to separate meshes with separate particle systems. It was a nightmare and each click took 15 minutes, but I somehow managed to convert the meshes, only for blender to crash every time I rendered. I finally caught on to the fact that this was too much for my computer to handle, so I got rid of the children and tried again, but it wouldn't even convert to mesh for some reason. Finally I cut it down to 500 and it worked, I then cut it down to 400 trees and changed the size from 4 to 5 so that I'd have more realistically sized trees. It finally worked, and blender wasn't crashing. So, I started rendering. It is still rendering, I started it at around 5 pm on Monday, and as of Tuesday morning, it is at 246 frames of 825. Each frame's render time is about 3.5 minutes, which means it is going to take me at least two/three days to render it out. Honestly, I'm glad that it's even working at this point.
For the 3D printer, I was unable to fix one of them, but I did get the other one unclogged. I went in blind at first and really just dismantled the whole thing; there was an easier way to do it, but I think this was pretty beneficial for me because I learned how to put the machine together and I familiarized myself with it's inner workings. I also found the actual clog itself, which was pretty cool. 

Evaluating: I think the trees just caused me some of the most pain and suffering that I've been through yet. That's a lie, but they really did hurt my soul a little. There's only so much you can do with particle systems before it becomes too much to handle, and I think I might have crossed the limit here. As for the armature, I think that really was a good idea. But I think the base itself was a bit off and if I'm going to create a master armature, it's going to have to be pretty near perfect so that I can use it for everything. I did like that I started off the experimentation for my next piece early, because that gives me more time to work on it, especially since I want to include it in my portfolio. As I don't have the animation completely rendered yet, I don't have an accurate gauge on how it went, but I think I made a good decision in switching the plot. Not only does it give the story more meaning, it also makes my life easier. Of course, because the trees were such a nightmare, I wasn't able to fix some other stuff that stands out a bit in the animation. First, the mother is rowing on the left side of the canoe, which doesn't make sense since they're going to the left, it would probably have been better if she was rowing to the right or if they went to the right. However, one of the main reasons I even deleted the first girl and reworked the plot is because I could not get the rowing to the right action correct, it wasn't working out. It still probably would have been better to make them end up on the right side of the river but oh well. Secondly, the walk cycle worked out where there was a little pause at the end. The animation ends at that exact point so it looks like the girl's character is stopping: this gives the animation a different sense, which I could have avoided but I really just did not want to change things drastically at that point for fear of messing the whole thing up. 

Integrating: From prior experience and from this project as well, I've learned to keep things simple. I love making things harder for myself and it is not doing me any favors. I think this applies especially in the case of actions and the nla editor, the whole thing is pretty messy to begin with. Which is why I know that the only actions happening in my next animation is going to be a walk cycle, plain and simple-ish. I definitely don't think I'm going to stop working with particle systems however; as much pain as they cause me, they give me the ability to do a larger variety of things and I'm not quite keen on the idea of getting rid of that to make my life easier. As for the 3D printer, I think I'm going to go ahead and start working on some stuff I can 3D print, aside from my regular animations. With that, I think I'm going to go out of my comfort zone so I can figure out the best way to print some more unconventional things and which support structure work best for them. 

Work Log:
Monday 10/14 - Off
Tuesday 10/15 - Worked on Animation
Wednesday 10/16 - Worked on Animation
Thursday 10/17 - Worked on 3D printer
Friday 10/18 - Field Trip