![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Mind's Eye
Nov. 6th, 2006 12:04 amDecided to be anti-social this weekend and get caught up on some cleaning and school work.
Not to mention, thanks to Will, I'm really starting to enjoy working in Maya. The class I took before really rushed it. Van barely covered any of the modeling tools or UI stuff and went straight into 'Animating' as soon as we could build the crudest model, and then he was all about 'making things funny'. Hard to do with broken rigging, and to be honest, 'funny' isn't really my idea of good animation anyhow. Hated that class and hated Maya as a result of that class.
Since I was cleaning and thinking about animation, I decided it was also time for a long past-due project. Taking my old VHS tapes of animation and transferring them to DVD for personal use. I've been watching them as I do this, of course. So far I've gone through 'Amiga Animation Volume II' and most of the Mind's Eye series. Gosh I forgot how much I loved these. New Age music and rough old animation where you can tell just how torturously slow it was working on the machines back then. It was all new and exciting.
I guess it erally is if I look at it with the right eyes, but I've seen so many fly-throughs and badly animated mannequins that I really began to crave something else, and I felt 3D was a threat to the beautiful 2D works of the past, so for a while, I boxed them up, put them away, and ignored them.
They're nice to come back to now. The technology has improved so much. Stuff that would have taken days to render back then can run in real-time now. It's really amazing.. And you know what. Despite a lot of this stuff being Phong rendering with either no shadows or the crudest raytracing, there's a lot of it that's still really beautiful and there's some really amazing stuff that people made. Quite inspring!
I sort of wonder where I'd be right now if I'd really stayed with computer animation in the early 90s. I made a lot of stuff (most of which, I unfortunately lost in a harddrive crash in 1994) Only the car and the dolphin animations on my website survived it. I suppose in a lot of ways, I've come full circle. Even back then I was programming algorithms for 3D animation, not just using the tools. I never really dreamed I'd be able to come back to that in a professional life. Very cool when I stop and think about it.
I miss the late 80's early 90's. There was some sense of optimism in the world that seems to be somehow missing now. I miss staying up all night rendering on my 386 and cranking out leader art by hand while waiting for the computer, listening to the Cure and Erasure. Dark smokey nights in bars, talking uncomfortably with strangers. Maya is taking me back to that in some ways. I'm building things just for the fun of building them. The robot above is an example, and I've been building lots of other stuff and feeling really inspired to make stuff again.
Heh. On a tangent, speaking of making stuff, I was thinking about how it might be fun to try bringing some animation history to SecondLife. I think I could build a working Zoetrope. I could even do it so that it was slitted and opaque from the outside but the insides were made with transparencies, so the images would hover in mid-air as sort of a hologram inside a virtual reality. I could even build real-time models of old Amiga animations. The checkered ball bouncing on the waving plane. That sort of thing. Lots of crazy ideas. But for now, I'm off to bed. To sleep, perchance to dream.
Not to mention, thanks to Will, I'm really starting to enjoy working in Maya. The class I took before really rushed it. Van barely covered any of the modeling tools or UI stuff and went straight into 'Animating' as soon as we could build the crudest model, and then he was all about 'making things funny'. Hard to do with broken rigging, and to be honest, 'funny' isn't really my idea of good animation anyhow. Hated that class and hated Maya as a result of that class.
I don't think we'll even get to do any animation in Will's class, and I'm good with that. He's got us almost entirely focused on modeling, lighting, texturing, etc so far. Really learning the tools and thinking about how to use them in ways that express yourself. He also challenges us constantly. Every class has a quiz. He gives us some scene and we're supposed to do as much of it as we can in 15 minutes. Keeps one on their toes. Anyhow, I'm really enjoying it. This is the 3D animation class I've always wanted. |  Simple Robot Model with some basic texturing and default lights |
Since I was cleaning and thinking about animation, I decided it was also time for a long past-due project. Taking my old VHS tapes of animation and transferring them to DVD for personal use. I've been watching them as I do this, of course. So far I've gone through 'Amiga Animation Volume II' and most of the Mind's Eye series. Gosh I forgot how much I loved these. New Age music and rough old animation where you can tell just how torturously slow it was working on the machines back then. It was all new and exciting.
I guess it erally is if I look at it with the right eyes, but I've seen so many fly-throughs and badly animated mannequins that I really began to crave something else, and I felt 3D was a threat to the beautiful 2D works of the past, so for a while, I boxed them up, put them away, and ignored them.
They're nice to come back to now. The technology has improved so much. Stuff that would have taken days to render back then can run in real-time now. It's really amazing.. And you know what. Despite a lot of this stuff being Phong rendering with either no shadows or the crudest raytracing, there's a lot of it that's still really beautiful and there's some really amazing stuff that people made. Quite inspring!
I sort of wonder where I'd be right now if I'd really stayed with computer animation in the early 90s. I made a lot of stuff (most of which, I unfortunately lost in a harddrive crash in 1994) Only the car and the dolphin animations on my website survived it. I suppose in a lot of ways, I've come full circle. Even back then I was programming algorithms for 3D animation, not just using the tools. I never really dreamed I'd be able to come back to that in a professional life. Very cool when I stop and think about it.
I miss the late 80's early 90's. There was some sense of optimism in the world that seems to be somehow missing now. I miss staying up all night rendering on my 386 and cranking out leader art by hand while waiting for the computer, listening to the Cure and Erasure. Dark smokey nights in bars, talking uncomfortably with strangers. Maya is taking me back to that in some ways. I'm building things just for the fun of building them. The robot above is an example, and I've been building lots of other stuff and feeling really inspired to make stuff again.
Heh. On a tangent, speaking of making stuff, I was thinking about how it might be fun to try bringing some animation history to SecondLife. I think I could build a working Zoetrope. I could even do it so that it was slitted and opaque from the outside but the insides were made with transparencies, so the images would hover in mid-air as sort of a hologram inside a virtual reality. I could even build real-time models of old Amiga animations. The checkered ball bouncing on the waving plane. That sort of thing. Lots of crazy ideas. But for now, I'm off to bed. To sleep, perchance to dream.
