Ruarri

Well...The reading of the new play 'Sherlock Holmes' went well and the plot looks good. The adaptions amused many and non-purists will love it, I think.
Our Moriarty and Grace have very appropriate voices and Ruth's multipart 'game' was funny. All in all I have high hopes for this one. We just need to source enough Period furnishings and clothes.

Well...That was 2011, that was.
It seems I still have a position at the Hospital next year, which is good,although I also still have a $#*!load of work to do to complete my assessment.
Harold 3D was finally handed over on the 23rd of November and I am using the Handover as my basis for Presentation 3, as the Melbourne presentation has been deferred to late February. Unfortunately the Secretary collapsed after the meeting and she was the one extracting the film of the Presentation from the LC camera (se's o.k.). This will delay completing the assessment until December sometime. The Handover and sign-off went well and Ann from LEV was very enthused by the possibilities of the project. Unfortunately no other LEA reps were able to attend, which makes for a rather small review pool...
Still, That is now outr of the way and I can at last finish the Manage Projects Workbook...and the e-learning module...and this blog plan...and... ...
(*sigh*)

It has happened again! Somewhere a glitch has occurred without warning and the bones in Harold have detached from each other.
All bones now work from a central pivot point rather than a terminal one, even though the terminus is defined as the point in the heirarchy.
This is prevalent in the backup files too...the whole rigging project just forced a re-start. >^<

This is pissing me off more than a little. 4 weeks to signoff and only a set and a model to show for it.

Rigging characters is definitely a Masters or PhD task.

Massive rethink needed....

what the F*@#??

Well, assessments begun and Harold is fighting me.
The biped failed because of a skin/geometry error that could not be fixed, so I have re-boned Harold from scratch using free-bones only.

This has added the problem that Harold's limbs have no limits so he is double jointed
and that I must link the bones into sub-control sets to make animation easier. I haver no idea how to do this...
Time is against me at all points and work is multiplying rather than reducing.
The model now works but cannot be transferred to the Set. Thankfully the Set is complete and successful.

The Harold AR project goes well, LET having accepted it and rated my presentation.
Presentations for Harold AR, Harold 3D, and iBoards are mooted for November in Melbourne.

Can anyone eau-fe with 3DSMax tell me what just happened??
I was editing the envelopes for my new jawbones when oner of the vertices over the eye attached itself to the jaw. Try as I might I could not isolate the vertex responsible, so I tried to identify the area affected by changing the material over the faces involved. Having effectively changed nothing but the local skin colour - it fixed the problem!...
The vertex(s) released and all is normal.

This bug is wierd and I don't grasp how skinning and materials are related to vertex position.

(I mention this out of curiosity and to help anyone else with rogue vertices.)

http://www.traptcg.com/

This site has many useful tutorials and tips for 3D animation, ranging from the basics of animating per-se to facial rigging and professional analysis of published CG works.

Not just how-to but how-did-they-do? Very useful. Also has tuts for those working in UDK or between UDK and 'Max.

TraptCG homepage

The Permian games are now all but complete. Colouring in is in its second beta, Cacopsmaze is fixed and ready as are Quiz, Wordfinder, and Hangman.
Speedapod has ground to a halt because of coding issues and crashing Flash.
Harold is now back to being bone-rigged to save time and the HIT lab has provided ideas for new uses for him.
OHS is complete and handed in;, on with the rest...
The new classroom times have also F*ed my time budget as I no longer have out-of-hours access to catch up in. >:P
harold

WooHoo!! Finally a fix for Flash code!
For all those struggling with global variables in AS2: The "_global." is only needed for the initial declaration. Once declared the variable can be called from outside or inside a function with just its variable name.
ie: Declare: "_global.myMC", Call: just "myMC" !

Conversely in 3DMax - beware of making bodies attached to heads if you want to use morph targets. The Target object must possess the identical vertices of the base object = the whole body, not just the morphed head-part. This could cause headaches. Similarly don't rig bones in anything morphable until after the morphtagets are complete.

Werll... This is turning into one of Those Days. Firstly I completed the CacopsMaze game, saved it, backed it up - then discovered that the file had irreparably corrupted > I had to re-create the fixes from scratch using the beta test file.
That done I worked on StudioMax, and in changing file the License for Max disappeared, so I now can't trust Flash, and can't access Max.
My day is going nowhere fast...
If this keeps up this entire year will disintegrate into rotted files. Why Adobe can't fix these things before they release anything is beyond me. return it all to Macromedia - it worked under them.

Completed (hopefully) anims:
CacopsMaze
Permian Wordfinder
Fossil Hangman