Victorian Luxo Sr,

For the directed study I'm taking, one assignment was to model, rig, and animate an inanimate object.
Here's my victorian lamppost. Hopping along. Very unconvincingly.



Not that proud of it, but I guess it sorta worked out. The main thing I figured out was that if you don't rig something exactly right and understand everything about the rig, the animation will be a pain in the lower quarters. It was. And I still have to figure out the rigging process. I know, I rigged Delgo so much time ago, but I only really absorbed some of the process, and not everything applies. E.g. delgo was a single mesh, whereas this post is made up of components, but some of the components need to be skinned (deform with joints inside). Therefore, I didn't know how to parent parts of it, and the whole thing got a little wonky with translation. But, I brute forced it into a hop and hop, and still learned some, though I need to sit down and spend a great deal more time on tutorials for both rigging and animating. I don't know if I've said this before, but I'm not that good at animation, and I don't enjoy it as much as modelling. I guess once I've learned a lot more, it should be more fun, so we'll see.

In other news, I'm really wanting to try my hand at NaNoWriMo, which is a challenge to write a 50K word novella-novel during the month of November. I have a very bad habit of not finishing projects, but maybe, just maybe, this one will stick. All I have to do is write 1-2 thousand words an evening. It'll be a breeze. I really want to write a good book someday, so this will be a way to write a sucky book now. I'm sure it'll be fun while it lasts, and even if I only get to 10 thousand words, I'll have learnt a book-load (haha, I was gonna say boatload) about writing. So this is all to say, I probably won't post a lot in November. I need to take time to do some drawing too, so maybe that can be a December project, and I'll go super intensive on the Maya starting in January. Man, if I think about how far I've come since March... really far. But could be further.

Well, the video is almost done uploading, so wish me luck with the writing and I hope I'll have something to show for it by my birthday :)
I probably won't be able to show it to anybody cause it will be frightfully embarrassing. Hmm, still uploading. What else can I say. Have a safe and happy Halloween! I've been working through a dynamics training kit. Very cool and fun. I learnt how to make a soft body (which is like a piece of cloth for example without using nCloth) and how to bake simulations and create snowfall. I'll maybe post some screenshots of that as I go, depending on how interesting they are.

Okay, that's enough from me for now.
Later,
Stuart