Test rendering

March 31, 2014

I'm doing a test render because it's going oddly quickly today, about the same speed as my computer which is great. I need a little break with my coffee so I'm watching it render for a little bit. I just have about half more of the second arm movements to animate and then I can just combine the two parts into one big file, choose camera movements and backgrounds and then render it. I'm not very happy about choosing camera movements because me trying to animate cameras has not gone so well thus far. But I will try and perfect it. I showed my friends this project (one was Megan Higgins who had to take a year off for financial reasons) and they said I was great at this which surprised me. I don't like watching very much 3D animation unless it's in video games like final fantasy that are totally breathtaking. But I really like working on it which surprises me too, and this is the only homework I worked on this weekend. The next two days I have to work on my 2D animation but I figure if I finish most of this today I can start a test render while I'm working on the animating part of that since it's traditional and then it will hopefully be done after I'm done shooting so I can color the whole thing in Photoshop (I'm being overly ambitious for this next project because I really like it and it looks really nice so far and timed out well. I really need something nice for my portfolio).

So while I'm waiting for the render to finish, which is more than half way done I'll ramble about Final Fantasy X. It was the game that really got me into video games after Pokemon and has made me spend about 200 hours on it, between it and it's sequel. And I think that it's amazing that it was so far ahead of it's time. I remember what other games looked like in 2002 and it looked nothing like this. It was so beautiful, especially in the cut scenes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBrGrG4fsTU

Here's an HD link to my favorite scene. I would love to work on a game like this after college. This class has really made me think about different career options that I would still enjoy. 2D has also made me think about becoming an independent animator and I'm really glad that I'm actually thinking about all of the options. I didn't really before, I was really set in my old lady ways. I'm really excited to take that class with you next semester because I'm actually pretty good at coding in HTML and CSS and I've been practicing since I took that class so that I can make my own site senior year without a template. I think learning Java won't be too hard for me and that excites me. This whole thing excites me.

I also just put the video of my test render. It took less than 10 minutes for 900 frames which is awesome!!!!!!! I hope it actually works in this terrible uploader though, I like youtube so much better. Alright, back to work after a long ramble.

(PS I remembered about Final Fantasy because they remastered the original and sequel for the Playstation 4, and it looks even more amazing after they touched it up a little, although to me it looks like it lost some of it's original character, even though they were trying to up the visual quality of the gameplay. But I want my brother to get a PS4 so I can play it obsessively. Not that he'll share but in like two years when they make a PS5 he'll give me it as a hand-me down.)