Thursday, April 29, 2010

Progress Update: keepinig me Busy

This is what is keeping me busy right now. I'm doing this on a laptop so it is slow and the screen size doesn't help. As a priority I'm not able to move as quickly to do my game design writing.

Then nice thing about 3d is from the stand point of a drawing artist: I have a model I can keep coming back to for new poses and angles. I hate how just when you think you have everything, there is another angle shot missing and its just not the same.

When i was trying to draw my comic, again and again I was stumped by angles and perspectives. A little artist secret is that skill comes in the form of memorizing a ton of these images. the memory it takes up is better served in more often used skills in my opinion, like social and critical thinking.

Drawing skill, the external computational one gains from language, notebooks, picture references and mathematical formulas are available thanks to technology. I think its better use of attention to just keep it organized instead of holding it all.

So I'll have to do about a dozen of these faces to get the hang of it. I have to keep notes how many "faces" I have to do per individual feature: like noses, mouth, lips, etc. There is a technique required in 3d in order for a mesh to be animated, where all the "faces" or shapes that make it up are squares. I mean ALL! No triangles or it will screw up on render. I wish I had a 22 inch screen to work on it. Screen size affects productivity, I'm sure many of the desk jockeys already know that.


Studio dreams - Open source software means, costs that would have been going to material capital goes to human capital.

I was doing the numbers of the cost to have my own production line and borrowed money from a bank at 20-12% interest (its rather high over here). Calculate ROI and have several previous projects to have a good intuition about project cost, scheduling, and organization. 3d Graphics, non-super realistic can earn a good return in about less than a year IF the crew is fully trained.

Add up a non-professional crew from the ground up and it might take 2 years, including possible man power loss to get ROI. Of course the ideals and assumptions made are all pretty optimistic. Its better to just continue on my path as developing the open source 3d arm of the company than go independent. Income and project diversity and adaptability matters more when there is no complete mastery yet.

AND, if I going solo means less time doing what I find fun: writing my homebrew.

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