Avery Brown, Week 08 Journal
If Walt Disney rose from the grave, I would hope that the very first thing he would do is apologize for XGen. Maybe Autodesk bungled it when they ported it to the public release, maybe Disney just works in a way that is conducive to the way Xgen works. Whatever the case, it is a terrible mess. They need to hire some UI/UX people, because clearly XGen was designed by somebody who has never used Maya before. It is a terrible clash and because of the dumbest possible reasons. XGen can’t parse node names with colons in them. You know, like the way that Maya symbolizes namespaces. Somebody must have reeeeally saved some time there, not writing a couple extra lines of colon parsing code. However, despite many setbacks and days of troubleshooting, I found a website (not official Disney or Autodesk, by the way) that explains how XGen works. So I figured our problem out soon after. So now we can render our hair.
Don’t worry, we also have clothes now, so this is the last naked man walking around in a creepy hallway. I worked on refining the lighting in our two largest environments and solved an issue I had been having with color mapping.
This is just the master lighting, that will appear in most shots. Individual shots will have specific added lights and alterations to the master.
Friday was spent working on the poster. The reactor room and the mad scientist were prepped for rendering and the freeze ray exterior got a complete re-model.
Hours Breakdown:
- Environment Modeling – 3:00
- Poster – 6:00
- Paperwork – 1:30
- Website Admin – 0:30
- Technical Directing – 24:00
- Adviser Meeting – 2:00
Total: 36:00
Positives:
The poster was fun to work on.
Negatives:
Still worried about the abysmal state of the render farm.