Shy the Sun directing Jack Splash Short Film
Probably old news for some, since that title was used on Duck Studios website in Feburary sometime! Shy the Sun (aka, The Blackheart Gang) are directing and animating the new Jack Splash Short Film. Its been roughly two months since my move here to Shy the Sun, and work is progressing at an amazing pace! We’re all hard at work, working some pretty long hours (I’m here at work writing this on a sunday afternoon 
, coz XSI just crashed on me again, lol) The fact of the matter is… if you work hard, you’re probably gonna party harder, and that is to true of all of us here!
I have been intergrating a few of my ‘gaming methodologies’ into our animation pipeline. It prooved rather painfunful (oh look, XSI crashed again… maybe I should stop multitasking… but seriously why can’t I have XSI and firefox open?!) at first becuase XSI has mutiple, Instancing, Cloning, Duplicating options each slightly different in behaviour, but in my opinion none of them are perfect. Let me explain! I have been building suburbs and a city enviroments, so I decided to use a modular system where each window face of a building would simply snap to the next adjacent window panel and thus build up an entire building. It works well until I referenced each panel into my city scene and then duplicated the referenced model. Each ‘reference’ model gets re-imported everytime you re-open the scene, thus making the scenes take hours to load. The better option I have discovered is to use an instance of the orginal reference model, however instances stay totally indentical to the source model. Effectively these means that you cannot change that instance at all, another silly bug within Softimage is that an Instance cannot be made local, so that connection can never be broken! Sorta annoying hey! Anyway, this annoyed me and off I went to xsibase.com and thankfully managed to find a great script that allows the conversion of instances to local models. Viola, problems solved… if only I had found that little script about a month ago! Thats life though, you live and learn! 
The modular system really does pay off though, just yesterday I was sitting with the director and he wanted to move some of the city shops around! This was a simple task of just moving each section around which would not have been possible if each building had been specifically modelled.
Okay back to work! Need to start setting up passes and lighting these enviroments!
~C
Related Posts:
- Moving from Gaming to Animation
- Delete All Missing Materials & Texture Files from Scene
- Fond Farewell to Shy the Sun
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