Final Semester Blog Post 1 - Hitting the Ground Running

I am excited to get this stuff going and finish up our thesis strong!!! I'm proud of us and the work we've all accomplished, and now it's finally time to polish everything up!! I get to make a new schedule, which is always fun, and I'm looking forward to fixing some of my animation from last semester. It's good, but it could be a lot better, and there are several things I want to tweak, move, or change, you know what I mean?? Things could just stand to have a little more time focused on them. I'm going to obviously finish the schedule and make sure all the operation stuff is on track before I do that but that doesn't change the fact that I am gonna do more animation and it'll be so fun!!!

My teammates are all doing well too. No one is struggling too bad, and while some things are going better than others, I'm confident in our ability to finish this semester strong with a product that we all can be proud of. I'm a bit worried about our rigs, honestly, but Rianne is doing her best and honestly she's making amazing progress so it's just kind of a little anxiety in the back of my mind. All things considered, even with slightly jenky rigs, our short is coming along amazing!!!

Textures need to get going like. . .last week. We have a lot of them, I know As has been working on them, but we haven't really gotten many chances to actually plug them in to everything, which I think is one of the reasons are film doesn't look as polished as it should. There are also a lot of missing 2D elements that need to be added in or created for it to hit that final style point we've been attempting. Cal is the most in charge of that.

I'm a bit worried about our files, because they haven't been tracked as much as I feel they should be, and I really don't want things to get unreferenced, moved around, or unplugged because we weren't able to fully figure out the file structure. But that's something I'm hopefully going to start looking at next week, and get figured out.

Rendering is also something I'm scared about, because really?? I still have absolutely NO idea how to use Deadline, at all, let alone properly. And from what I recall we'll have to IMPORT everything before we even start rendering?? Do you know how much information our scene already has in it even without importing?? TOO MUCH. It's crazy. This is definately something I'm going to want to discuss with the professors more because I want as much preperation and understanding of the rendering process as possible before I get going on it. I'm honestly tempted to just comandeer several different computers and render on those, even though I know that's pretty slow. I just don't know Deadline well enough to trust it yet. So that is definately something I need to look into. We'll figure it out though, and hopefully make a little checklist of things we want our renders to follow so that we're all on the same page.

I want to try and get a job almost immediately after I graduate, because I want to have my own life and my own place and all that fun stuff, and I know we're going to work on things like that during this class but I'm still worried. It's a daunting process, really. You know?? Going out into the world and finally starting my own, independant, not school life. I just want to be happy and healthy, and live at a comfort level that I enjoy. I don't particularly care about much else. But there are SO MANY FACTORS to think about when it comes to being a working adult, both in and out of work. Things will get there though, I'm sure of it. Just gotta take it one step at a time.