Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Milestone #1

My first milestone review is tomorrow morning, so I'll post here what progress I've made and what I still have left to do. But first, an updated Gantt Chart again:


So my 3D animation is nearly complete and ready for rendering. That's the good news. The bad news: it's going to end up being about a minute long, instead of the projected 20-30 seconds. Whoops. That's around 1500 frames. Each frame seems to take a solid 20-40 minutes to render (it depends on what computer I'm rendering from, among some other factors), so it doesn't take a math genius to figure out that it would take an entire month's worth of rendering if done from one computer. Yikes! Thankfully, I'm not doing it from only one computer--I plan on hijacking a bunch of computers from the Collaborative Media Lab for this sole purpose (a feat I can probably only get away with solely because I work there). However,the big consequence of all this: a longer animation means less time to make more styles to switch back and forth from. I am still doing the 1920s style one next, but chances are very slim that I'll have any others done before spring break. I only really need two different styles for this project to work anyways, but having more would still be nice. Perhaps if we're to continue working on it after break, I'll get more completed.

So anyways, enough ranting. Here's what I hope to have ready to show tomorrow:
  • Storyboards
  • Hardware rendering of my 3D animation (or at least parts of it)
  • Production-quality rendered still images

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Gantt Chart Revision


Here is my Gantt chart revision, as requested for Wednesday. It will be re-updated before my milestone review on the 31st, where it will hopefully look like I'm not as far behind as it seems (isn't it sad that I spent almost 120 hours working only on the 3D animation, and I'm still not done with it? This project is going to destroy me).