Holli Rausch

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks making a baby. A few surprising things I’ve found out while on this miraculous journey:

• It takes patience
• Sometimes, the result isn’t exactly what you imagined
• It’s really, really hard work
• They don’t come with diapers, by default
• Another person involved is really just in the way
• Pacifiers are a God-send

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I have made a 3D model of a baby. I’m really happy with the model; which is a rare occasion, considering I’m a bit of a perfectionist and my own worst critic. I don’t often like my projects when I’m done with them. Of course, there are things I’d like to change, but I’m not dwelling on them because I like it overall. Next, we’ll add a skeleton and animate our models, (many people chose to model aliens, and I find that….weird interesting). This animation may be our final project, considering the time it takes to model and animate anything. And just figuring out how to animate a biped will take much time in itself. So, here’s hoping we don’t have another project for our final.

So this is basically my first post about the wedding since we got engaged. Next week, we’ll be three months away. And that’s a little crazy. Out of the weekends in the near future, it looks like the only one that is available is the weekend before I graduate. It makes me stressed out. I wouldn’t say that I get stressed out easily, I just have enough going on in my life all the time that I’m stressed often. I know a lot of this will pass in a couple weeks, because I’ll be motivated again, once the middle of the semester has passed.
Here are a few examples of how I know the stress is settling in:

• I’m getting zits on my cheeks
• When I think of a big project I need to do, I feel like sleeping
• More nights than not, I have a nightmare about the wedding going wrong or it comes up so fast that we don’t have everything ready
• Feeling self-conscious
• I would rather work ahead in class than work on wedding projects
• I make a checklist of little things (like, “think about such and such design”) just so that I can cross it off when I do that and feel like I accomplished something

I am very excited for the wedding. We have some great things planned, and are still planning some great things.  I just need a little more time in each day.

I introduce you to Farley, the character I modeled from a tutorial, named by a combination of two reader suggestions: Farlie and Harley. (Thanks, Miles and Christina!) He’s not superb, but he’s not bad. I had a lot of fun making him, so I hope you all enjoy him. I don’t know if we’ll be animating Farley, or moving right on to making our own characters and animating them. (I’ve already sketched my idea out…I’m such a modeling nerd.)

One thing is for sure, we need to put skeletons in them before we can animate realistic movement. Also, adding a skeleton makes it much easier to animate than without one. I’m quite excited and hope we get started ASAP. I’d like to include it in my portfolio by the end of the month (at least the model…the animation probably isn’t realistic).

I didn’t achieve it, mostly because of time, but I wanted his hair to look like the emo character that Chris blogged about long ago. I figure I would have needed at least an extra day to really get the hair even close.

Did you know that in The Little Mermaid, Ariel’s hair was the hardest thing for them to animate? And in Ratatouille, the hair (on the rats) was probably the most impressive part.

Let’s just say, there likely are people whose job it is to model the hair of a character and other people whose job it is to animate it. At least, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were that specific.

So we’ve started to dabble with character modeling in 3D class. Right now, we’re all following a tutorial so it isn’t too challenging (technically or creatively) and they’ll all end up nearly exactly alike. But it’s quite fun. I wish we would have been doing this a long time ago. The body is all one object, made of a few hundred polygons (probably around 300 before making it smooth, far more with the smooth modifier). Obviously, he is missing a head, but we haven’t gotten that far yet. And, I fear my head might ruin the body, so I better post about it now, my audience can focus on the good!

The most difficult part was working on the hands. I had some vertexes crossed on the fingers and they looked weird and paper thin. I fixed them. (Yes, there were only supposed to be 3 fingers and a thumb.) So I’m a little proud of how they look at this point. Soon, I’ll be adding the collar to the shirt, a head, and materials to the character. Anyway, I was thinking I should name him. Any ideas?

UPDATE: I won 1st place in the 2D competition for my picture of Marissa…! Good thing I left that 2% chance!

I again submitted two pieces into Beadlemania. It’s called Beadlemania because 1) Beatlemania is the term used to describe the era where The Beatles rocked (it still hasn’t ended!) and 2) the College of Arts and Sciences is in Beadle Hall. Beadlemania is to 1) showcase student work over the past year and 2) award those pieces that are most outstanding.

Last year, one of my pieces won 1st place for the 2D category. I’m 98% positive I won’t be winning anything this year for my entries. (I left 2%; just in case it’s a Cinderella story). It’s not that the things I submitted weren’t good…I just know they aren’t as good as others’ work. They judge tonight or tomorrow, but I’m not hopeful. One award is good enough, right? I mean, it’d be selfish to win another. Anyway, I submitted that picture of Marissa and my Ping-Pong animation from last semester.

I submitted my Ping-Pong animation, as opposed to my exterior environment (see below) for many reasons. 1) For some reason, the DVD decided to stop working right when it needed to most. So, I didn’t have time or $ to try to reburn it on a new DVD. 2) Since I lost so much time from the remaking of corrupted files, I had to sacrifice many artistic endeavors I was going to try. Here are a few of them:

• Every frame would have been black and white, except the flower would be in color
• This would require bringing in over 2000 “pictures” and outlining the flower by hand — at least one more week’s work
• I would have fixed the glitch in the animation of the flower, right after it floats in the air
• I would have made the trees sway in the direction of the flower’s movement, to show it’s a windy day and the flower just isn’t a magical flying flower
• I would have done this to the yellow ribbons, too
• I would have focused more on the “back story”
• More focus on the yellow ribbons, support our troops signs, words on gravestone
• Confetti on ground — suggestion a parade the day before
• Not even done this exterior and done the island from Lost instead
• Would have needed at least another 2 weeks, just for rendering time
• There are a lot of trees on the Lost island
• Trees take for friggin’ ever to render

The thing I do like about it, is that I animated the camera as if it didn’t know where the flower was going. Kind of like if a human saw it start floating away and wanted to film it…one just can’t anticipate where the wind will blow. So I am happy with that. Anyway, watch it. If you don’t have anything nice to say about it…that’s OK. Apparently, neither do I!