like I promised

well, like I promised here's the Doctor's head.

it's not finished yet, mainly the mouth needs attention, but I've been modeling his body as of recent. when I can find the time anyway. still struggling trying to balance school, homework, my job, and this project. Mainly because good grades are important to me, if they weren't, I wouldn't have such a hard time ditching an english paper for this project. I'll find a way to make everything work though.

--Ryan

small update from Ryan

right, Will set me up with a system I can run Blender on a few weeks ago, and I have modeled the doctors head so far. I've also gotten permission to install blender at my workstation in the CNS department and work on it during downtime. unfortunately, downtime is becoming more and more of a rarity in the office and my homework and study loads keep getting bigger. I'm really feeling the stress of this production, school, and work right now and I'm really hoping I can do this. I know I can do it, it's kind of like looking at a cliff you're about to climb and thinking "I'm supposed to get all the way to the top?" (I like to rock climb, so that's where the analogy comes from.) what's more is that there's a time limit, and technical issues which need to be worked out, along with my general inexperience in the field. as will said before, he's a year ahead of me, at least. I just started in 3D august 2007, and my ignorance is apparent, at least to me.

I'll upload a picture of the doctor's head real soon, I still need to put teeth in his mouth, and work out some issues with the lips.

It's been a while...

Sorry for the lack of updates. Currently Me and Ryan have been trying to figure out the best resource to get this project rendered in time. And for a while I was stressing about it. I have been picking up on some of the restrictions with larger environments with characters and trying to work out ways of speeding up render time without losing out on quality. This has been a huge learning experience for me and Ryan.

Anyway I wanted to mention some of the solutions that we have3come up with in relation to rendering resources. Both me and Ryan went to a 3D Animation program in high school at a place called the Granite Technical Institute. I spent 2 years and Ryan spent about a year and a half. That is where basically we both began are adventures in animation :) Anyways we still have close relations with the teacher of that program and has allowed us to setup a render farm in his lab.
His lab consists of about 40 computers. I don't know the exact specs but I will post those when this is all final. I am going to try to setup a render farm, but my knowledge of such things is limited. If I start to waste too much time trying to get something like a render farm to work efficiently we will probably do away with the idea. We would then just end up doing single machine rendering. Splitting up the project files into frames of a hundred or so, and then do it that way. Its a little harder but its about all the choice we have if I can't get a render farm setup.
But other options have made themselves apparent in the last week. Thanks to my Bro I learned of an world wide open rendering project called BURP. The idea is the same as a render farm. Where you have a single location of where the project file is. Then that one place sends out work to thousands of other computers. Substantially cutting rendering time down. I have already done one test render and it worked very well with all the effects that we are implementing into this project. If you want to check out that render here is the link http://burp.boinc.dk/session.php?id=770 Anyways this has become a possibility and it would make me very happy if we could use it. There are some restrictions on what exactly you can render though. Becausee it is free to use you can't render anything that wll be used for commercial purposes or will make any money. So I am going to present this project to the administrators of that program and see if we can get a green light.
Another plus to something like this is that we will be able to render this out in HD. Instead of a DVD resolution. But we'll see. This might be another one of those goose chases that everyone talks aobut nowadays.

Thats what has been happening recently, and agian I will try to post more often.