The Magnificent Balzini - Progress

Many of you are wondering what I am doing with my life since the semester ended and won't pick back up again until February. Well, This week I have been furiously modeling and texturing all the characters, props, and environments for my alive ball short: The Magnificent Balzini.

I'm sticking to what I know and have been working on the animation totally in Cinema 4D, not Maya. There are just too many buttons to push in an order I'm not familiar with yet. That being said, there is still a heck of a lot that I'm not familiar enough with in Cinema 4D that I am still trying to figure out. This is a perfect opportunity to learn 3D in general.

I'm planning on rendering this animation out in 720p HD, which is the mid-size HD. There are a few more settings I know I am going to have to tweak in order to get the render optimized, though. Just to give you an example, the above test render of the theater with the busted floor took about 35 minutes to render. Now, if I'm going to be making a short about 2 minutes long at 24 frames per second, that puts me at 1,680 hours of rendering. There are a few things to tweak to bring that back down, but in the end, it is still going to take a while.

Learning how to paint textures is another fun experience. Our badly burned fellow above was all painted in by hand with a computer mouse. That's when a graphics tablet comes in handy.

Anyway, I'm almost ready to animate. I just need to place all the characters and organize the scene structure so that it's easy to work with. After that, I will jump into lighting and rendering. Should be fun. Wish me luck.