Little exams update and sort of announcing Project Horseapple · 6:37pm Jul 6th, 2013
I got the rest of my results the other day, and an interesting thing happened.
I came in at 14.00 for the proclamation of the first Master year. I figured I had to show up, because I still needed to redo one Master course. Well, that's not entirely true: I had to follow a week's worth of lessons in a week that's normally kept free so students can study, because last year I didn't attend these classes due to a minor breakdown and without being informed they were mandatory classes.
I want to paint the picture of this course before I continue the story. Part of it consisted of going on a trip to the south of Europe, which was around the time I had my breakdown. I'm tempted to say the trip may have caused it (dinner at 21.00, bed at 23.00, not something I liked), but that's beside the point. We visited some farms and we had to take notes. We had to write a report and explain the things we'd reported on an oral exam. That's the bit I did do last year. The bit I did this year was a very interesting class surrounding conflict resolution between several stakeholders, project management and DEGEST, a means of governmental planning for the future with all relevant parties being engaged in it. The class was given by a professor Denis Lacroix, and I can safely say that if you ever hear of this in your class, you should pay attention. It's got a lot of applications.
But anyway, the point is that we got graded on presentations done in this class, our communication skills and our capacity for reasoning and explaining said reasoning. You'd think that I passed this part of the course with flying colours.
Imagine my surprise when I heard all the names of the first Master graduates and mine wasn't among them.
It was the only thing I had to do. All I needed to do is follow class, participate, and sacrifice my rehearsal week to pass this course and this year. There is no way for me to redo it over the summer, it automatically means I have to attend these classes again next year.
So while that's going on, I collect my grade note. Guy leafs through the papers, tells me I'm on the list, and indeed on the list of students who did not pass. Guy calls other guy, turns out the professor in charge had forgotten to tell everyone that if you had second Master courses, you'd get your grades at 16.00.
Deciding to mull on another failure, I went to the local bookstore, found nothing of interest (again, more on that later), and waited for the verdict at 16.00.
So I look at my grades, and turns out I need to redo three courses in total (the Bachelor course, one second Master course from first semester and one from this semester). I look at my grades for that one first Master course and...
15.
I have 15/20 as my final score. And knowing that I scored a 6 last year, that means I got a 9 out of 10 for the bit I had to redo. So I ask the guy "Doesn't this mean I passed my first Master?" and he says "Yeah, sure."
I'm not sure if this was due to some Bachelor backlash, but that was, umm... infuriating. Given my already foul mood, I didn't stick around for drinks.
On another note, I'd like to formally make an announcement regarding a little side project I've been alluding to in my past blog posts.
It's a Blender animation project I'm codenaming Project Horseapple, because all the big Blender projects are named after fruits and because if my college results are anything to go by, I always get good results when there's waste material involved.
Seriously, though, I've been trying to make a custom 3D pony creator just for this animation with the bit of free time the past week or two has given me, and... well, I've figured out how to do the stuff like make colour and hairstyle a property of the bones, meaning it can be put in a pose library. I also know how to do the same thing for leg length, torso, muscularity, the works. This means that I only need to have one file that contains a pony, and I can populate any scene by duplicating this pony and changing the pose. The problem is that I'm currently stuck on basic things.
The people who've talked to me in chat can attest to the fact that this has been bugging me for a while now. To be more specific: I want a pony that's capable of walking like a biped as well as a quadruped. This is pretty hard, because there's no way to weight paint a mesh to ensure there's no stretching in such an extreme pose difference, not without making the thing look like a clearly jointed toy. Aside from that, deciding on how to do the eyes without making them look wacky is hard. I'm beginning to see why most stick to just texture projections for that, but I want my ponies to have the Pixar eyes. There's several options, and I haven't exhausted all of them yet, plus I can still just use the projected eyes if I really have to. The main issue has been the area around the groin; since I've redone the pony to be a biped by default, there's an area of the abdomen that curls around when it goes to all fours. Making the shoulders look natural is proving tricky as well: I'm still working on which bones need to rotate and which ones need to stay still for the transition, and all in all it's got a lot of details to it and a lot of potential for messy deformations.
On the bright side, I know how the guys from Big Buck Bunny did it for the squirrels. I've tried their method, and it does work to some degree, but I'm still ironing out the kinks in it. One problem was solved, but created several more, you might say. I think the skeleton I've got for my pony is just off, but I've only got trial and error to go by. If you're curious which technique I'm referring to, you might be interested to know it's the one Pixar uses for the very same problem.
Thing is, I'm beginning to wonder why I should bother. It's not so much a question of making progress, because I am, but... well, we chaoists have a saying.
When you're up to your ears in alligators, you forget the original project was to dredge the swamp.
I'm up to my ears in alligators right now, and I'm at the point where I have to wonder if I'm not setting myself up for a major embarrassment. If I do somehow miraculously finish this thing, is anyone going to care?
I've looked up the stages for producing an animated short, and in terms of story I'm in preproduction, still. There's no actual script with dialogues, but there is this:
It's still rough, but I'm pretty much set on what story I want to tell and with which characters, so that's something. My main issue right now is motivation and feasibility.
So, if there are any Whimper fans out there, or just people who'd want to see this animation, by all means tell me. If there's something inherently and indubitably wrong with the outlines, from a plot perspective (don't argue grammar or names being clarified in odd places, it was edited a few times), add a comment in the script. I really don't want it to end up like this silly thing.
I might post some pics of the base pony when I manage to get the deformations all right, but in the meantime, there's something to look at.
And again: not feeling up to chatting right now, but I will reply to PM's from people I promised to help.
I am more than ok with this.
1192021
With what? The needless freaking out or the possible, potential, animation? Or the reference links posted?
1193864
A few things. The script concept, the Big Buck Bunny movie link (I had never seen that before and it amused me greatly), and people using Blender (I downloaded it once a few years ago but could never figure it out, so I gave up).
Wait, so you passed and don't have to retake it?
1231989
Exactly. I passed that one thing with flying colours, even. A nine out of ten for a part of the course on communicating and working out projects. And they let me think it'd be another redo for about two hours on end. But yeah, my first Master year is over and done with. Three more courses and a thesis to go.