Work is distracting me. I’ve got these two big projects on right now – the safety video for the yacht and a trilobite display for a museum in Mexico. Both are big, complex jobs and both have deadlines in September.

The problem with having these long term projects is you’re never quite sure where you ought to be on them at any point and you need to set (and keep to) goals throughout the project.

There are so many different aspects to these animations (both are really like mini films – involving narration, music, characters and editing as well as animation) that are all both exciting and difficult – so I sometimes end up getting preoccupied by them.

Although, obviously I want interesting and challenging work, it’s hard to turn that off when it comes to the end of the day.

I end up getting distracted – as though the real world is happening somewhere else with me – or my mind not connecting fully with it, and I don’t like that about myself. It must be obvious to people around me sometimes that I’m not all there…

The only real solution is to be as organised as I can – to plan out what I’m doing on what days. For some reason when I know I’ve got a difficult problem to tackle, knowing WHEN I’m going to tackle what portions of it frees me up somehow – it allows me to forget the problem for the most part – knowing that even if I don’t have the answers, I’ve at least dedicated a time-slot to dealing with them.

On Saturday I scribbled a few notes on a scrap of paper, planning out the next couple of weeks. It helped a lot – and even if some of those plans don’t work out, I at least know I’ve got time for most of what I’ve got to do.

Hopefully that made me a little better company for the weekend….





The joy of farming
I’ve now got so much rendering to do for the two big animation projects on my plate right now that it’s become pretty clear that one computer isn’t going to cover it. If you make a guess that each frame of animation takes about 5 minutes to render (the practice of getting the computer to draw out every beam of light bouncing off every object in the scene to create a finished 3d picture), and there are 25 frames per second, my museum animation on its own is going to be about 50 days and nights of rendering.

Since I’ve got to deliver it at the end of September and I’m not even going to be able to start the rendering until all the other work is done on the project, I’m going to be in a spot of bother.

Luckily 3ds Max (my animation package) has a trick up its sleeve. Basically you can install (for free) unregistered versions of the software on as many PCs as you like, and network them together so that each computer renders out a portion of the job.

Commercial rendering farms as they’re called turn out to be more expensive than buying extra computers and doing it yourself.

Anyway – I’ve now set up Lisa’s laptop, and re-energised my old PC (which fell apart earlier in the year) with a copy of Windows Vista. So I’m now rendering 3 times as fast at a cost of about £100.

So I’ve managed to get a good chunk of my yacht safety video rendered over one weekend. What’s more, it doesn’t matter that some of the renders need tweaking because I can go back and do them again overnight whenever I like. It’s a very freeing experience.

At the end of the month, when the museum animation starts in earnest, I’m going to buy and add a couple of quad core machines – bringing my processor count up from 2 to 14 – so I should be able to take on these big tasks without worrying about rendering time.

It feels as though I’m slowly scaling up my operations what with render farms and Elance. This is something I’m not used to as a freelance artist – but it’s going fairly well…

Render farm idea
Here’s an idea for anyone with a bit of web programming skill: set up a website which allows people to donate downtime on their own home computers for network rendering. You’d be able to call upon hundreds (even thousands) of PCs to do a rendering task, pay the contributors a small amount per frame, and charge animators to use the service.

You’d be able to undercut all the commercial render farms out there, plus you’d have no overheads, and an almost unlimited supply of render machines.

What’s more, instead of a render task taking weeks, you could typically finish the job in minutes.

Just an idea.

I’ve been working pretty constantly on my two big projects this week – pausing only to write my video newsletter – which of course arrived after a long delay with a very tight deadline.

It looks like I will be making the trilobite animation and that’s great news. It also seems the same people want to meet me in Mexico to talk about other possible projects – which would be great.

Elance
Having decided to use Elance for the first time to hire in people to help with my animation work – and having given a team in India the job of rigging some of my 3d characters, I got the finished rigs back this week.

They weren’t brilliant, I have to say. I did choose the cheapest people – which I guess says something - and the results were mixed. I don’t think they’d done much character rigging before.

Character rigging, by the way is adding animatable bones to a 3d person so that when you move their arms and legs, the right parts of the body bend. If you get it wrong, you get unlikely looking bends and tears and the character’s bodies go out of shape. This is what happened in this case – and if I’d been using them in the normal way, the results wouldn’t have been satisfactory. Fortunately, I’m only using the characters as silhouettes, so it doesn’t matter too much.

I’ll definitely use Elance again – it’s a good way to farm out work you can’t or don’t want to do – but you have to be careful about who you choose.

I think the main requirement – aside from an understanding of the task – is an understanding of English. You really need to be able to communicate complicated ideas when working on an animation projects – and that means a common language is a must.