Trilobites and newsletters
It looks like I’ve got another big job on – and right up my street too. It’s a trilobite animation for a museum and hopefully it’ll give me the chance to resurrect some critters from the Cambrian period.

Trilobites are complex beasts to build and animate, and they come in a huge variety, but there are some amazing fossils around because they preserve so well (even their eyes were made of stone).

The first few tests look very promising and I’m busily writing a storyboard for the animation which will have to be 10 minutes long and be scientifically as accurate as possible.

A quick calculation tells me that if I’m to bring this animation in on time, I’m going to need some serious rendering power – 15,000 frames – and let’s say 5 minutes per frame – that means 52 days rendering day and night. The deadline is the end of October, so I don’t have 52 days.

This means I’ll need a render farm – several computers all rendering different scenes. Now, you can buy time on render farms, but it turns out to be more expensive than buying extra PCs (especially as 3ds max allows you to render on multiple machines with one licence).

My solution: buy 2 new PCs, rejuvenate an old one with a copy of windows Vista and if necessary run more rendering on my wife’s laptop… four computers running 24 hours a day and my main machine available for the night shift should mean I can get the renders done in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I’ve probably got another job doing a web banner, a trademark for one of my previous clients and somebody emailing about another pop video – I’m going to insist on payment up front for pop videos from now on – small bands are flexible and do a lot of good stuff, but you never know when they’re going to disappear.

I’ve also turned off my advertising for a while – I’ve got two big projects on now and that’s enough to keep me going up to the end of October.

I’ve also got the video editing newsletter coming round again. This has now increased to include effectively 3 newsletters a month - and I’ve been trying to do that today.

All in all…. Busy busy busy – and although I keep saying it – I’m really keen to do some documentary work!

Elance
My venture into the world of Elance – farming out some of my animation work to other people seems to be working – although I haven’t seen any results yet. I’ve picked the 2nd cheapest offer and I’m hoping to see at least one of the characters I’ve asked them to produce bones for in the next day or so.

In the meantime, I think I’ve done something dumb – I’ve built all the characters and objects for my current animation separately and they’re all different sizes.

Resizing isn’t a problem usually in 3ds max, but there are some situations where it’s tricky and one of them is characters – re-scaling a character seems to distort its model for some reason and it’s going to be a real problem if I can’t sort that out quickly….