Tweak. Sim. Repeat.
12 December 2014 - Comments
Wow, what a roller coaster of a few weeks! I thought it would be good to get a quick pre-Christmas update in, as it's always a bit busy this time of the year and who knows when I'll next get to update the journal.
Project pit of doom
A couple of weeks back I reviewed my current showreel projects and realised that I'd made a few key mistakes in my approach.
Self-study at home is amazingly flexible and productive in many respects. However, one thing you do lack is the mentor/tutor relationships you would have on a university course. I've no doubt that input along those lines would have prevented the mistakes I have made.
From my review it was clear that the projects:
- Lacked focus - I could have been more intentional about the skills I was planning to demonstrate in each project.
- Scoped too wide - the projects were too large in scope and overly ambitious, creating long lead times, and requiring too many disciplines and techniques to complete.
It is always disappointing to make these mistakes. However, I'm trying to treat it as a learning experience, and accept it as one of those challenges that comes with learning in relative isolation.
Post review, I've decided to shelve my current projects in favour of more focused and quickly realisable wins. I'll be making a few brief videos, like the one below, to demonstrate some of the work I've done on the projects to-date.
FumeFX R&D
In the background, I've continued doing various pieces of FumeFX R&D.
I'm currently just finishing off a large explosion ...
... previously I explored did some wavelet turbulence R&D as well ...
VFX/Dynamics
I've also been continuing with the destruction VFX workshop, which as it turns out has been somewhat of a distraction from the project work. I may share a little more about this later in the week.So far, I have a love hate relationship with dynamic simulations. It does remind me of the Edge of Tomorrow tagline, as it is very much a case of 'Tweak. Sim. Repeat'. Even watching industry professionals creating sims often feels like fairly random parameter tweaking. I'm not entirely sure I enjoy the round-trip process. That said, once you've got a lot of experience with a package you no doubt build up a good gut feeling for which parameters to tweak when, even if you aren't organised enough to create templated recipes for various effects.
New Projects
As I haven't journaled for a while I've got a lot more to say, including talking about the new projects, but maybe I'll leave it until later in the week.
Until then, adios amigos.
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