Bleh

I'm in kind of a rut. I signed up for Digital Tutors, a website with a bunch of tutorial videos. It wasn't exactly the best time to do that, but I thought it would help my cloth simulation... It didn't. Then I found another tutorial about the trax editor, which I thought would help my animation. It didn't. So I basically just spent $45 for a month of tutorials that I shouldn't be wasting my time on, because I have 3 other projects I'm working on. Here's some status updates:

Aiko's Bopeep - Kind of on hold because it's the least crucial of the 3 projects. I need to do a lot of work on the animation to make it look more natural. It's 960 frames, and I'm having a hard time breaking it down into manageable chunks.

Cerebus Cloth Simulation - I was enlisted by a guy in California to do cloth simulation for a team animation. I was really excited at the opportunity to work on a team, but I'm not sure I'll be able to get the job done. It's simulating the cloth on a jacket, which is really hard to do cleanly. The animation is obviously not set up to properly work with the jacket, and even with some tweeks I still run into problems.

Dominance War V - I just deleted my own thread, which is embarrassing. I'm pretty sure the moderator will be able to bring it back, but I feel like an idiot. Plus new animation threads are popping up all the time, making my chances of winning slimmer and slimmer. As I mentioned before, the Trax Editor tutorial I went through didn't help at all, so that will slow down my progress, once I even get to that step.

The stock market is completely confusing me, my parent's puppy is turning into a spoiled brat, and I'm back up to the same weight I was at Christmas. And it's snowing. Not a good week for me.

The Big Question

Do I press on with this animation using the techniques I started with? Or do I go back and try some new techniques that might turn out better? It's hard to say at this point if I'll even be able to finish it using the techniques I started with. But I don't know that these new techniques are going to solve all those problems. I guess I should sleep on it. But I'm not sure if I'll be able to sleep well, since I took a nap at 9pm :\

Aimless

March wasn't as productive as it could have been. I ended up ahead of schedule, and just kind of messed around rather than taking full advantage. . I didn't spend as much time on animation as a should have, instead I dabbled in some MEL scripting, rigging, and this other program called DAZ Studio. DAZ Studio is a really odd program... I can't really tell what it's meant for. There's a bunch of content available for free, so I just ripped as much geometry to OBJs as I could and uninstalled it. It was taking up a lot of space in some temporary folder I couldn't find on my hard drive.

Now I 'm kind of dabbling in cloth and muscle simulations. I have the Aiko 4 character from DAZ all rigged up in Maya, so I'm going to try animating some of the dance sequences I've drawn out. It should be fun, but I'm not sure how to set up my deadlines for April. Maybe I'll have to see how much work I can get done in the first week and them make some approximations.

I did get a lot of drawing down in March, which I think is really good for me. Hopefully I'll be doing a lot in April as well.