It's been a case of nose to the grindstone, through the grindstone, onto the floor and beyond. I think my nose is somewhere in the southern hemisphere by now. I've just come to the end of a long and challenging project, a 3 minute animation involving a CG car, CG studio and CG desert. I don't think I can show anything unfortunately but if that changes I'll add some videos and stills up.
There were some bits of the project that were just a logistical nightmare. I tried separating the tasks as a company would, into modelling, rigging animation etc and this process definitely helped. One of the key aspects that really sped things along was file referencing in Maya. The model and rig were in a scene that was referenced into the studio scenes and desert scenes allowing fast changes across the whole range without too much hassle.
Another issue was the rig itself, for the most part the car had to be a rear wheel drive, so the rig was built to drive and steer from a controller with a pivot between the back wheels. At some points though the car needed to skid which meant the pivot had to shift to the front wheels. As a bit of a sticky back plastic solution I had a secondary controller with a different pivot and a switch (kind of like an IK/FK switch I guess) to allow me to switch between the two. I'm not sure if this is the right way to go about it but it worked. If anyone has any more elegant solutions let me know!
There is one more bit of news unrelated to 3D. I've started taking photographs a little more seriously / at all. As a bit of a learning exercise I'm doing a 365 project, or a photo a day. How long will it last? Who knows. Will there end up being a lot of photos of cups of tea and my workstation? Most definitely. But you should look anyway; you can find it on my Flickr page here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/patrickfinnvfx/. Here's a yesterday's effort as a taster.
As always, any questions, suggestions, meaningless chat or if you want to say hello, give me a shout via the contacts page or social media or email or. . . . whatever.