So it's nearing the end of another week which is crazy... it seems much shorter with the zoo trip in the middle.  The zoo trip rocked, but I'm sad it took away from my senior project time!

This week I started on a new project.  You all saw the final version of my previous project.  I'll show more renders and all in my final presentation, but for now the pedal car is finished!

The new project I started is a standing cartoon cat character.  I'll show renders soon, as I've made a lot of progress.  The artist that drew the cat character in the first place also drew the character in this commercial.  The characters are pretty similar in style as well!  A little interesting thing I learned about that commercial is that it's a combination of stop-motion and CG work.  The trees and background are mostly stop-motion, while the main character is CG as well as some particles.  It's interesting to see how they combine the elements.  Eric Urban, the animator sitting next to me moved to another location today, he's working on stop-motion animation now, as he's able to do both!  I keep getting side-tracked I know, but bear with me, that' show my brain works.  So my new project is coming along well!  Monday and Tuesday I worked on modeling him, then at the end of tuesday, when I had finished up what I thought was good, I had Fred come over and criticize it.  He gave me a list of changes I should make, and I started working on those.  Today I finished up the tweaking, and Fred let me move on to unwrapping my model (UV mapping as I talked about before.)  For this character I'll get to use a 3D paint program instead of photoshop.  That means, you paint directly on the model in 3D space.  I'll be using mudbox, as fred let me choose between that and C4D's bodypaint program, so that will be a fun tool to play with!

The plan for this project is to rig it (give it a skeleton of bones that affects the 3D mesh,) and with that rig animate it!  We'll also give the cat fur which will be another fun tool to play with.

Today there was a large meeting for all employees in the kitchen area.  At first I thought maybe someone had stolen something or someone's lunch, but it was more important than that.  Basically things are changing in the company and they were telling people about those changes, but I wont say any more about that because... well... I don't think I can!  It sounds exciting though!  Oh, and of course the most important reason they called us in was that someone had made a cake for everyone.

And that's about all I have to say now!  I'll get renders up of what I'm doing tomorrow, and you can see what happens as I progress!