Maritime Cathedral

Maritime Cathedral

The art and such of Rick Sternberg

Why did that stop working?!

I worked up the gumption to get started on doing all the facial rigging on my current model (one of those fiddly bits with lots of stuff going on), when I quickly realized that the vertex weighting on the mouth no longer existed.  I was sure I had done it already and got knocked out of my work mentality and dreaded the apparent setback I was facing.

Making a new character is one of those massive undertakings that you have to focus on the task at hand or you can get overwhelmed by all the work involved. So reaching a point where a fairly involved task that was believed completed a while ago suddenly needed to be done again kicked in that overwhelmed sensation.

I stepped away for a minute then looked back to confirm that I had completed that previous task. I did. I also realized that the way I was setting up the rig would work fine with that previous save. Phew. I was really having a hard time thinking about having to redo all that work when I was mentally so far past that point on this project.

Breaking Bad and Dexter – The Finales

The end of Breaking Bad was satisfying. The end of Dexter was not. Basically what Breaking Bad got right was that the end was a logical progression of the story and the storytelling itself was consistent with the rest of the series. Dexter felt like it was too conscious of it being the finale and needing to do something unique.

From what I recall the only absence in the presentation of the final episode of Breaking Bad from the rest of the series was an obvious GoPro shot. Maybe they could have stuck a camera on a bundle of cash or something.

Dexter was just a mess. The obvious conclusions of him moving away from Miami with a family or ultimately getting caught, would have served as a much more satisfying end. It may not have been bombastic or fancy, but it would have felt right. Ultimately its not about what the conclusion is, but trusting the characters and the writing to make that conclusion interesting and good storytelling. Breaking Bad went with an obvious end for Walt, but made the journey getting there worth watching.

As an added thought on finales, I only just recently watched the entirety of The Sopranos so I’ll add that into the discussion. I would have to say I agree with it being a tremendously weak ending. Not because of the non-ending aspect so much, after all there is a particular John Sayles film that has an ambiguous ending and it is wonderful. But rather because it long felt like they had run out of things to do with those characters. The shooting incident with Junior and the aftermath would have been a far more satisfying ending for the series.

Whether that series ended with the final episode of season 5 or, for an even more ambiguous ending, with him standing at the threshold of that house in his vision state, it would have felt more satisfying. In both cases the series would have ended as a result of two major themes of the series: his lifestyle and psychology (Junior’s dementia or Tony’s own unconscious mind made manifest in the visions).

As it was, everything that followed that event felt like the show going through the motions. So I guess it that regard the finale was a fitting conclusion. They basically had nothing left to say so it just stopped. True, the way it was shot tried to add to some ominous pending conclusion, but it felt more like them saying the show was about that family and the danger around them, so here that is one last time.

Of course they could have pulled a Dexter and had Tony and Vito run off together leaving it all behind.

GTA Series

I started playing GTA III again. I made it farther this time around but still lost interest. There is something about the GTA games that makes me want to play them, probably the open world nature. I really enjoy playing big open world RPGs, but obviously GTA is not an RPG.

The GTA games also have a good sense of atmosphere to the worlds they create; that also appeals. They are worlds I am interested in exploring. The problem comes when having to play the game. The combat and the driving just aren’t interesting to me. I also don’t generally play evil characters.

Knowing all this still doesn’t stop me from owning all the GTA games. I generally play them briefly and then put them away until I am drawn to peek in at those worlds again.

Splinter Cell Trilogy

I recently finished playing Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory after many previous attempts.  I had all sorts of problems with the horrible DRM and system requirements at the time of its release that I never got much further than the first level.

I finally ended up buying it again on Steam and was able to play it all the way through. I enjoyed it quite a bit and thought the very ending was kind of nutty but fun.

At the same time I bought that I bought the Double Agent and Conviction. I started playing Double Agent, but found all the little gameplay systems that I liked in the first three games were no longer present. I played it until it felt like one of those stealth games where the lack of information makes you feel like a really bad spy, and constantly replaying bits to get it right. So I couldn’t get into it.

Obviously based on its reviews other people really liked it, but it just wasn’t what I enjoyed in the past games. I’m definitely one of those people who would prefer a new adventure using the same mechanics and updated graphics than a systems overhaul to be like other games in the genre.

So I decided Splinter Cell was a wonderful trilogy and dropped those two into my “maybe play at some point” category. On to other adventures!

Dream Sequence

A brief clip from something I saw in a dream. This was basically how long it was in the dream, it was a movie clip there as well. I just liked it and wanted to sketch it out, so I put this together in a few hours.

Rigging Test

A short video to test out custom character rigs in Maya. Obviously could have fixed up the animation more, but I felt like I completed what I set out to do and was ready to move on.

Face 1

Its a face

 

I’m not sure what the purpose of this drawing was. I just found it in a sketchbook and thought it was interesting.

Comment bots

Its pretty crazy the fake comments you get when you talk about some notable thing. Its kind of like when an automated message calls you and the answering machine picks it up and its two machines talking to each other. Only in this case its two bits of software talking to each other.

I’m guessing somewhere there is a site that auto-generates content and then comment bots respond to it, completely removing humans from the equation of useless interaction.

Animatics

I’ve started, stopped, restarted, restopped so many animated projects over the years and I keep trying to find a way to finish them. So now I’m thinking I should just complete them in a painted animatic form.

Doing them as animatics at least gets me a nice looking video of the idea that I can post here and feel like I have at last completed that project.

Ideally I can work through the backlog of notebooks and digital files of project ideas I’ve had and clear the way to being more focused on newer projects as they come along.