Hardware All Acquired

I’ve never had a budget for the film set in place, but I had made a list of what things I feel I needed to purchase in order to make my life a lot easier when creating the movie. These are the expensive things on the list  (hardware) so have since 27th August 09 have been saving then buying, saving then buying things off the list of my ideal hardware set-up. Today I crossed the final one off the list. I’ll have to do a video or something on my set-up once in production as I’m pretty proud of it, it’s starting to look like NASA or something. Anyway the final thing on the list after the new MacPro, monitors etc… was a Wacom Cintiq – which is essentially another monitor that you can digitally draw on. I’ve been using Wacom tablet’s for years now and have been drooling over one of these for a while. I’m looking for my computer drawing to improve exponentially through using it. I will probably set myself daily challenges in order to really sharpen up, some of which I will post online.

Most other items on the shopping list are now software based, such as plug-ins, some which are function based, others are purely for visual tricks which aren’t as important at this current juncture. Have spent this weekend following more 3D tutorials, I find a lot of the theory as well as the technical applications of the software really help from certain videos. Something I heard which I though was particularly insightful, is to initially build the bare essentials in terms of rigging and then add controls as needed. This little bit of advice was really helpful as I always looked at it from the point of making a finished prop to be used throughout. This way takes a lot of the pressure off and allows to not learn everything all at once, but instead in more easily digestible chunks.