"the Throes of Artistic Appreciation"

I'm back with Omid, and working with the largest of the visual arts group on creating puppets produced in Maya that can be controlled using a Wii-Mote. Jake is our art lead, and Omid is the master-mind. Omid and Jake decided that what we were going for was something that could be picked up and used easily, something simple and intuitive. Chris is our benevolent over-lord and when he came by to check in on us he got on some long-thought-out tangent about creating a fine-tuned interface for Maya that would allow for immediate response to the artist and allow for more subtle and nuanced movement. I sort of glazed over at this point and while we all thought this was a neat idea, we summarily dismissed it as soon as he drifted away.

"The head bobbing is very compelling," he said.

I'm mostly excited by the prospect of actually learning some small chunks of Maya. Omid's enthusiasm has much to do with this, as he says modeling is fun. Of all of the things I've heard from the computer animation people, the most frequent complaint is that actually animating in Maya sucks. I guess that is the reason for Chris's starry -eyed vision, putting some physicality back into it.

On Lee's side the largest group is Max and Kat's insane hyper-instrument-integrated-light-visual extravaganza. There is a sound-room project as well, and both of these should prove to be very interesting.