A night of sleep! I fell asleep at 11pm or so and woke at 8am - the first such night in about 6 weeks. I've had less than 10 days like that this year. I felt awake and alive this morning. Praise the lord for restful sleep!
A full day's work on the Summer video, it is pretty much complete as per the script, but needs lots of tidying up. I'll not spend too long on it, I know this is primarily a learning exercise and a further test of how to animate and how best to use Argus. I'm working on techniques and ways to create new work, and I think visual themes, contrasts, are the key, as in all art. I've now updated Argus to version 1.04 but using it often feels clunky and awkward, I'm getting overwhelmed by numbers for actors, tracks and costumes, and piles of individual events.
I also discovered a major bug which caused many hours of worry. I haven't used size in my tranformation matrices before - not at least since Trax in 2000 or so, and I think the code then was also bugged. I needed to concatenate the size matrix with the rotational transformations, but I only know how to multiply size to the complete x/y/z rotational transform. I had totally forgotten about matrix multiplication and was crudely multiplying the single cells(!) so no wonder it didn't work. Now it does, but the size is applied after transformation, so, for example the x size always stretches in the x world axis. I envisaged the size to apply to the x local axis... although this can be done by scaling the object beforehand. I'm unsure which would be more useful, there are pros and cons with each, and now, almost all of my animations have used planes exclusively anyway, so it hardly matters... yet, the fact that I can't work out how to mutliply locally annoys me.
I've spent many hours this week, at least a day's worth, programming Argus; adding things, removing things. I expect this is a necessary part of new software but I find it a chore. I expect I'll finish the Summer video over the weekend.
