Harsh Lessons Learned

Today was supposed to be a day of simply painting maps. 

I however decided that I'd try to figure out a good way to generate a map zoom. I decided to simply rotate/scale/position the depth map's in a pre-composition. I however didn't anticipate this when setting up the grid when I started. Thus I had to generate a workaround which would proof difficult as the map would shift outside of the bounding box I had set up. Re-adjusting the grid to compensate would completely ruin the look so I had to set up a additional track matte to subtract everything outside of the bounding boxes. This however left me with a set of solid layers within my particle grid. I decided to take a extremely ghetto approach and generate a rotating and scaling mask to go along with the zoom. Tweening the mask didn't net me accurate results so I was forced to once again go in manually and fix it.

At this point I had wasted a fair amount of time, but had in fact also gotten it to work. To much dismay however I realized that due to how I generate the depth map's, the pre-composite process had thrown off my anchor points and all three maps were shifted over and through each other. This left me with two options.

• Manually re-align each map based on the street map.
• Roll back to a auto-save and just scrap the work for now.

 I've decided to simply revert back to an old auto-save project file and continue work from there. This is when I realized something I had overlooked when setting up and configuring my AE CS5.5 setup. While I had turned on the auto-save feature, I had forgotten to specify the increments properly. Which left me with auto-saved project files an hour apart. This carelessness set me back 3 hours of work as apposed to what I expected to be no more then a hour at most.

So today I painfully got reminded that one should lock and check their layer properties when pre-composing. As well as making sure you set up and check all your preferences when updating to a new version of your software suite. But again, these things happen and you've just got to roll with the punches.

I've started conceptualizing the UI on the side, I personally like the idea of a 3D mouse in a holographic panel. Direct physical feedback and smoothly tracking a hand and/or finger gesture will be interesting. I'll definitely have to make a small test as a proof of concept to see what looks and feels best. Something to maybe do tomorrow if I get bored with depth-map painting.

I have a list of things to do still, among them is figuring out what the smartest way would be to generate a accurate reflection. But I realize that most of the things I have on my mind at this point are just going to be educated guesses at best. Simply because the main asset isn't done yet and it all revolves around that.

I will leave you with a updated version of yesterday's video. Beyond this I will probably not post any more video's until this version of the map is completely populated.

For now however I'm going to call it a day.

-Niotex