I spent 8 hours on Saturday resurrecting my beloved Fish House.  I haven’t touched it since 2009 and when I first opened the project I understood why I walked away from it in the first place.  It turned into a tangled mess of polygons and wireframes.  When the floorplans were laid one on top of the other, everything seemed to fit, and it should have been a Lego-snapping job of building out the geometry.  Unfortunately it didn’t work out that way and in my frustration it sat unfinished on a harddrive until this year.  A few years of teaching Maya and not letting my students make excuses has forced me to turn that same tough attitude on myself to get it together and get it finished.

•    The architecture is laid out in order of the narrative so it starts at a particular room on the first floor, The Fishtank Room, and the film’s only  character explores the rest of the house room by room.

•    The character is very organic and billowy, which contrasts with the cold modern architecture. There’s lots of concrete, glass and steel.

•    There’s 3 floors including an attic.  How does a modern house include an attic?  Its surreal.  It could include an elephant and still fit the theme.

•    It doesn’t include an elephant.

I had an epiphany about render times recently that went something like “what’s the deadline? divide that time into the number of frames you’re rendering and that’s what each frame should take.”  Don’t ask why I never worked that way before.  For test renders I cut it down to 30 seconds for a reasonable light simulation.

I’ll keep posting progress on this as it comes, hopefully at least once a week.