The Rotation is Complete

I cannot wait to be done with college. It needs to end, preferably sooner than later.

This senior thesis project is seriously destroying my life. I've been putting about 40 hours a week into it since August, and progress is just so unbearably slow. Over Thanksgiving break I was working constantly on it and I barely got anything done. I made some palm trees move. That was honestly about it.

I know I'm bitching, but man I really need to bitch about this.

It's been on my mind more than usual because I'm scheduled to start animation the beginning of December and it's flat out, absolutely, no way in hell, going to happen. I don't even know how many more months I would need before I'd feel okay with going onto animation. I don't think I know numbers that high.

And it's awful because I'm doing it entirely by myself, and honestly, I don't know enough. Everything I try and do something I have to research from somewhere, and you would be amazed at how shitty some people are at explaining stuff.

Here's an excerpt:

once the bottle is filled to the level you want, export the circle emitter particles as a single .bin file and set that state as initial state.
then unlock the timeline lock and hit A or click on simulate, go for a ciggy break or take your dog for a walk.
the liquid will simulate along with the animated bottle movements.
after the simulation is over you need to add a mesh and convert the particles to mesh (one more big set of trial and error parameters, heheh...)
Import the mesh created in RealFlow into Maya using NextLimit Mesh Loader.

I painfully made it through the bulk of this tutorial when I got to the "using NextLimit Mesh Loader" and had a pause as I realized I had no clue what the was. So I looked it up. And, of course, there is no documentation anywhere online that says what it is. Not even a hint.

I found a workaround several hours later and I got every thing all set and I rendered my scene out (just a test scene of about 50 frames) and when I finally saw it being played I noticed it looked weird. The scene was just a moving bottle filled with orange soda. The orange soda part being the nonsense that was so hard to make. But as the bottle was moving, the soda was just sort of floating there. Apparently I had forgot to turn gravity on.

Why the FUCK isn't gravity on by default?

God, dammit this shit makes me so angry. That's an entire day's worth of work and it looks bad because there's no gravity.


Cursing is my armor this semester. I'm sorry my mouth is so foul.