Hi all, long time no see.

I noticed that my views is higher when I write the blog less formal. Will do my best to keep all you interested. How have my holidays been? well it was busy, least to say. We had some artist friends from Sweden visiting for a little bit more then a week. They helped me a lot with the project. Especially my old mentor gave me valuable assistance.
The 3d animatic looks better then anticipated, still scheduled it for some more feedback. But that can wait for a bit.The texture problems is solved feels like everything is running smoothly now. With the title text and everything the film landed
on a solid 2minutes.

The new years eve was magic and my love for Tokyo and the japanese increased. We started with some sweet thai food in Shinjuku. Impressed my swedish mates, talked thai with the waitress and the chef was happy to talk Lao with me. We planned first to go to a Jazz club, but they were full. So we went to a Rock club instead for the countdown, it was a amazing and so fun 🙂

After that, we took a walk. Around 7 A.M. we went to the meiji temple. Wash our hands in a traditional way, we never went in for prayers out of respect for another mans religion. We took a walk around it. It was full of people. Intresting to see how different people celebrate the ending of the year.

Akihabara showed a lot of modern japanese art in the form of manga and toys, we walked and watched for hours in this area. Needles to say I could spend more hours. I guess for most japanese that this is a everyday view and may not see this as something special,
but for people living in the other side of the world… well this was fascinating. Picked up a lot of insperation.

I do not own this picture, but here is a link on one of the toys. www.kawaiikakkoiisugoi.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_5311-800×533.jpg

We also took the chance to visit a japanese art exhibition at Tokyo metropolitan art museum, that day was the last day they showed western art. They even had a Van Gogh painting! To see how japanese viewed western art changed some of my art perspective. For instance they considered a lot of the middle eastern art to be part of the western art, it is a great logic in that point of view. Also fun to compare the japanese art and the western art.

Taking pictures is prohibited.

Tokyo tower was a height you should not miss when visiting tokyo.

This is all from me today! Will update with a picture or two as soon as possible!
Thank you for reading.

here are some new textures. Getting closer and closer to more texture. There is one more big obstacle with the texturing, all the props. I am especially worried about the intro scene. Spended about two hours with the band today. We will be playing live on sunday at Hon atsugi station !

after that painted some more for the project. Tomorrow we will have a feedback meeting for all our works as I understand it. Hopefully i will find time tomorrow to work on a design for the new years card and the labratory mascot. Just trying to catch up on the main production these last days.

anyways here are some pictures of the progress, hope you all enjoy!

See you all tomorrow! need to work on this some more

Have a lot to do so spended saturday painting the textures. Took longer time then anticipated, but all well. Spending more and more time working alone in my apartment now, mainly because my computer is stronger here then my laptop in the lab.

Well here is a peak on todays progress.

One love
/ Khamla

Man, spend all day today fixing some texturing problems. Cleaned out some uvw maps and had to re-paint the girl. Well I think I have most in control now, so the others should go faster. The most frustrating was that solving this is so time consuming. Partly because it was a very long time ago I textured and partly because I am still not well versed in the secrets of texturing.

Ok here is a sneak peak on todays work and solved problems. Is going to work tomorrow to and try to catch up lost time. This have not been a good production week 🙁

Hopefully we wont run into any problems next week!

P.S. I am very curious on who read this blog! I would be more then happy if anyone of you can throw in a comment or question!

ran into some problems with the textures had to re-do everything. But now I finally manage to solve it and got a little “bump” on the textures. Hope you can see it. It is a “bump” map in 3ds max that calculates the dark and light colors. So the “lighter” colors sticks out and cast shadows, while the darker colors is “cut” in the mesh. What to do now is to redo his cheeks a little bit.

Also painted on some of the other characters, but more pictures on them later on because I am not happy with todays results.

Have a great day / Khamla

Well the head is finished, is going to polish the hands and feets now.

I tried to do a fast texture on deciding what skin the character should have. I am thinking of a “painterly” look. There was a problem that he was to human like before. But I think that the texture helped  a lot.

The modelling of the hands and feets should not take that long time, Planning on modelling the female character after that, texture her and compare her to the main character to see if they booth could be in the same world.

An interesting thing I learned about Siggraph asia is to plan for coming mistakes. It might sounds wierd, but they had a good point. For instance, to plan that after feedback to rewok your modell. That one might be obvious, but sometimes people get sick, a software crashes, Virus or you do not get the equipment you need to work. Or you just run in to some problem with the software that make you loose a lot of time. And things comes up a lot of the time. Especially when you studying at another country.

for instance, we get at least a letter a week here to fix something. It can be something wrong with our bank account or we need to find equipment for our projects in the city. It may be small problems but it is timeconsuming especially if you do not master the japanese language.

Thank you for reading,

/ Khamla

A bit tired but now I am up and running again. It was insperational. The film project took a break because of that. But got really valuable tips and tricks. We experience some communication problems in Singapore, but it ended well I would say. The labarotory won a prize and they did a really good job.

For pictures on the trip and more in depth info, visit khamlicious.tumblr.com/japan. So these days after Singapore I have mostly been recontacting some contacts from Siggraph and speedpainted a lot to get back on track. I should take a day off, but got so motivated by the trip so been planning and working a lot. The model is close to finish. Spended some time doing the hobby project. We are thinking of playing a swedish song for the school.

Anyways, have a great day!

/ Khamla

We were supposed to meet a girl who wanted to learn english and in exchange she is going to teach us japanese. But there was a misunderstanding, she thought that the meeting was next week and we thought it was yesterday. I called her and she seemed super nervous. The reason was probably because she suddenly got a call in english.

I noticed that people send sms a lot here in Japan, even the guys do that. Back home guys rarely send sms if it is something important or if you want to hang out. I have a perfect excuse for not sending sms, my simcard do not allow me to send sms.

So we decided to work on our hobbyproject, we went to the jamming room and started to play some music. It went pretty good this time. I am rusty and the people I play with are a little new to music, but it is starting to sound good now. I try to raise the bar ever session. We have not played much together, found out that we are going to have a 20 min concert by the end of december. That should not be any problems I hope.

Here is a picture with some of our crewmembers

Wish you all a great day and week!
/ Khamla

So we have officially joined the music club now. they invited us to what we thought would be a dinner. It turned out to be a really crazy party with lots of free alcohol. It was fun and I enjoyed it alot. Though it made me a little tired the day after. How was the party and how is it different from the ones back home?

first off when the party started people were relaxed and quite. After a while they were really loud (like back home =) ), then men started to kiss and make out with each others, stripping clothes of from the most drunked onesand gave them a box. So there were a couple of naked men at the party. Some passed out. This is an unusal sight for me. The food was good, a lot of fried dishes. They had fried chicken, pork vegetebles and more fried chicken.

Even though it was a lot of suprises I must say it was really interesting to see. It was a very big contrast to see that the japanese students are usually very quite and polite, but when alcohol is running through the veins, The inner spirit of the party warrior comes out.

I do not dare to post any pictures, because I havent asked permission to post them yet. But hopefully someday in the future we will see them.

One love!
/ Khamla

There is a swedish friend here in atsugi who took us outlast weekend. To be honest I was still sick. The funny thing is that I actually feelt much better the day after. Well borrowed a streets saleseman his guitar and tried to hook him up with some customers.

Then we sang karaoke for 5 hours, I must say that it was very relaxing.

Today we had our first jamming session. It feelt really good, I enjoyed it alot I havent played in a band for a while, but now we got acces to a music room once a week. Hopefully I can borrow a guitar or bass soon. I was the vocalist and bass player today.

Shirai-sensei told us we could write about our everyday life here. So I am thinking of dedicating this blog primarly on my everyday life in Japan. And for all of you who enjoy my production updates. Do not dispair, you can follow your boy at khamlicious.tumblr.com/.

Allright enough from me!
One Love! / Khamla Vonsensey