Current Project in the Works

Well I'm going to be vague,
I am working on an animation using Blender.
So far it seems promising,
I purposely kept the whole thing simple,
yet rather cool looking.
Josh Melling is trying to keep me from compromising as little as possible.
Some things have had to be trimmed down,
it was taking 40 minutes per frame to produce perfect lighting,
I trimmed it down to 20 minutes per frame and the results are nearly as good.
That is on my Quad Core 2 and it was maxed out.
I'm utilizing Yaf A Ray, it seems to be from past experinces and this present one to be very quick and reliable although it's integration with blender is not that great sometimes.
The only issue that is worth mentioning is that the bump mapping
doesn't work well in Yaf A Ray, sometimes it works other times it won't.

Anyways I'm hoping for the best,
if not it's yet another project to add to the 100,000 I never got around finishing that would have looked sweet if finsihed.

However since I've committed myself,
plus the intensive forethought I think I can pull it off.

Another Gimp Flame Wallpaper

Gimp's Flame Filter

                Some fun with Gimp's Flame filter! I created these 
          in Gimp using the  render/flame filter and a custom gradient

                        Feel free to download as backgrounds and use!
                                    Josh Melling (Repatition)

More work on Terminal2

The end of computer animation by hand?

I have thought seriously about doing computer animation as a profession.
The industry is very interesting to me,
bringing characters to life, different animation styles and overall it's just plain fun.
However after lots of research on the subject,
calling a few colleges and looking at what the future of the industry is I decided against it as a career.
With motion tracking getting as good as it is the industry is shrinking,
with technology growing at such an exponential rate a MoCap system optical,
magnetic, visual or otherwise will be affordable enough that it will phase out most of the need for animators.
Pixar comes immediately to mind that they do not utilize motion capture,
Monster house for instance and many other productions utilize mainly Motion capture.
They will still be needed to do physically impossible animations, to clean it up and do cartoons within the spectrum of loony tunes, however the future seems rather bleak.

I will still mess around, I will sometime do a nice animated short and make almost all aspects of the short nice, however right now I'm focusing on my education.
I'm wanting to earn my Associate of Arts before I'm 18 and proceed with my business degree,
I'm hoping to get the latter by the time I'm 22 possibly 23.
Many people have more than one degree, maybe just maybe there is the opportunity of getting a job in animation after I have a "real" secure job, I mean I can dream right ?

Busy

Currently I have not had the time for a project,
with college right now I'm trying to score high enough on my CLEP tests so I can earn 12 credits for my month of study.
However I really want to do something with Josh Melling and Brandon Gomez for the local media class where you enter in a project.
I love animation,
unless I get some killer idea I won't invest my time into something that's not so good.
It can take around an hour a second to make good 3d character animation that looks realistic.
I have some ideas, however until they are nearly done or I know that they will be finished I will hold off from posting about them.

Continuing work on my Tremulous map

Currently named Terminal 2, here are some screenshots from the in-game engine.

Currently working on completing unfinished parts of the map.

Some old Gimp work I never posted

Here is some old work I never posted all done in Gimp

                                               Some thing cool!

                                           And some water ripples

All this was done without any textures or reference images! the power of gimp is great! and yes Photoshop is better but there is this little green piece of paper that I just don't have....

Quicky Render

(Click image for a much more detailed image,
Blogger really degrades the image down)
I had to go to Waimea (20 minutes from Honokaa)
for some supplies to hang my metal halide light on my reef aquarium,
so I was out of town for most of the day, consequentially when I got home I had to start working on it, after that I had to start my CLEP studies.....

I only had enough time to make him look better when rendered...
However I did fix the transform issues since they bone's normal;s were not correct placed,
they were easy to fix by just editing the bones and transforming them so they normals are the right way.....
Tomorrow I will hopefully be able to weigh him out so when he is being animated or posed the
deforming of the mesh will look much better.
I will also be subdividing him then sculpting him soon.
I used Yaf A Ray this time,
basic Photon mapping and a simple image to make the render look better.

If you have any suggestions, idea or any other input I'll be happy to receive it.

GORT Fixed up and Rigged

(I'm sorry for the bad render,
there is no environment yet so the reflectivity the the movie screen shots shown are not shown.
It will looks way better when I put more time into materials.)


Okay that is a render of him being posed,
I fixed him up with Josh Melling over my shoulder critiquing stuff and I changed a good amount of it.
I can easily sculpt in more detail before I weight out the bones to make him deform correctly, or maybe just do more weighting after I as a multi-tiers subsurf.
I need to make his rig less dirty also,
curves, setting the correct local rotations since they are off some in the fingers,
read on rigging thumbs since they aren't easy to rig
IK for the legs, plus when his rigging is okay I need to subdivide him then add detail since to him(look at the shoulders!) plus other random stuff I can't finish 10:30 at night.
He won't ever be perfect,
but suitable enough to animate him doing something half way cool, preferably cool.

I will always appreciate the ManCandy rig and the Ludwidge rig
for how nice and versatile they are, no matter how lame Josh Melling says they are!

Spark Fun bummer

Well my hopes were shattered like Josh Melling's,
I had everything my cart, reloaded the checkout page twenty times and I found out that the money was gone.
Later I went to my aquarium and had to remove my puffer fish from the tank with forceps since he died from some sort of disease, I have a 20 gallon reef that is thriving but I feel so bad about the fish..
Double disappointments, well I guess anything that is free isn't around for long and you shouldn't coint on getting it.
I'll stick with ebay and buy my stuff cheaper, not free but better than retail.

Sparkfun Failure? and Updates

                      
Sparkfun a online store has been planning a freeday for a few months.
It was supposed to launch 9am MST time and go on to 11 pm.
Great Idea but as a small business with as we now know not the fastest servers.........As you all guessed and many may know already Its CRASHED!
And in the last Hour has become the 3rd most popular search on Google,
with "Volcanic" popularity.
it is possible that they may fix this issue or enough people will be ticked off in time!we will repost as soon as we have more results!

1.Update: and to keep updated sparkfun twitter feed 4000 given away to somebody! but still unloadable page!

2.Update: I got to Sparkfun but i cant get to checkout!

3.Update: Checkout loading! and 13,630$ given away!

4.Update: well couldn't get past checkout and 100,000$ was spent!
All hopes shattered! sad but there must be many others like me!

A late happy New Year! Blender Organic Modeling Project !

Well being bored,
and watching a rather bad movie that had something so simple I had to copy it.
Pretty bad movie, great idea but the lack of explanations of the invasion made it overall a bad movie.
Here is what I wanted to do for the heck of modeling and rigging it.
Besides I have not done much for organic modeling.
GORT from the movie

Wikipedia








Mine after 40 minutes.
The hands are terrible, otherwise it's not that bad.
Doesn't look that good because I didn't use a HDRI.















Un-Subsurfed:

Simplistic(I think it's good topology for rigging) un-subsurfed wireframe.




Within a day or so I'll rig him after I tweak him to make him look more proportionate
(hopefully it works well, I've never done a character and finished it),
then I need to get some suggestions about the animation(Yes something I'm good at!) I'll do with him for the heck of doing it.
Maybe if Icarus works(sometimes it does) I'll do motion tracking....

When he is rigged and looks good I'll give out a Blend file,
might be nice for somebody who wants to get started in animation with a simple rig.