Because People Want to Know These Things…
January 29th, 2009
I’ve added a link to my resume in the About/Contact section at the top.
Archive
Archive for January, 2009
Demo Reel 2008.
January 28th, 2009
Well, it’s been fun, and here it is! And now tucked under the page-break for your loading convenience.
Honorverse Update, Complete. Ish.
January 11th, 2009
Of all things, I cannot find the comp-atop scene with the countermissiles launching from Nike’s upper rails, or the missiles that are smashed apart by same. They’ve got to be something – aside from that, I’m *really* rather happy with this update. Thanks to RiK for lending me lots of CPU power for brute-forcing this, rather than having to spend the time I spent setting up that CFD air-blowout on breaking the first scene apart. Video under the fold…
More Honorverse Stuff…
January 8th, 2009
See, this is when it gets fun. I’ve got a nice fat hopper full of things to render now, buffed and polished so if they’re not actually making me happy, at least I’m not actively embarrassed by ‘em.
The first set of Honorverse shots are rendering on my dear old mate RiK’s Mac Pro – still apparently the cheapest way to get eight Xeon cores in one place, must get myself one of those – so I can stop messing about with trying to optimise it and worry about other things, such as the “Big Ship Gets a Steaming Great Hole Blown in It” shot.
Comme ça.
Still having a fiddle with my CFD solver, and I wish the darn author would re-license my replacement dongle… but I’m tolerably happy with the fiddling today. Might conclude that shot with the “down low” angle rather than the “up high” – seeing a honking great spaceship (with a steaming great hole blown in it) hanging over one’s head does seem a touch more dramatic. Wouldn’t you say? Anyway – now I’ve got RiK’s Big Mac (arf) grinding away on one shot, Lady Macbeth (the big rig) on this one, leaving me free to muck around tuning up a Vue render on Dauntless (the nice laptop I got in New Hampshire for not an awful lot of money).
Nine days and a wake-up ’til I fly, and I’d say it could be a lot worse. Yay!
January 3rd, 2009
Told you that glitch in the cheek was an easy retopo. Maybe not so much when I first built this, but NewTek make good kit with lots of yummy upgrades.
Still looks like Wogan, though. Ho hum. Onwards!
The more I look at it, the more I realise how crummy that sculpture actually was compared to the original head. Cripes. No wonder it’s all outta shape. A philtrum like that ususally requires some kind of facial wound.
I Don’t Do Humans
January 2nd, 2009
Funny story. A repeat client comes along and says “We really like your work, and we’d really like you to make a 3D version of this person, from his bust.” “That’s fine,” say I “if you can take photos of the bust from front and both sides with it on a turntable, using a locked-off camera then we should be golden”. While it’s true that I don’t do a huge amount of character animation, it’s also true that a shape’s a shape. So you’d think. So duly I get 23 photos with different zoom settings and centration for each and every one. I love my job, but a sense of humour really does help! So anyway, in the course of trawling through my old projects, I came across these.
A minor twang on the jaw s’patches – easy bit of retopologisation there – and the Fiber Factory IV settings don’t seem to have translated perfectly to FibreFX. The skin texture really needs a bit of work. But to get a little bit of human-work into the reel, it’d probably do for a mid-ground character. Besides, in a high-tech industry, it’s good to show your human side.
The really funny thing was that whilst all concerned were agreed that I’d made a reasonable facsimile of the bust itself, the gent in question was always thought to look like a photo taken 20 years earlier when he was equipped with a truly magnificent moustache. Therefore, this bit of work was never used. He might make a good pub landlord or something…. I’ll see where I can slot him in.
Flicking back and forth between these two images, I recall all the many places where drawing gridlines between the essential pieces of anatomy did me no good at all, as the camera height, position, range to object and zoom factor varied every single time. *sighs* Still, if this was easy, anyone could do it. Right?