Old Happy Dude

OK, so I'm adding some personality to this guy. Bad english teeth and a big goofy grin. Still sculpting him but I think he looks pretty cool so far. Can't wait to do teh textures...

Old Creepy Dude

Some updates to the old guy character. This time with textures painted for the epidermal, subdermal, back scattering, and specularity layers. Makes a huge difference! Couple problem areas but overall he looks pretty good. Next step is to give hime eyes, teeth, and personality...

Old dude

Still working on the textures for this guy, slowly getting there. I think eyes, teeth, hair, and a better expression will also help a great deal.

Last of the Harvard Tutorials

The final of the four tutorials I wrote for the Harvard "Maya for Molecular Biologists" class has been posted on molecularmovies.org. This covers the basics of render layers and some compositing tricks in After Effects. The link opens a PDF, all the files are available on molecularmovies.org



I was supposed to visit Harvard Medical School last week (Friday the 13th of course!) and sit in on the class (to heckle the teacher) however I had to cut my east coast trip short and come back to LA. My dog Blue (aka bloopatone) is getting very old and she had some accidents while we were gone. She's doing better now, lots of antibiotics and close attention. I'm glad I got to see some of my friends in DC for the brief time I was there. I only got to see my niece and nephew for a few minutes in a crowded bagel shop. Hopefully I can try the trip again sometime soon. In the mean time I'll keep the site updated with Blue's status.

Blue in better days when we first came to LA:

Book promo on Pixologic.com

Hey, the front page of pixologic.com is featuring my book and Scott's book: pixologic.com They have a free preview - actually all of chapter 5.

Thanks Gnomon!

I just finished filling in as a substitute teacher for Ryan Kingslien at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects. I taught four sessions of Introducing ZBrush while he is in Copenhagen. Thanks to Ryan for the opportunity to teach, it was a lot of fun. thanks to the students for allowing me to rattle on, I hope everybody got a lot out of the classes. If there are any questions please feel free to email me.

Next week I'll be on the east coast visiting friends and then up to Boston to hang out at Dr. McGill's Maya for Molecular Biologists class at Harvard Medical School - you can check out the tutorials I wrote for the class in the previous posts. I have one more tutorial I'm finishing up now.

Here's a quick animation I did for fun. This is a space capsule reentering the atmosphere, just keeping up my particle practice. Click on the image to play the animation:



More later!!

movietime

I was playing with the scenes I created for the cell division tutorial and came up with this little animation. I experimented with combining some really whacky render passes in After Effects. looks kind of neat, like astro-cell biology from the 30s. Click on the image to view the animation (2.4 MB quicktime).