a few bits and bobs to start the summer

I've been pretty bad about posting with any regularity. Been a bit busy with the family and a lot of the things I've been working on aren't terribly conducive to interesting blog posts, some MEL scripting and playing around in XSI, Nuke, etc. Hopefully I'll get more up to speed this summer.
A few random things . . .

1) added a couple new things to my reel. Again. Not a ton of new stuff, just some 3d tracking stuff and some bits of the Nick stuff (which never got used). Here's a quick hit of a couple of the many Nick pieces we did. (FYI, I modeled a bunch of it, rigged much of it, and animated all of the first bits and some of the last bits)


2) Rich and I did another quick Ilksville thing, "half-shell smile". Trying to keep chugging along with it. It's tough cuz we've both been busy. Got one more cooking as we speak.
larger version here
BTW, congrats to Rich on his installation at the Artomatic show! If you're in DC in the next month or so, go and check it out!

3)Here are a few of the doodles from Corel Painter that I've been playing with.

click for larger

4) I've also gone back to modeling a bit more of the Psychemy guy. As I've talked a bit in my animation class at NYU about modeling for animation (however briefly), maybe I'll post up some of the modeling process for the body and such.

5) After a big of a hassle with distributors, I've finally reorganized things to get The Needful Head DVD a proper home. It may take a few days to for things to get sorted with Amazon, but once it's all working, rest assured, I will pass along all the relevant links.

Watch out for the render ninjas . . .

On ur computrz, ajustin ur gamma.

a bit of painting. . . and jealousy

. . . So the other day I checked out the blog of this dude, Mark Behm, and I was blown away. I LOVE his paintings. I scroll down a bit and turns out he's also an awesome illustrator. Ok, makes sense. Keep scrolling and see that he's also a sick sculptor. Wow. Turns out he's also an amazing 3D modeler and texture artist. What? And he's got videos that demonstrate that some of his paintings are done in, like, 10 minutes. On screen. Man oh man, that's impressive! I click on a link and it turns out that he also animates feature films. Ok . . . now I want to kill this guy.
What the hell? Sooooo much talent. I linked to his site over there ------>
He is the first person I've linked to that I don't actually know. Does he care? Probably not. Too busy doing all that fancy art stuff of his better than 99.99% of people in the industy. Dick.

Anyways . . . he inspired me to realize that I suck, so I've decided to try being a bit more serious about drawing and painting. Not too serious, cuz then i might feel foolish, but a bit. Of course, ACTUALLY painting is a big step. So, instead, I'm gonna try to do a quick number in Corel Paint each day. Only for 30 mins or so (ok maybe an hour) just to try to get back in the swing of things, that is, to the degree that I was ever in the swing of things. Here are my first few efforts. If I ever do anything thereafter that I decide I like, I'll post it, but certainly not daily. This is more of a public benchmark for myself, I guess, to see if I get better later.

the "under coat". This is the stuff I forgot that I don't really know how to do well. . .

this is with muck painted over the last image.

today I saw a stupid trailer for "Wolverine" and then did this.

Hopefully next week I'll be able to post up some new Ilksvilles and maybe some other work. Otherwise, you can find me staring at this guy's blog and crying . . .

3D stock images

Been working with my Lovely, Talented, Smart and Lovely wife on a bunch of images to submit to a stock agency. Basically, just images based on globes. I can see why there aren't loads of 3D images in stock. They have to be rendered at around 6K (6,000 x 6,000 pixels). A lot of the ones we've been doing have depth of field, transparency and so forth, which takes FOREVER. About 3-5 hours per frame (I know that's not forever for some renders, but I'm doing 5 versions per image (US, S. Amer., Eur., Asia, Africa), each precomped on various colored backgrounds (15 images per concept). Some things don't work and some do (I rendered about 30 images at 4K, only to realize that wasn't high enough rez). I'm rendering them in little elements that Steph is then comping together. The upside is that with 30-40 pictures, we could probably get a couple hundred images through all the permutations. It just takes ages. Since I'm not a Render Ninja by any stretch, I'm trying to figure out the best way to attack these hi-res images as best I can.
Here are a couple, smallish, of course.

Fishes doodle

Just doodling . . .
Guess which one I am? (hint: second from the left. Workin my way up the food chain baby!)

I'm back, baby!

Been working on an Undisclosed Job in an Undisclosed Location (actually at home) for the past few weeks. Can't show or tell anything about it (for a year!?), but I dug up something for the pitch that I never showed the client. Rich and I were thumbing through "The Art of the Matrix" book the other day (Rich is working on a graphic novel, which is also undisclosed, etc etc) and this thing I did a few years ago reminded vaguely and worsely (?) of Geof Darrow. (BTW, shockingly hard to find his art online). So I'm putting it here. How's that for an explanation?







(click for larger)