Music for my wife

RIP Maya.

No GNUs is Good GNUs With GPL GNUs

Here I thought I was the only person who absolutely hates Walmart. Was stuck in line for 20 minutes (I think this is a record for my quickest checkout at Walmart) and got into a conversation with someone on how we would rather spend twice the amount at Publix just to avoid the Hassle of pushing my way through the isles to finally endure the stampede of people going through the checkout like cattle. But for some reason every two months or so I completely forget that I hate Walmart and up and go there for what must be a masochistic desire to punish myself. But sitting here drinking my freshly brewed iced tea from my new ice tea maker somehow makes it worth it. Well at least I keep telling myself that, besides I have wasted time on worse things; watching Robocop 3 in the theatre comes to mind.

Anyway in between all my bitchly duties of the weekend I found a little time to continue Blocking out the GNU. albeit The the Mastering Maya: Advanced Modeling course from http://www.3dbuzz.com/ taught me an amazing amount, I was still having trouble focusing on this model. It seams that it has been getting worse and worse with each model and I thought it was because maybe I just didn't enjoy modeling as much as I thought. But I sat down and analyzed it today and it has actually been a clash between the two sides of my brain. You see I am completely winging it on this one and just free form modeling. With this style I am really in creative mode and I keep trying to focus on the technical at the same time by trying to keep quads, layout edge loops for animation, and just generally thinking too much about it. It gets to the point that I just want to delete the file. That is when I thought about what Kevin said about drawing Image Planes. He absolutely hates it because it completely takes the fun out of drawing for him by forcing all these rules upon him to make everything line up.

That is when I thought about the fact that the two hemispheres of my brain are probably battling for control the whole time I am modeling, so I decided to take a little bit of a different approach. As of right now I am not giving one ounce of thought about the technical side of things and just laying out the geometry so that it looks good and I actually started enjoying the whole modeling process again. Just like I did when I started and didn't even know about edge loops. Once I have him to a point that I am happy aesthetically, then I will go in and look at it technically, when my brain can switch into logic mode and just go to it. Anyway, here is the little bit of progress I got done today. Everything is as I picture it in my mind with the exception of the face which is a little too moose like a this point, but I will change that soon enough.

Back at it again.

Well if you havn't figured it out by now I like to jump back and forth between projects, especially when learning on my own. So its time to get back to modeling before I forget everything that Zak drilled into my head. So I was going to do this one in the Silo 2 Beta, but seeing that I hit a couple of bugs right off the bat and the fact that I need to relearn how to use Silo, I decided to stick with Maya to lay out the base of this one. And oh yeah, this one is going to be for a couple of guys doing some Linux VTM's on 3D Buzz. They are offering 50 to a hundred buck for the best model, but seeing that this is all about Open Source, it just wouldn't feel right accepting money for it. :)

I actually wanted to start this one a little sooner and was waiting for a friend, Kevin Mayle, to do me up some concepts, but his lazy ass put it off to long. :) just kidding, I know how it is when someone wants you to do something artistic for them, and you are just not into it. Actually I hate it when people expect me to create something for them, like I owe them because I can do it and they can't. :) Anyway I decided to wing this one like I did the water demon oh so long ago. Anyway here is the start as I rough in some geometry to work from.

SOH-CAH-TOA SOH-CAH-TOA!!!

So I spent my lunch learning a little about right triangles. What did I learn, well nothing new, just that I hate learning math. Looking around the net I found some videos over on 3D Buzz free to all, but they seem to go a little to fast for me, guess I will have to go back through all the basic math VTM's they have to refresh myself on multiplying and dividing fractions. Anyway, here is what I learned.



I understand the basics of it laying out the formulas, but it is in solving the formulas that I start to get a little intimidated. But it all boils down to why i have always hated math, I have no real use for any of it yet. Once I am able to start applying it to a real world problem then i will get into it and it will start to make sense.

In Too Deep

So In my quest to really learn all there is to know about being a TD it has become abundantly clear that math is a very important part of it. The problem I have not a clue when it comes to anything higher than basic algebra (yes, I know i should have paid attention all those years ago in school). So I started teaching myself what I could find that I need to know. So far sin, cos, tan, arcsin, and mod seem to be the really important ones. So the next few posts will most likely focus on what I am learning as I go.

Numbers

Seems the most basic concepts need to come first: the types of numbers that I seem to be dealing with in 3D.

• Rational numbers - Any number than can be written as a fraction - 3/4 = .75
• Irrational numbers - Those that can't be written as a fraction - ∏ and√2

Interesting point I found out is that the float comes from floating point which refers to the decimal point floating back and forth. i.e. .75 x 10 = 7.5 or .75 / 10 = .075. I know I am kind of weird, but I like to know the origins of things like that.

S to the H to the Ape to the Node

Quick post to get back into rigging and TD information. For some reason I got to thinking about creating rigs and using complex curves for control objects, but only had a slight idea of how to go about it. I figured that it would somehow involve getting multiple shape nodes under a single transform node, but had no clue how to do it. A little looking led me to a CGTalk article (*1): parent -r -s shapeNode transformNode.

Hmm, just parent the shape node to the another transform node, but why the -r for relative. Well looking in the help, I see that relative makes transforms relative to the parent, thus not needing its own transform node. Exactly what I was looking for. Now I will have to play around with it to see what creative uses i can make for it.

*1 - CGTalk Article - http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-310723.html

What the hell are Z-Men?

Holy Crap! Check out the whole poast over at CG Talk, gonna have to keep an eye on this guy.

CGTalk thread - http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?threadid=426903

e338's home page - http://www.e338.com/