Dennis the Menace

So where the hell have I been the past couple of days, well most of Friday night and Saturday I was sleeping as Hurricane Dennis kept knocking out the power. We only had like 50 mile an hour winds and were without power in my neighborhood for almost a day; off and on. I swear since Charley, someone can fart in our neighborhood and the power will go out. Oh well (it could have been a lot worse, so I actually feel quite lucky) I spent the remainder of the weekend modeling my Mech and got all but the bottom of his foot textured before turning in at about 2:30 in the morning last night.

Let me tell you that I am now an expert at planar and cylindrical mapping; what a pain in the ass to texture that bad ass mech, but well worth it to render it out. I can’t even imagine texturing it for full production use, the toe alone left me dazed and numb, ready to fall over in my chair. But I did listen to the whole VTM series while doing it and found that I was quicker than Zak at most of it (isn’t the pause button great :D ). So tonight I will be quickly finishing up the toe and then move on the to the rigging and UI.

On a last not e about UV texture mapping I have to say that I did it Zak’s way of planar mapping everything for about a whole 2 faces and then decided to try something a little different. I ended up just slicing section apart at the edges and moving and sewing them. I was about as quick as Zak’s method (No pause button this time) it was just more comfortable for me; I don’t know something about rescaling and rotating the faces when they were almost the right layout anyway kind of irked me. Everyone has their own ay of working right.

On a last note, you might be asking about my Abduction project. Well I decided to get away from it for a few days, thus the reason I decided to get the mech modeled and textured. And I am going to get the rigging and UI done as I am going to go back and use it on my alien. What a pain in the ass it is to animate him with all those chaotic locators floating all over the place. I also need to play around with different setups for his body as I have yet to get reliable results from the simple IK Spline setup I have going.

Anyway I will try and post a picture of my mech ASAP. And as sneek peek, I am trying to squeeze in a Model I finished in Silo shortly before starting the class. Just need to get someone to import it into Maya for me and save the scene so I can actually import it into the PLE :( But here is a pic of who will be driving the mech. And iof your wondering I am figuring out how to rig him up with a VTM from Buzz himself I received sometime ago. Another of the great benifits of being a Member Sponsor.