Monday, November 30, 2009

Tar Sand Animations


These animated segments for the upcoming documentary H2Oil do a pretty good job explaining why the whole concept of extracting oil from the tar sands in Canada is utterly stupid.


Via Drawn!

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Can Maya come out to play?

At Montclair State we switched to Maya this semester (from Lightwave) and that meant that I had to update all my lectures and instruction. That did take up most of the time I spent at the computer. But all work and no play make not only Jack a dull boy, so after Thanksgiving, after the Family left, I found an hour or two to play and stumbled across the fact that every single point on a Mesh can be animated individually:



I rendered it using Mental Ray with a shader that is using the distance to the center of the sphere to change appearance a bit. No bones, blend shapes or other deformers, just point animation. Though it may be considered pointless. But that is the point of play, right?