Grow Up and Fall

In the process of trying to decide on the next big thing, I tinkered with Maya (and Python) and created this test. I woke up early the other day and came up with yet another project. May be pursuing that one... this could be a development test for it.

Node loss

I spent a few hours to assess where I am in porting the Eye Brain character from Lightwave to Maya. The resulting image is a tad dark, but I do like the painterly quality of it.

Note to self: deleting the materialInfo nodes in Maya is not very clever as the objects will loose all hardware shading. So that is what they are for! Ran createNode many, many times...

So where am I on Eye Brain? Many models done but no antagonist yet. Need to scan my hand for that.

The next big thing

What to do, what to do? Next to dealing with some uncertainty in my professional life, I need to decide what creative project to focus on next. I have at least three in the pipeline. Here is a look development test I created for ">Hello World":

Usually NPR cross hatching relies on properly laid out UVs on all objects. For "Seeing Red" I generated the UVs for the ground plane procedurally based on the world space coordinates and normal direction, but that is not an option for most objects. In this test I do not use UV maps at all but in stead project hand drawn cross hatching patterns onto the scene from the camera. Since the camera is moving, there are two projection position (the start and the end) and I had to add one extra to fill in a gap as some of the wall was obscured from both positions but visible inbetween.

But I am not sure I like this look for this project. I may use the technique (but not the look) on an older stalled project in stead: Eye Brain. That is the second project in waiting. A new project is brewing, involving integrating a CG version of this hooded character and some yet to shoot HD video. Or should I do something abstract again? Or maybe think up a project that does not take months to create? Make up my mind I must!

Mr. Beam

While researching something completely different I came across this nice projection mapping video. The artwork is created by fellow Dutchman, the Mr. Beam collective.

Licht Festival Gent 2011 from Mr.Beam on Vimeo.

Skunked Again

To our dismay we found another skunk in our trap Wednesday morning. Since we had to go to work, this one had to wait until the next evening to be set free. I snapped this picture of it, seems to be yet another individual, a small one:

I was stupid enough to not want to swap cars and took it away in our Prius. So now it smells terrible…

Update: this afternoon a skunk who was eerily similar to one I released last week on the other side of a major highway, was strolling leisurely through our neighbors garden!