Bad hair day

Last week in class I mentioned how hair is often rendered from small polygon strips that always face the camera. Can we do that in LightWave? Please? No, not really. But there is a plugin called sasquatch. Et voilà: Jane Hair. LightWave does not come standard with the full hair render plug in, so theses results from "SasLite" are not something any barber could approve of.

A Box

Not the one I'm living in (just kidding), but build to be an antagonist to EyeBrain. How is that going to work? I'm not saying! At least not yet.

Has something to do with an art work I read about a while a go, need to find that reference. Here's a YouTube video of something that is just as annoying: an "Ultimate Machine" that turns itself off as soon as you turn it on (via Boing Boing, via Make)

Head

Been busy, but not with animation. Purchasing a house is a lot of work, and will keep me occupied in the weeks to come. I have been modeling a bit, as a distraction form the legal mumbo jumbo of real estate contracts. The head on the right is the result, build from the mask I created a while ago. The reference images I am using do not show the ears, I think I might have made them a wee bit too big.

Tugging

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Originally uploaded by ebmorse

Not really in the habit of re-blogging (yet 8^}) but here's a very interesting review on Generator.X of the work by my friend Brandon Morse. We went to grad school together.

Added Tentacle Thing

Heres Yet Another Turnaround, added the tail-tentacle-spinal-cord-thing to my EyeBrain model

Yes, need to work a bit on the rigging and animation of that "tail", and it would be nice to grow some scattered hairs on it

The brain has eyes!

Yes, another brain turn. Now with Eyes. Add a tail and EyeBrain can be animated.

I am doing this in Lightwave since that's what I'm teaching at Montclair State. Have been struggling a bit with the IK system, their base system has some quirks*. There is another system, called IK-Booster, which seems to be easier to manage. Downside is that it is quite different from what I know from other 3D software packages. So it is not something I am going to encourage my students to use, since that knowledge will not be very useful unless they stick to LightWave.

* It seems the IK gets evaluated before any "point at target" constraints, which makes having eyes look at a target a bit harder. Especially if you have these muscles on the side that need to move with it. Finally got rid of all the bones in the muscles and faked it...

Displaced Brain

So here's another brain spin. After discovering that displacement in Blender works just like LightWave, I turned to good ol' Mental Ray, which I used to render this version (from XSI). Real displacement at rendertime that does not need denser geometry to work. The difference is most obvious on the cerebellum (the small part at the bottom).