Well, quarter’s finally over.  Haven’t posted on here in a while.  Didn’t get quite as much done as I had planned.  So bad news first, good news later.  Bad news, my hard drive’s needle stopped at approximately 3:30PM Thursday Nov. 20th.  Ran many diagnostics and rescue apps on it, to no avail.  However I did scrounge up a few remaining bits of data from various backup sources.

I completely lost all the new turtle stuff though =\… I’m not going to remodel that.  I would much rather like to do something new.  But first, I have to get my reel/dvd stuff back together (I have copyable vesions of everything, but nothing is editable after the harddrive loss).

Once I have that under control again, I’m going to start something fresh… Now for the good news (kinda), I was able to more or less salvage my “traditional reel” from programs I left running, it’s all glued back together and available for viewing.  Here and on my portfolio page.  More to come soon!

Finally, got back in zBrush!  Probably won’t get too much more detailed considering the shot.

Welp, finally got back to doing things to my turtle, haven’t really touched it too in depth in a while. Finished modeling some quick vertebrae for the neck and tail, little more cleanup, combined the meshes (from the mirror working state), UVed everything and put them in a nice little layout, and finally got some joints up in him. I’ve just been playing around with some rigging stuff, however I haven’t gotten very far, I’m relatively anxious to zBrush so I’ll probably start that today!

Dunno if anyone even cares to see these, but I’m usually curious.

     A few weeks ago I was playing around with 9.5’s new smoke tools and solvers. Originally I was doing it to create some movement specific reference for Fay’s bat farts. Couldn’t stop playing for a while after I started though. Ron helped me figure out a bunch of stuff. Might use the setup for something more interesting eventually.

     It’s pretty simple, it’s just baking out the velocity data from a DOPs smoke sim to a sequence of .bgeo’s which then gets sampled into a vopsop inside of a particle network. Then the geometry gets generated based off of the particle trails. I’ve included an older version of the file (as my more recent ones got lost when my hard-drive broke). All you should have to do is run the ROP for the velocity attribute in smoke_object.

Been keeping relatively busy, especially with trying to get this website up (little rusty at web stuff).  Wanted to go ahead and put up some fresh content.  Nothing amazing by any means, and to be quite frank I’m farely behind schedule.  Been pretty busy at my job so I haven’t had a whole lot of time to devote to my personal projects.

So I guess my primary project right now is finishing my turtle shell shot from the summer (considering I only had 5 days to do the current version).  With some wonderful suggestions from Fay, I decided give it some life with a skeleton inside.  I’m almost done modeling/uving, and will hopefully be in zbrush soon.  Hopefully Cheryl will help to rig it, and Fay to animate. Here’s where I’m at so far.

And some comparison shots…