waaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

Last night after putting in 12 hours or so at prologue my caffine-addled mind refused to rest. At 2 am i got up and worked on a project I'm doing for Digizyme. it started to really kick and it was looking hot. At 5 am I was satisfied and finally decided to go to bed. Woke up at 7:30, in a cheerful mood, ate some breakfast, watched part of a rerun of the Colbert report, turned on my machine to put in a few more minutes of work on the scene before going to work. File does not exist.

My external drive has gone into a coma. A very serious one. Even R-studio can't open the drive. All of my older prjects are on this drive. most of the current crucial files are saved just becasue they live on multiple machines. but my late night work is gone. many of my characters are gone. my generic Zbrush head and all of its derivatives are gone(see images of heads from 2 posts ago). Pretty much bummed me out. I may be able to try and have the files recovered. I believe they exist, but it may be expensive to get them back. I don't think its a mechanical failure. something got corrupted. sigh.

In other news, I'm learning Python. My Houdini class is chugging along but i haven't had much time to work on the homework. I just got mel studio pro and csmartblend for Maya. i haven't had time to play with them yet.

oh well.......................

New Tutorial

I've added a new tutorial to my site. This one demonstrates a workflow I've developed that allows you to paint particles on a surface and then, using a bunch of simple expressions, have the particles grow along the surface depending on how they have been painted. I alos go through how to write a MEL script to automate the process. Check it out in the tutorials section.

I haven't had much time to draw or create original stuff lately since I have been working so much. But I am able to type out some tutorials while rendering so hopefully I'll have a few more on the site over the next few weeks. I have another short one typed up but I have to put the screen shots together.

Meanwhile I was able to get the DNA pdb into Houdini. All the work went into formatting the PDB data correctly. Once that was done, the rest was a blast. I have controls that allow the different atoms (oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus) to be scaled independently and I have a switch that changes from spheres to metaballs. Pretty cool.