Ask me why I'm smiling...

ZBrush 3 is in the House! Got it installed on my 64 bit machine, working great so far. Of course I have so many things going on right now I won't be able to play with it for a while.

My main concern is that creating nifty heads and humanoids is now a lost art. the default head tools + body tools that come with Zbrush are so good, and easy to work with, that the skill of head modelling from scratch is almost worthless. Oh well, all those damn head on zbrush central were getting boring anyways...;)

Variations on a theme

More variations on this "egg" idea. Pretty gross...






Here'a the original image:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bloopatone/502977727/


At Yu+Co this week. ESPN owns this town!

more organic mayhem

This is fun:




This one is a combination of two images:




Here are the originals:

www.flickr.com/photos/bloopatone/502931872/


www.flickr.com/photos/bloopatone/486855855/


Here is a phony em scanning version




I love Painter!

WTF?

Just got back from watching Spiderman 3 at the Arclight. What was with the bad reviews? That movie was the best of the three bar far. I really did not like 1 + 2 very much but 3 was great. Critics are just knuckleheads sometimes.

another one...

Here's another oragnic study. Painter, Pshop, and even a little Zbrush...




Here's the original photo. The screw in the tree was turned into the ball in my version

www.flickr.com/photos/bloopatone/502927618/

organic study

In my efforts to create more interesting organic models I spent some time messing in Painter 9 with one of my many bark textures. Here's what I came up with:




Here's the original image.

I think doing more of these studies will help my 3d scenes. I have a tendency to make everything in one piece in Zbrush. Have to start breaking it up into pieces.

Modo Fun

Here are some test renders from Modo. Occlusion passes were comped on top of the color passes in Photoshop and a little level adjusting and fake DOF were added in Pshop as well, but overall its a cool result. Just some experiments with random organic forms created in Zbrush and Modo.

This one is straight out of Modo:




These had a little tweaking added in Post:

what-not

While I anxiously await my turn to download Z-brush3 I thought I'd post some images of some 3d doodles and experiments. The first is an android head I created for my friend Anthony Honn's personal animation project:














Here is some kind of weird organic modelling experiment:










I'll have more to post in a little while...

Sculpt-a-licious

Yes!! Its finally out!! John Brown's latest sculpture DVD!! It features a cameo from your's truly and his sculpture is based on my design!! Its so awesome, even if you're not a sculptor, the amount of info about human anatomy and design is worth the price. Check it out:

www.thegnomonworkshop.com/dvds/scu06.html

Look at the sky turned a hell-fire red lord!

Oh, I do not quote Hendrix lightly...here's the view of the Griffith Park/Los Feliz fires from our balcony last night. We could see flames leaping up from behind the hills. Clearly god is angry at the Hollywood liberals but he doesn't have a good map of LA.




Or maybe he just hates the Gilmore Girls...last night's episode was interrupted by all-night blathering about the fires.

close!

I'm very close to having my pdb2geo.py python program working. My last entry was incorrect, the newline + return special characters were not the culprit. I did get the program to create a .geo file that Houdini can read now I have some logic issues to work out so that it behaves the same way on every pdb file.

\rg!

I'm so close to having my python script working. The last problem seems to be something in the way it interprets special charcaters. I'm writing lines of text and ending each line with "\n" or "\r" to start a newline for the next set of 3d coordinates. when I open this in a text file in Windows it does not recognize the newline character and so its formatted incorrectly. This means I get an error when I try and open the file as a .geo file in Houdini. Everything else is working.

\rg!

I read the news today oh boy...

I'm part of a story on animators who turn their back on the movie industry today in the LA Times ;).

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-animation7may07,1,279505.story?page=1&ctrack=1&cset=true

Neither of my animations they linked to have anything to do with HIV, but they are pretty cool.

Texture time

After a week of snapping photos with my new camera of weird textures I quickly figured out I would run out of space on my serever to post them all. So I opened an account on flickr.com. You can download any of the photos and use them for anything as long as you don't resell. I'm hoping over time I'll get better quality out of the images, the do suffer from some noise artifacts when viewed at full res. I used some of them as the basis of alphas in zbrush and got some cool results. Hope to do more soon! The free textures link on the side will take you t my flickr page. Other people have posted cool textures too!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bloopatone/

Bloopatone-a-mania

Here's a reminder as to why this site is named "Bloopatone"




And now...Free textures!!

If anyone likes these, let me know and I'll post more depending on how much space I have on the serever. just let me know.

Lumix

Got my Lumix FX07 yesterday...




also got a new hat.