Cat in my lap....

So I've got CC sitting in my lap purring away as I type this. She's curled up in a ball against my chest napping. I've been working on work stuff this evening and trying to help Pooks with her stuff. Finishing off the long Thanksgiving weekend with work... mainly because I've put it off for too long.

I did another render, but it's kind of darker than my usual fair. I like it though. It's here.

I've switched over to my PC from using my mac. Pooks needed the laptop for her work and so she's got it. I went ahead and upgraded my PC though, 2GB RAM and Nvidia 7600GT video card. The graphics are GREAT now! Just awesome, I can't say how good things look now. It's not the latest and greatest video card, but it makes this machine scream!

So I'll disturb CC a little to go to bed now. Thanksgiving was a hoot, the cats provided most of the entertainment. We're still eating turkey. I've enjoyed my time off.

Another Day...

Well more time spent rendering. It's amazing how much work it is to pose an image on a computer fix up their clothes, hair, legs, arms, joints, fingers, head, neck and eyes before you get something presentable. It takes more work than I thought. I also want each figure somewhat unique and different, so taking standard character maps and modifying them, or doing post processing is also taking longer than I thought.

Last night I made a dud. It may go into the calendar, but if not that's ok... What calendar you may ask? I had the keen idea of trying my hand at doing a pin-up girl calendar. I had started one of family photos but I never finished it (80% done, but several of the images got corrupted and so I'll have to redo them.) I wanted to do this as a challenge for myself to make something and seems like a pin-up calendar would be kinda cool. If this comes out ok, I may do a sci-fi/fantasy one next.






If you get a chance check out the blog of CellBlock36. This post especially is quite good.

350

A scary number on the scale. So Helen and I started walking last night. Getting into the habit and keeping it will be hard, but we can do it.

We're back to church hunting again. I like the one close by, but it's a little too overly-friendly for my Episcopalian background. Episcopalians have a habit of being stand-offish and somewhat stuck-up, so it's hard to come into a very touchy-feely church for me. I'm not sure why Pooks doesn't like it. Either way we are off into church shopping land again. I'm ready to settle into someplace though.

I have been commissioned for some more 3D renders! That is very cool news and of course something I enjoy anyway. It's hard to go back to GIS programming instead of just working on the renderings. It's also hard to resist the urge to buy up every 3D model I can. Unfortunately my bank account is holding me back too.

Waiting...

The server my home area is on (where I do my computer work) is getting rebooted and some new hardware put in so I'm waiting...

That was so last week, so I'm actually finishing this blog post today...

So Pooks' is getting job options from clients, I'm still working on my stuff, and I'm back to playing WoW like a mad man. Part of that is that I've made two characters and I had been using them both for seperate professions ( mining& blacksmithing for one and enchanting and tailoring for the other...) hmmm might need another blog for me to just talk about WoW lol.

Anyway I made some WoW changes that are really taking up time.

I have been spending time building scenes for my 3D renders. That takes time in setting things up. The are like lego's that never quite snap together just right. It makes it time consuming but hopefully having it done will mean I don't have to do it again. It's also failry easy to work with scenes instead of figures b/c scenes have much lower polygon counts and so are easier for the computer to handle and so easier for me to put together quickly.

I've been thinking about taking up guitar again, but doing that will mean I have less time for my other activities. Pooks and I joke that I get a new "hobby" every week and stick with it for a few days before jumping to the next one. Even today I caught myself thinking that I could make an illustrated Book of Hours, before saying "No" to myself. It's annoying sometimes... It makes me feel un-focused.

With the renderings I have a slightly different problem in that I'm not quite sure what to say. So It's hard to make a comic book when I have no story. I can think of situations just fine, but an overall combining "story-arc" has been much harder to think of. I'm also just not sure of how far to go with it or what I want to happen to the characters.

... to jump back a little to being un-focused (except seemingly about WoW) I think part of it is that I need a little more 'life' in my life. I just do work and home. I tutor physics on the side, but I am seeing that I need a little more. It used to be church for me, but since I haven't been recently, that's left a hole I need to fill in a more positive way. Probably with a new hobby ;-)

Good stuff....

A new render over on my comic site...



Just something nice.

Helen and I got a nice surprise this morning.

Still have one car broken. :-(

I'm tutoring physics to a friend of mine here at work. It's easy but kinda boring.

No comments?

testing to see where the comments went???

Hmmm.... This just shows that today is Monday. ::sigh::

Yeah so on the last post for some reason the link to post comments has dissappeared and I don't know why. Oh well.


You can comment on this one though!

Also, the cat is named "Rexx". We got him from my sister Jennifer, who had given him to an elderly lady, but she didn't want him for some reason. He's just too cute and looks like he will get pretty big. He is super fluffy and soft.

Still working on part two of my comic, I'm working on some story details and trying to keep things rolling while still introducing more people. I've expanded that part of the site though to include some of my random renders. That way I can keep it categorized without having to worry about managing it via the gallery.

I have TWO(2) customers!!!

Woot Woot!

So two people have asked me to do some renderings for them based on what they've seen me do so far. I'm flattered. It's pretty cool to know that something I'm doing for fun some people really like. One is a logo design involving a gecko, another is a dinosaur novel that Dad wrote. First one is easy, the second one I don't know about yet. I have some ideas, but I'm not quite sure how to do them yet.

So Dad blog tagged me to write eight random facts about myself...

1) I've been married twice... surprisingly I don't have much to say about that. I really love my wife and enjoy her company and just being with her.

2) If I am getting bored by a book, I will skip to the end to find out how it turns out and ignore the things in the middle. I almost did that with the whinny Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix. He like whined through the whole book, JKR got the teen angst right, but it was a pain to read.

3) I like comic books, X-Men, Spiderman, Cerebus, Conan, others. I still have a few of my "Savage Sword of Conan" magazine like comics...

4) I've always liked fantasy comics & stories. "Conan the Valorous" is one i go back to often. Good Mind candy.

5) I enjoy working with computers. It's the fun kind of playing with toys kid-like kind of joy. They are like lego blocks in that way.

6) I tend to moan in my sleep. Just a long low "unhhhhhhhhhhhhh". Helen doesn't mind it but it wakes me up sometimes.

7) As I'm doing this I'm watching the web logs for my web server hosting serveral sites go by. It is interesting to see people searching for things, robots indexing pages, spammers trying to auto-register, people referencing images from myspace. I'm also keeping an eye on the 1,000,397 records of web hits that dad has gotten since December. Actually there's more, but I seem to have lost a file somewhere. I'm trying a finer-grained webalizer configuration file so hopefully this will give us a better idea of how people are looking at his site.

8) Umm.... I'm tired? Well I was up until 1:30 last night playing with some new toys ...


This is a very large image (3.5MB) of some of the new clothes and things I got for my Aiko models. I also have some other things, but this one scene took forever to setup. The new models all have very high rez textures so it slooooows my computer down when working with them.

9) We got a new cat today. His name is "Rexx"

Crawling out of a hole....

I'm finished... at least with part one and the setup...

Read and be amazed:



I can actually get back to actually doing work at my job, working on my other web sites, and getting around to Dad's meme (don't worry I'm working on it! :-) )

I enjoyed the working of setting this up and getting everything together. Pooks was a great help in reading and making suggestions. I did a stick figure story board to get an idea of where and what I wanted people to say. Each picture takes about 20 minutes to render after spending 20 minutes in preparing the scene. Things should go faster now that I've gotten most of the basics mastered and have developed a work flow. Yes, I've got more of a story to tell, and I don't know where I plan to go with it yet...

Nice...

I like it when everything comes together...




Sometimes a plan comes together very nicely.

More Renders... and Where's Pooks?

Hmmm.... I've been having fun doing more rendering...



a lot of fun...



some are even better than others...



Which leaded to a nice animation (click image to download/play)...



Combine it all together for a comic book...




I think the animation is nice. Let it loop and it's kinda like a nicely dressed lava lamp.

I was showing these off to a friend of mine and he noticed the nice bust and well-formed female figures and appreciated the detail I put into them. He then asked me, "So Where's Pooks when you're setting up these pictures and animations of skimpily dressed, big-busted, well-formed women?"....

"In the other room, but I do show them to her!"

"Sure, right."

Don't worry I'm keeping morally sound while setting these up. Mostly keeping away from the 3D fetish-wear clothing sites. Wow.

Everything's Gotta Eat...

More playing with renders, I think this one came out really good. It's dynamic and clear. I'm torn between trying to animate some of these and just keeping with static shots of things. I'm still trying to work on back grounds to. So far that's been a little bit of an issue. I was thinking of going comic book style with the images, but I'm not sure of what story to tell. I'm thinking Sci-Fi, especially since that is the only scenery file i have. :-) Most definately though I am sticking with the anime style. I like it a lot and it's something I enjoy personally.

Still around and working on 3D stuff

Life is interesting at times... Lots of weird dreams lately. I've had to take down my dream site to clean out some of the spam being generated. It seems spammers were creating fake users with real email addresses and then sending private messages between the users to get spam sent out to the real email addresses. So I turned off private messages and am going through and blocking IP's by the hundreds. lol an admin's work is never ever done.

Patti is still staying with us. Pooks and I had a long talk about it last night and came to a couple of conclusions about things. Nothing serious but a clearer understanding of how things work.

I've been having fun with my animation stuff. It's been cool setting up and working with both the terrain modeling and figure setups. I don't have any new pictures posted yet b/c I have been spending time learning the terrain modeling software. Bryce is the name of the software that I'm using for terrain modeling. It is really cool although the learning curve is a little steep. The basic tutorials need some work. I also realize though that I need to get used to the interface more, most of the problems are that I need to learn where the tools are that I would use to do things in the program. It makes it interesting to try something and have it do something unexpected.

So learning and working have made for an interesting start of the week and I haven't even mentioned the door that I put in on Saturday!

(Side note: Living with 3 women is interesting. The giant ass lump of hair and goo that I pulled out of the shower drain this morning is proof of that. I'll spare you the picture.)

Getting into 3D...

So I've been working on some 3D rendering stuff recently. What is rendering you say? Well it's computer software to take a scene of several virtual objects and draw what they would look like under various lighting sources and at different camera angles. It's pretty cool and something I've been interested in for a while. So I am getting a copy of the software Bryce, which does 3D terrain modeling. (That's rendering landscapes, not just a bunch of objects) . Hopefully it will come in soon.

You can see some of my preliminary work at my photo site...