sunbeams

undiagnosed ADD

Gooooooooood lorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrd.

For the life of me, I can't focus on anything right now. I'm just trying to finish one rig, but I keep getting distracted by the thought of veggies going bad in the fridge. Delicious veggies, here I come to cook you!

Then I'll have to take the compost out to the garden, obviously. While I'm out there, I should probably do a little weeding so my neighbor doesn't get irritated and push weeds under the fence again. Oh, and I can do some laundry. And I should sweep the stairs. Maybe I should go on Pinterest. Then I'll take Zoe for a walk. Do yoga. Make some tea. Oh look! It's dinner time! Let's go cook some more veggies. And so it continues.

WHYYYY? 

I finally sit down to rig and now I'm looking at my notes and finding three different ways to make IK/FK switches and I'm totally paralyzed trying to figure out which one I want to use. URG. Clearly that means it's time to write a semi-sane blog post. 

Yes.

Back from Brazil!

I made it back from Brazil unscathed! Except for losing my camera in a cab and getting the most mosquito bites I've ever had in my life. Those Amazonian bugs aren't kidding around. They bite you THROUGH your clothes. And layers of DEET. The little bastards.

So thanks to my absetmindedness, I now have no pictures of the lightning storms over the Amazon, the piranhas we caught, the tree climb over the Rio Negro, the streets of Salvador, the surfers and the crabs in Itacare or the big Jesus in Rio.

But I did get a pretty sweet pair of neon Havaianas while I was there.

Unfortunately, while I was gone Zoe was staying with my parents and she had some abandonment issues, which led her to start biting her back leg. To get her to leave it alone, we've instituted the cone of shame. But to give her a break from smashing the cone into all the walls, I fashioned her a sumo wrestler diaper out of a t-shirt. So this is currently what my dog looks like:

Now that I'm back, I finally got a chance to go to the drop-in life drawing class at the Mission Cultural Center last night. It was strange, but fun. The "teacher" (maybe she was just the facilitator?) didn't even acknowledge people as they came in and the music she put on was some bluesy song about not eating yellow snow... um... sure. It's only $8 for two hours of drawing a live model. Hopefully I'll start going more often. 

what I've been up to lately

Still working on the spider rig and about to start a full biped rig, but at the moment, I'm focused on facial rigging. I got this great head model from my friend Iana and I've been modifying it to be able to create some facial expressions and controls. Little did I know that it would be such a long process... I had to retopologize a bit because the export from Mudbox was a pretty dense mesh. I think I was able to keep it pretty true to the original model. Then I had to add teeth, a tongue and eyes.

Here's what I came up with:

Weird, right? Not too bad for my first try at modeling mouth parts... at least in my opinion. Although, now it's time for the real test -- to see if they look really crazy when I try to make her smile or open her mouth. Fingers crossed.

Sketching on the plane

I was drawing some lions in my sketchbook on the flight into Frankfurt and a family with two little girls was sitting next to me. The older girl on my left didn't say a word to me, but kept looking intently at my drawings, then finally looked up at me. I smiled and she pointed at my notebook. When I handed my pen over and asked if she wanted to draw something, she carefully drew a heart on the page. From then on, we were immediate friends. She told me her name was Emma, she's 5, her parents are 41 and 44 and all about her pet chickens and her old dog. At one point her parents had to tell her to stop trying to use me as a pillow and to stop trying to speak to me in German. So adorable.

spider rig

This is my latest rigging project. It still needs some tweaking but I thought I'd put up the little animation test I did. I tried a new way of skinning this rig and a different way of painting weights by selecting vertices and flooding them to individual joints, which actually was more successful than my last project. 

Ideally, I'd also like to still tweak some of the weight painting on the verts, put in some deformations, add more flexibility in the leg joints, more controls for the body (which you can't see in this video) and texture the little critter... In progress! 

hands

So I've been drawing hands lately. Not sure why... but thought I'd share since I haven't posted in a while