A Week in the Life Between Gigs...

Some folks wonder what freelancers do between gigs. Well I can't speak for them but for me more than a few days without a project to work on is a painful thing - I just really enjoy making stuff. As I've been posting sporadically, since the start of the year I've been working on a python rigger so aside from doing a little animation with Morphy a few months ago, that's what I work on.

Aside from the typical things of course . Like spending time with my wife when she gets home, grocery store trips, joggin the dog, cookin dinner and workin through mountain of stuff that gets put on the backburner when those crazy gigs come - oil changes, home repairs and the like. Also reading books. I read . A lot. My brother got me caught on The Game of Thrones series so that's kept me busy about a month of reading. Should finish the last one (so far) next week or so. Highly recommended if you like the fantasy genre in the slightest - except for you, mom....maybe a little non-PG. Some characters I've loathed I've come to really like. Except Cersei, I'll be amazed if Mr. Martin can redeem her.

Back to python. Maybe other TD's work different. I've never really worked in a studio setting with other td's writting code so I don't know but I find myself circling back through things I thought I'd fixed days before.  Also, my libraries of functions have gotten huge. Can't believe how long it took to figure out the traceback feature in Maya....like this week. Some days I feel like an idiot.

Here's my running log from this week so far(which I've been using evernote for note keeping and really enjoying). For code writing I'm using jEdit and version tracking via an online code repository.

Mon

• bbRiggingLib
• locMeSurfaceCV
• setCurveByColor(obj,color)
• setCurveByIndex(obj,colorIndex)
• bbDistanceLib
• returnDirectionSortedDict(targetObject,objectList)
• returnClosestObjectsFromAim(targetObject,objectList) 
• bbSkinLib simpleControlSurfaceSmoothWeights
• added a lot more calculating, doing a pretty good job now (though a little slow cause of all of the measuring)
• bbAttributeLib
• doSetAttr(attribute,value,forceLock = False)
• set attr replacment that ignores locks, relocks if it was locked and has a forced lock override
• doConnectAttr - see above
• bbSpineRig
• pretty much workin now want a better ribbon setup but the spine works with squash and stretch
• bbDictionaryLib
• returnColorIndex(color)
• returnColorDict()
• returnRotateOrderIndex(ro)
• returnRotateOrderDict()
• returnVectorToString(vector)

Tues

• bbDistanceLib
• returnClosestUPosition - made it work with compound curve objects
• returnCenterPivotPosition - returns the coordinates of the pivot of a bounding box of an object or objects
• bbModuleLib
• returnSettingDataAsFloat - culls in the data from the settings as a float, parsing it if there are ',' to a list or to an array with the '|' divider
• bbCurveLib
• createTextCurve(text,size=1,font='Arial') all the text curve under a single transform 
• createTextCurveObject(text,size=1,name=None,font='Arial') stores info for easy updating of the text or font 
•  updateTextCurveObject(textCurveObj) recreates the text with new text and font info sizing it the same as what was there and replaceing the shapes that were there. All while leaving the original transform node unmolested 
•  bbRiggingLib 
•  centerPivotLocMeObject - like loc me object, however, for positioning purposes, uses the bounding box pivot of the object instead of it's actual pivot 
•  bbControlMaker
•  moved the limbControlMaker here from bbLimb
• bbModuleLib 
• createdcreateSizeTemplateControl - which makes a template sizing object for initital sizing data

Wed

• bbSearchLib 
•  returnObjectType - fixed logic for detecting shapes 
•  bbRiggingLib 
•  setCurveColorbyName & setCurveColor by Index - added shape detection so that if you feed it a shape instead of a curve it just does the shape, if a curve, it does all of it 
•  bbCurveLib 
•  made the update text account for parent scales to ensure it maintains it's proper size and stores the new scale, also made it retain curve color info 
• Added duplicateShape because it's apparently not easy to do so with basic maya commands added gear, eye and teeth shapes 
•  bbControlMaker
• MasterAnim almost done working 
• childControlMaker which will come in all kinds of handy

Thurs

• bbAutoNameLib 
•  more fixing of the auto name logic made storeInfo default to locking the attributes, however there is a leaveUnlocked bool option now 
• bbMathLib
• multiplyList - does what it says, ignores 0's 
• bbRiggingLib 
•  parentPivotLocMeObject - takes the pivot of the immediate parent of an object instead of it's own while still matching orientation and oration order of target object, world if no parent is present 
• returnColorsFromCurve - queries the colors of all the shapes under a curve and order them by volume encompassed
• bbCurveLib 
• made duplicateShape work with curves with children (yay compound curves!) 
• bbLimb
•  started the changeover to the new template setup 
• bbModuleLib 
• returnOrderedModules (redo) - Changed it to read the hierarchal relationship of the modules stored via message nodes to produce an order instead of the wonkier version I had before.
•  bbControlMaker 
• MasterAnim done 
• childControlMaker done 

    DESCRIPTION:
    Generates a radial array of controls around a base control where things start at noon and it divides
    the clock positions by the number of controls to make.  You can also change the mode so that you can
    tell it where to start on the clock and increment which to use.Stores the children controls to the baseControl
    as a message  node and stores the parentControl info to each generated control. It also takes into 
    account the colors of the baseControl using a secondary color if it exists.
    
    REQUIRES:
    baseControl(string) - The control we're working off of
    controlTypes(list) - the controls you want created. If the type specified isn't in the base settings,
                         the control is created as a bbTextCurveObject
        Presets - settings
                  visibility
    mode(list) - (['even']) -  mode to set our values by and other information as required
        Options -   ['even']
                    ['incremental',30] - the firest term is mode, the second
                                        is the degrees to separate the controls by. Can be negative   
    baseAim(vector) - ([0,0,1]) - which way does your master control point
    baseUp(vector) - ([0,1,0]) - which way is up for your master control
    offset(int/float) - (0) - offset the starting clock position
    scaleMultiplier(float) - (.25) - multiplier for scale (default is .25) of the absolute size of the parent control
    distanceMultiplier(float) - (1.25) - multiplier for distance to travel 
    localRotationOffset(vector) - ([0,0,0]) - offset rotation for the controls if you want it
    aimChildren(bool) - (False) - aims the controls at the root of the base if True
    zeroGroups(bool) - (False) - if True adds zero transform groups to zero out the controls
    lockHide(bool) - (True) - If true, locks hides and makes unkeyable the typical transform attributes per control
    
    RETURNS:
    controlsMade(list)





Friday

• bbControlMaker 
• Heirarchy changes to the size object 
•  bbLimb 
•  returnTemplateSizeObject - returns existing objects or makes them and returns them if they weren't found 
• doGenerateInitialPositionData
•  initially looked at using curves from the start but am leaning towards just orienting locators aimed where I need and using multiply lists below against standard ratios stored via settings.conf
•  bbRiggingLib 
•  aimSnapUpObject (added) 
•  bbDistanceLib 
•  returnClosestUPosition - made it work if you feed shapes in it 
•  bbMathLib 
• multiplyLists - multiplies lists of values - [[2,3,4],[2,3,4],[2,3,4,3]] = [8, 27, 64, 3]

Basic problem solving - Scripting for a monotonous task....

So, I've been working a gig for a couple of weeks now and ran into an issue that Maya's base tools seemed to provide no good solutions. When I find myself in such a predicament I invariably find myself going down a path. Before I begin, a caveat - I'm an intermediate scripter and I'm sure there's much more efficient coding methods. However, functioning inefficient tools are better than no tools:) Hope this is helpful to anyone who happens to peruse these ramblings....

1. Identify the need - In this case I need to ensure that a skinned mesh didn't have any vert with more than two influences. The annoying thing with maya is that even if you tell the skin to only have 2 influences and to maintain it it does the job about 98% of the time and just doesn't seem to care about that other 2%. Faced with the prospect of individually checking every vertex via the component editor for more that two skins, any other option is much more attractive.
   
   
2. See if Maya has any tools to fix the problem - Messed with skin settings and the various mirroring, hammering and skin options to see if native maya can fix it. Sometimes this work, in this case it didn't
   
   
3. To the internets! - Google and CreativeCrash check for a script or solution. If someone else has solved it and been kind enough to post the answer no reason to reinvent the wheel.
   
   
4. Write a tool - Think through the requirements and results you need from a specific function or functions and beg, borrow and steal (while providing credit) the pieces to make it work.

For this little conundrum,  I wanted Maya to tell me if I had any vertices that had an influence above x influences and get that information in a usable format. Here was the particular flow on this problem.

• For this script, I started with writing a function to return any vertices over 2 influences. 
• As a part of that, I found the functions I needed to use need to know the skin cluster name which I remembered having wrote a function for a while back so I grabbed that.
• Then, I thought it silly to cap it at 2 influences and allowed the user to specify the number of influences the user chose
• Finally, worked on the workflow so that the user didn't have to type commands into the script editor as I wanted to be able to give my client a buttonable script for their artists. In the end it made sense to me to have it both report the bad verts as well as select the first in that list to easily get to work. If I was in a fuller production environment it might make sense to make a gui or modify the function to be able to select through the bad vertices list rather than a one off end function here.

In the end, spending an hour or two making a simple tool both enables a montonous task prone to user error doable as well as provides a tool for other artists to be able to do the same which is always a boon in production.

import maya.cmds as mc
import maya.mel as mel

maxInfluences = 2

def returnExcessInfluenceVerts(mesh, maxInfluences):
    skinCluster = querySkinCluster(mesh)

    badVertices = []
    
    vertexList = (mc.ls ([mesh+'.vtx[*]'],flatten=True))
    #Find the bad verts
    for v in vertexList:
        influenceList = mc.skinPercent(skinCluster, v, query=True, transform=None) 
        if len(influenceList) > maxInfluences:
            badVertices.append(v)
    return badVertices


def querySkinCluster(obj):
    mel.eval ('$mesh = "%s";' % (obj))
    skin = mel.eval('findRelatedSkinCluster($mesh);')
    return skin
   
mesh = (mc.ls (sl=True))
if len(mesh)<1:
    print ('Please select a mesh')

else:
    badVertices = returnExcessInfluenceVerts(mesh[0],maxInfluences)
    
    if len(badVertices)>0:
        mc.select(badVertices[0], replace=True)
        print ('>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>')
        print ('%s%i%s' % ('There are ',(len(badVertices)),' verts are over the max influence:'))    
        print badVertices
    else:
        print ('No verts over max influence')

Project NoName Revealed!

Project NoName (more widely known as Nintendo's E3 2011 3DS Animation Thing) went live at the Nintendo keynote on Tuesday. This is what we've been burning the midnight oil on for a while now. It was awesome seeing it live on the internet and Bokser was in the audience so we all lived vicariously through him. 

I'd like to throw out thank you's to all the people involved but I don't know whom I can talk about yet so I'll just say, "Thank you [you know who you are], for letting us be a part of this and for all your support."

The story of the how this project came about will have to wait for another day along with a clean render to put up whenever I get the clearance but I'm gonna say what I may. The clean version doesn't have that dark panel on the bottom either (it was added after it was too late for us to do anything about it...ah well).

The Pitch:Nintendo wanted a series of segments to first show off some upcoming 3DS titles and two as a bit of a show piece utilizing projection mapping. 

The Limitations:

• Established well known IP's - As such, how characters move and what they can do is fairly well established and must be adhered to. Also, characters from one game could not be on the screen as other characters at the same time so clear delineation between segments was a must.
• Flexibility - The segments were required to be created piecemeal so that the order of them could be changed right up till the show.
• Projection mapping - For those of you not familiar with projection mapping, there are certain "rules" if you will which need to be obeyed for the effect to work to it's best. The main one is that you have to "color in the lines" which on a building is a fairly large are but when you have lots of panels like in this case, require creative thinking to work around. So for example, no character or main content piece can cross a panel's edge that is closer to the audience. You can come from behind a panel but you cannot start at a front one and jump down to a lower one over the edge. It's a bit confusing until you start playing with it - but it is what it is. The reason you don't do it is that it causes major distortion in the image. We did break the rule a little on the effects but they're so fast that you don't really see it. 
• Assets - First off, Nintendo's support was great on this front and for the most part we took skinned characters and assets and added our own rigs. We only had so much bandwidth to make stuff from scratch so we had to use that time judiciously. Because of that many of the sets and concepts evolved based on what they were able to provide.

The quick facts:

• Production time - 6 weeks
• Preproduction - 3 weeks 
• Resolution - 3335 x 1080
• Animation - 5 segments ~ 18 seconds apiece 
• Characters rigged - 12 
• Props rigged - 17 
• Sets - 5 
• Pots of coffee drank - a lot 

Visuals Team (alphabetical!) - The audio and some other work was handled by some of the great people at the company I've been working with but don't know if I can mention them yet. However, I will name our visuals team and give each and everyone of them a hardy thank you for their great work. Without further ado,  Team Project NoName :

• Matt Berenty - Modeling, Texturing 
• David Bokser - Co - director, TD Lead, Schedule Master, Rigging
• Josh Burton - Project Lead, Co - director, Art/Anim Lead, Animation (Kid Icarus), Rigging
• Chad Howitt - Compositing 
• Richard Hudson  - Animation (Mariokart) 
• Yehonatan Shai Koenig - Lighting 
• Matthew Ornstein - Animation (Luigi's Mansion 2, Mario) 
• Christine Phelan - Animation (Starfox) 

What did I do?

• Co directed and acted as project lead and liaison with ...the people I can't talk about yet
• Acted as art director/animation lead 
• Segment Concepts and boards
• Set Designs 
• All set modeling blocking (Berenty cleaned it up along with my nasty booleans) 
• Layout and Animation - Kid Icarus segment only 
• Character Rigging/TD
• Kid Icarus 
• Pit
• Eye
• Gun/sword
• Bullet particles 
• Set rigging 
• Mariokart
• Particles - smoke, sparks 
• Road modeling, texturing (cave to loop only)
• The poka dot mountains in the back
•  Set Rigging
• Starfox
• Fox
• Arwing
• Set Rigging
• Mario
• Particles - implemented the prep work Bokser did 

Relief!

We wrapped up the project that has consumed the last 2 months of my life and delivered to the client. If you happen to be at E3 next week you may catch it.  This was an amazing project and one I plan on writing at length about as soon as I can.

For now, I'm catching up on a myriad of emails and relaxing for a few days. Today I get to hang some blinds for my wife and make some bird houses with neighbors. Nice change of pace.

In the meantime, if you haven't seen this film yet you really should. I love everything about it.

Morphy May be around....

Morphy Tip of the Month: Take a look at some of the lip sync choices some of the stronger pieces have used (especially the example below). Seen a lot of animations that are pretty much just open/close and wide/narrow. Remember, wide can be smiling wide or terse/angry wide or a myriad of other options. Play with showing more teeth for some characterizations as well. Some folks talk showing more lower teeth, some upper. Play with it and keep up the great work!

Awwww...baby Morphy. nice job Shawn!

It's just a flesh wound Morcy! Great work Jed.

Fantastic mod, Tim and great animation too:)

Here's a good example of nice mouth shapes for lip sync.

And from this months 11 Second Club a few selections:

• Great mods on this one. Well done.
• And another from the top 10.
• Love the expression on the last guys...
• P.I. Guy
• Pretty nice hand work
• Drunken Duo

In other news....

The gig is going along great but working some crazy hours. Ran across a wild Maya bug though. Some scenes would only playblast at 24fps regardless of settings. Spent a good couple hours banging my head against Maya before looking up the hot fixes and finding I wasn't up to date and that was a known issue. So, if you're using Maya 2011 on a project, I'd recommend getting hotfix 3:)

Can't wait to see this project up and done. The team is doing fantastic work and I plan on bragging on each and every one of them as soon as I can talk about it.

Cheers.

Project M (for March!)...

Greetings internets! Wrapped up my gig on Friday and so glad to be done. Feelin a bit crispy. It was however a great experience working with a new concept - building projection. For those of you that haven't seen it, it entails projecting to a surface (often a building) whereby you do creative things with the surface to make it appear 3d for the audience. It was my what I expect to be the first of many with the TVP (a company based right here in Houston).

Looking forward to being able to show some of it. Here's some quick tidbits of my portion.

• 5 weeks of production
• Created template based rigging system for rigging the assets with body following, fin dynamics and auto swim functionality
• Modeled and rigged 4 creatures and rigged one more
• ~ 110 seconds of animation with aquatic creatures
• New python scripts written:
• createCurveFromJoints - self explanatory
• createJointChainsFromLoftSurface - makes joint chains from a nurbs surface
• attachJointChainToSurface - attaches joint chains to nurbs surfaces
• makeChainsDynamic - makes input joint chains dynamic, connected to the same system and names everything intelligently
• createDistanceNodeBetweenPosInfoNodes - creates measure nodes between position info nodes for measuring stuff on surfaces (like joint lengths!)
• getClosestUV - finds the closest UV on a surface to an input object
• getClosestCV - finds the closest CV on a curve to an input object
• getClosestObjToCV - find the closest object from a list to an input CV
• bbFish.finRigger, bbFish.rigSpine. bbFish.fixPoleVectorsCauseJoshIsAMoron (this was a good one:)

Spring means student films! So much talent out there...here's some great ones.

• Rain Town...wow...
  
  
• Thursday
  
  
• From Sheridan
  
  
• And a sweet lookin maya plugin to top it off...
  
  

Moonbot Film Teaser!

This is the film I had the pleasure of working on back in August. Can't wait to see the final film. Check out the new project website here :)

Best of luck on the festival circuit, guys!

From "Sunny" San Diego...

Actually it's pretty drizzly which my friends here tell me is an anomaly. Go figure. Got checked in at the gig on Friday and am gonna hopefully start pulling my weight come Monday. Great bunch of guys ("guys" includes the girls as well) here and looking forward to the gig.

Had a few emails on an issue with the Morphy scripts and wanted to provide some clarity there. In order to use the add mesh scripts you need to run the "tinkerers" qss script from the qss folder. I covered it in the vid but apparently wasn't as clear as I could have been. Again, I removed the qss's from the rig to keep the outliner clean. However, I got a tip from a guy on how I might be able to group qss's and so I'll give that a shot when I get back to the batcave. Keep your notes comin!

What else....

• Hodaddy's burger joint in San Diego is awesome. I recommend the single bacon cheese burger and chocolate shake. If you go for lunch you'll wanna skip dinner. Possibly breakfast.
• "Red" was a fun guy flick though I'd recommend a rental
• Don't walk on friends patio barefoot unless you check for charcoal dust first otherwise you'll spend the next 30 minutes with some paper towels and a bottle of resolve. :)
• Google maps isn't always right. My should have been 2 mile walk turned into 10. Ah well, needed the exercise.

That is all. Burton out.

Garden City Update....

Pretty close to final on my last shot of Garden City. It makes a lot more sense with the music but you're just gonna have to wait to see that in the final film. Also, there're 10f heads and tails on the shot.

Gonna start getting together a new reel here with a bunch of new work to send out and there are a few projects on the verge of happening that should keep me busy for a few months.

Anyone else in Texas see the absolutely amazing lighting storm last night? It was like a strobe-a-thon for an hour lighting up the landscape clear as day at 15fps or so (that's flashes per second). Wish I had a camera capable of taking that in.

Been trying to decide what path to take for the next professional development project

• Short film I've been ruminating on for a while
• Getting into digital sculpting in Zbrush
• Delve more into the rigging side of things
• Do another free rig (the human I started last year) since people seem to like Squirrely so much

...for now need to pick up some meat for dinner tonight:)

Hope everyone had a nice Easter...

First things first, I have the internets at maximum warp again! Well, not maximum, but quite sufficient.

The commercial I worked on last month at Psyop finally aired and someone who worked on it posted it so I reckon it's okay to link it.

My main shots were -

• s17 - fore and mid ground Octo guys, their Squid bubbles, and the arms.
• s23 - quick shot of the fox at the Octobot controls
• s24 - foreground fox, octobot and bubble sac, and the near-midground action of the bubble sac being hit by the turtles and eaten by the sub

I'll post the playblasts when I get the project page up as there's a bit more there. I had a blast on the project and really enjoyed the team and look forward to working with them again in the future.

Had some lemons of life lately which I'm workin on making into something sweeter...maybe lemonheads...I like those. The most recent of which was discovering Poison Oak in some other vines I was clearing off of some trees. Never had it before. Don't want it again. Don't want you to have it either. Avoid this at all cost....

However, I do have a sympathetic, supportive and beautiful wife who makes the bad days not so bad.

That and the prospect of a gator hunt on a neighbor's pond sounds like a life experience that suburbia just can't offer that the rural one can:)

Also, Bokser wants to finish Garden City this decade so I best get back to that...

Live from LA...

Things have been either crazy busy or crazy slow the last few months. Had a good holiday with the family and January 1st found my wife dropping me off at the airport for a month in Cali for some work at Psyop/Mass Market. A good friend of mine is letting me crash on his couch so I can repeat the get up, jog, work, sleep routine for a couple fortnight (such a cool term...shame it's not used more). Working on some very cool projects and excited to get a pinky toe in the door of the commercial houses. It's been a lot of fun wearing so many hats (animating, rigging, minor modeling), and I'm learning a lot of new tools in maya I'd never messed with before. The internets have unleashed all kinds of cool and odd in the weeks since my last but I'll do my best to gather some morsels here. So, tuck your napkin in your shirt and bon appetite.

• Margarita - A beautiful whimsical film from Spain (I think).
• Alma - This one has been making the rounds but in case you missed it I'll drop it here. Great set designs - especially liked the subtle gaping mouth of a shop front.
• Fun little viking greeting card animation.
• And another "Voila" from Spain

And for some quickies:

• Cool iphone app sketch books from some amazing artists
• Fantastic blog on the principles of drawing with a bent toward animation/boarding

Lobster gig is a wrap...

So here's the final Lobster work (at least for my reel stuff). As I said, the client ended up doing the animation in house so I just used the audio and shot framing (with permission) for my reel. I threw a temp texture on him and set up the shaders and lighting as well. Wasn't able to get the background plates so I made some temp ones that felt similar to the vids. You can find more info about the project on this page. Some of the shots make more sense with the vid (i.e. the empty plate is actually a live action plate of food...and the last shot has text up on the hold at the end). All told, it was a very enjoyable and rewarding project and I'm looking forward to the next! Things are going along fine here in Houston, gonna update the reel this week with Lobster here as well as a lot more polished Garden City stuff. Back to reel editing...

A Lobster, a lighthouse, and...an animated Jesus

• Lobster - I made this character last summer for a client who was doing a commercial. They liked Squirrely and wanted a "lobster-Squirrely" character - hence" Lobstery" (Yes I should probably come up with a more imaginative naming convention). The client ended up doing the animation in house for various reasons but were cool with my taking a stab at it for the old reel. The shots make more sense with the live-action plates:)
• Great stuff to watch... First up, fantastic mood in this piece. I'm a big "playing-with-light" fan so this is just a beautiful piece. Care to guess which amazing French school it came from?...guess I gave it away there Next up is a pixelated take on animation. Love some of the poses and the look is something I've not seen since the old King's Quest days and it didn't move like this:) Another fun one from across the pond... If you're offended by non-kosher* use of the image of Jesus, avert your eyes. Not sure I understand the film but whatcha gonna do? Enjoy the visuals, that's what! There's some sweet animation in this and great timing. * "non-kosher" - Yes, I'm aware that using the term with Jesus might appear to be ironical. However, He being a Jew, God incarnate and originator of a whole new faith I'd hope would both understand the complication created and appreciate the attempt at humor.

Post Something!

Alright, alright... This is a half day's work on roughing in another shot for Garden City in 2d. I've got about 4 shots in semi finish status - waiting on crits and final props. Things are coming along well. Life has been a bit busy lately. A couple of weeks ago, I was doing some freelance work for a studio in LA with Bokser which was a lot of fun. The render looks great, not sure when I'll be able to show it though. My wife and I finally closed on a little piece of land to put some horses on and I've been talking to Cory and we're finally gonna collaborate on a little bit of animation - the 2d kind and I couldn't be more excited to have a part in breathing some life into some of his characters. That's it for now. I'll try to post regular updates on this shot as it's pretty straight forward.

Tiko Project is on sale for preorder!

Holy moly and I'm behind on writing stuff on here. Lots been going on, thus I've not had time to write about it:) I'll try and catch up when I get some time. However, the important thing here is that the Tiko project that I worked on for FAR TOO LONG is about ready to ship and is on presale. My college debt fund gets a little help everytime Tiko gets invited to a new home and even more so with those "custom invites" (hint...hint). One of my other animator friends Keith Osborn helped out on the animation portion for Tiko and my buddy from college and fellow facial animator at work Scott Englert did a piece that'll be on the DVD called "Bassimator." It was a lot of fun to make but I'm very glad it's done. Check it out and see if you might like a copy.... ...Tiko will thank you (quite literally if you happen you get a custom message version and have him thank you on it...;)

Here's the LINK

Out.

Fantastico!

Holy cheerios, Batman! I'm DONE with my freelance gig. I'm burning the DVD's for the client now. Whoo hoo! It'll be a bit till I can update my site cause well, that hard drive crash I had a few weeks back took out all of my web source work. So, now that this is done, I have to get another hard drive to start unpacking my backups onto to see if what I've lost forever, and what I've got sitting in an archive somewhere. Good times. As soon as the client get's the DVD ready for sale, I'll post a link cause I know you'll wanna help Tiko pay for his pear eating addiction;)

Lots O' Nothin!

• Never ending rendering - So my never ending project is about at an end. I really can't thank the client enough for being patient. Let's just say that rendering at HD res adds just a "wee" bit of render time AND Lightwave doesn't render the hypervoxels so fast at that res. I'm pretty tired of not having my main computer. That and losing a hard drive a few weeks back makes me ready to give my computer a little break. About 30 frames to go!
• Running after being sick - I was sick for about 3 weeks. Not too bad of sickness - tired all the time, headaches, etc. So for about that much time I didn't really jog. So last week, I tried to start up again. Wow did I lose a lot of my runnin' mojo. Before I got sick, I was running 6 miles most days and close to 10 every other weekend. This week, I started at completing 2 of my 4 mile circuit and after a week of it, I'm only barely back at 4. The funny thing is I lost nothing on the lifting front....strange.
• Pirates of the Caribbean - Saw this last weekend with some friends. To get ready for it, I watched the first one the night before. The movie was a fantastic popcorn flick...just a whole lot of fun. It was a little long, but not too bad. On the special effects front I just have to say, "Wow!" Davy Jones is the most amazing cg character I have yet seen on the screen. The greatness of Golum has been eclipsed and my mind is still reeling at the how's of it. It was a special effects smorgasborg and I can't wait to pick up the DVD to see the behind the scenes.

Up for air...

Here's a little test render for the final lighting of one of the shots from my freelance gig. It's almost done! Another week and animation will be done! Couple of things:

• Keith Lango is moving to Brazil! He's gonna set up shop so he can animate and help people too. I think that's just pretty awesome.
• God has been kind enough to give me some small windows of rainless time to run outside as He knows my disdain for treadmills....thanks, God:)
• I'm heading to Oklahoma City next week to see my mom and some of my fam AND my aspiring comedian cousin is moving to Chicago in two weeks so it'll be great having some family local as well. He's a very talented guy and I'm sure he'll do great.
• Stranglehold (my main project at work now) showed very well at E3 and is looking pretty amazing. I think it's gonna be a pretty sweet game when it's done.

That's all she wrote...or he wrote...I wrote? Back to work, I might not surface again till animation is done on my gig, so...lata!

Taxes and an update...

Song of the Day: "Shiloh" - Andrew Peterson - Carried Along Album Good golly I dig Andrew Peterson's music. You'd think I'd be sick of it by now having listened to Carried Along most days in the car for the last 2 months. You'd might think that, but you'd be wrong.

It's that fun time of the year. Ah yes, taxes. I really don't have a problem with taxes, but they could make things a little easier to understand. It's one of the only times in life that you can have absolutely every good intention of being honest and doing the right thing and chances are, you're breaking some minutiae of law. A couple years back, I called the IRS cause I had a question. The guy answered it, then added the addendum that the IRS would not be held accountable for his answer and that if he told me the wrong thing to do, it was still my fault.

Fun times...

I've got a little render test from my current gig that doesn't really give anything away but is close to the final look. The lighting needs some tweaks and Tiko's gonna be sped up a few frames, but it's a good first step.

Here ya go.

Suffice it to say, more happens after that. But for that, you'll have to order a DVD from Bitstream when it's done. Not only will you get to see it, but you'll be contributing directly to the "Josh-Burton-Gets-Out-of-College-Debt-Fund" as anything I get is going there. It's a good cause, trust me. That and Tiko needs to eat...;)

Time to throw Toy Story 2 on and get to animatin'!

I'm a liar...and other stuff

A few weeks ago I wrote that there was gonna be an article in 3d World on The Potter. January's issue has come and gone and I actually was mailed a copy of February's issue which I thought would contain it. Alas it did not. I say I'm a liar because I made a statement based on bad "intelligence" that I believed to be true that turned out to be wrong. The story may turn up in time but for now but, according to the politics of the day, I am a liar. So for making statements I believed to be true, I must and shall be villified. Any takers? Enough satire. Edit 02/06 - A buddy emailed me this morning and informed me that the the article is in the March issue...sweet vindication:) Things are going along fine. I've been coming home and putting in 4-6 hours a night into this freelance gig I've been truckin on. I'm getting close to being done with blocking for the whole thing so I expect to really start moving this weekend. I took a break last night and did a little test render for the client of the set and modeled some flourishes as well and did another pass of polish on surfacing. Getting close on a final set. I received copies of the new Houdini book that used a Potter image over the weekend. The publisher was kind enough to send copies for the whole team so I gotta make a run to UPS. Some buddies got me to try site called linkedin.com last week. It seems pretty sweet for maintaining connections and broadening your industry connections. Give it a whirl.