100 Days - Game Over...

Well, the 100 days challenge finished back in October, and I must say it does feel like a big weight has been lifted.  The live exhibition has been - compiled a small handful (around 9) slides of work for their projector (there was a limit to the physical space - a slide show was the next best thing). It was a great event held at local art gallery Thievery studio back in October, loaded with visitors and some really amazing and varied work...

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800 bits - 27 days later...

I've made it 27 days so far - and I have to say I impress even myself in just how many small CG projects I've managed to pull out of my hat so far.  I thought its worth a short catch up on some of the things that I've done/used/etc to get me this far. Before I do, I felt its worth also mentioning a fairly amusing comment I got from someone who spotted my work online.  They thought I'd been posting up photographs - and said that I should...

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Day 1 done - 800 bits - the challenge is officially on!

Well, day one has ended.  However I broke my own number one rule - not to be too ambitious and try to keep things simple and achievable.  It started out great, but then it managed to slide down into my usual 'perfectionism' trap, followed by a mind that keeps coming up with more ideas and going off track very quickly. Thankfully I put the first image up - however with so many ideas I want to create, I let the first one become a huge...

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800 Bits...

I've signed up for the 100 Days project, a challenge that pushes people to do something creative every day for 100 days (starts 11th July 2014).  Not surprisingly, being a somewhat over-grown nerd from the 80's and with my passion for CG, I've entitled my entry 800 Bits - 100 computer generated images inspired by the 80's computer and video game era - an era and culture that was my childhood. This blog entry is really just to get the jumble...

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More CG retro goodness...

In our 3rd year 3D diploma, our students first assessment is to create a realistic rendered scene from photographic reference.  They've just been learning Mari, ZBrush, Renderman and Nuke - all tools that they utilise to produce the final image itself. As always, I tend to find that there's not a lot of things I can do when these roll around.  The 3rd year is very self-directed, and by this level they should be very competent with their...

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Front projection - Maya, Nuke and free scripts

I'm again back teaching Nuke to students.  Nuke 8 has some great features - in particular, I'm now officially a big fan of the colour wheels and scopes for working with grading...  But enough about that... Thanks to one of my students last year, I became aware of a great free Python script called Maya2Nuke.  It lets you set up your scene in Maya and then export it, along with animation information across to Nuke.  And it does...

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TECH : Broken doesn't mean it can't be pretty...

Recently a local retro collector was giving away some of his excess gear - in his collection, he had an old Commodore 64 that was dead. It had been gutted - all of its chips had been removed and someone had soldered in a few random wires - and it was missing a few keys which had broken off.  While only my brother had Commodore (I was the "Sinclair" side of the family), the old "bread box" styling of the machine is iconic.  I also felt even...

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