Maya TD tips - that awesome 'toolkit' you always wanted...

I got tired - tired of seeing icons on shelves in Maya disappear and noting that even when working, flipping to shelves to change the tool set that was being used meant the pipeline tools that I'd painstakingly developed would be hidden in a shelf that probably wouldn't be set back again when needed...

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Maya swatch headaches be-gone!

This was something that frustrated me this afternoon, so much that I thought I'd slap this very short and concise blog entry for anybody interested... I loaded up a rather complex project to test that had been set up to use VRay materials, and had been choking up and causing havoc on the render-farm here. ...

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100 days - Exhibited, and over for 2017!

Yus!  100 Days is now officially over for 2017... In one way, its a relief since I can now just continue with the norm's of life without that 'must do 100 days' thought lingering in the back of my mind.   In another way, its also sad that it was a good way to enforce drawing practice - however it has left me with a habit to just do it so its worked ou...

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More TD tips - Trello for task management

In any pipeline, communication is key - sharing and passing data back and forth, whether its from application or process to another or from a manager to an artist.  Over the years I've developed plenty of scripts to manage file naming, server logging and automating processes.  I'd also built a SQL feedback and approval system that didn't see the light of day - and after reviewing what I'd done, it was a great learning process but it was...

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100 days - 2017 edition

Foolishly, I figured I'd again take some time to do something creative for 100 days.  This time I've decided to keep it pretty much to one theme...  Caricatures and Comics... as its an area I've not spent a whole lot of time playing around in. Where 100 days comes in useful is as a way to provide plenty of compulsory "practice" time.  When you have an audience (ie. the interweb) watching you, there's kinda this whole drive to not...

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Restoring the 2600 collection - one box at a time

I've been buying carts for my 2600 to increase my library lately...  However as expected over the years, most carts end up becoming loose and without boxes, manuals, etc.  While I don't mind that, for a collector, it would be great if there was some way to get those missing boxes and at least display those loose carts in all their original off-the-shelf glory......

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Beeps and bleeps - playing Speccy music in python

While I was messing about with converting old UDG graphics to PNG files, I figured one of the other things I was curious to recreate was the beepy music from the ZX Spectrum.  BASIC code loaded with BEEP commands created that "I wonder what does that sound like?" curiosity that made me wonder just how easily I could use python to listen to the classic Sinclair hits of the 80's... To export or just listen? I tried two methods.  One was to make use of python's wave module.  This is a module that allows you to work with audio files....

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Retro bytes to PNG pixels with Python

After a long break from doing any retro game recreation in Python, I decided that since I had a few old personal game listings laying around from my ZX Speccy days that the idea of converting these to python could be fun at some later date. However one thing the ZX Spectrum had that we didn't see on the ZX81 (with its lack of any real graphics capability) was user defined graphics, or UDG's as they were termed...

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