Just goofing off with two very similar non-biased renderers…

The new version of Blender came out last week and I used the previous weekend to test out the new BMesh modeling tools.  It’s pretty sweet.

Here’s a powerful video of all that’s wrong with America today, and our fate if we continue on the present course.  I love it, it’s probably the best Youtube video I’ve seen in years.

I always wanted to finish my Jeep model, but after looking at it recently I’ve decided to start over.  Here’s what I have so far. Its intended to be a normal mapped game model, so I’m working on the high resolution version of it first.  I don’t intend for it to be super accurate, but I will make sure the proportions are right.

I’ve just solved my smoothgroups problem when it comes to using Silo exports in Max. Before it wouldn’t let me edit the normals even with modifiers without extracting each object by element from within itself. (basically taking the whole object out and leaving the name) It is really simple – the obj importer has a ‘faceted’ option, which completely ignores the normals exported by Silo, which is fine since Silo can’t edit vertex normals or smoothgroups anyway.
While I thought i was giving up the software for good (lack of updates + this problem), a new project makes me want to use it again. Max’s tools are fine but tedious, and I don’t have enough money for Modo. So long as it works I guess I’ll be using it.

Breakspace is to be a simple Break-Out clone for the Android. It’ll have a gracefully moving star-scape in the background, plenty of levels for prolonged game play, and a varied selection of power-ups.

Just a quick 3d sculpture.

Today I nearly bricked my rooted Nook Color by using ClockworkMod to delete /boot.  The good news is that I fixed it, and not only that, but I learned how to get it back to the stock rom from pretty much the worst case scenario.  For more information, here’s my post about it on AndroidTablets.Net.

I’m too far removed from my character projects… and while I should continue what I left unfinished, I suppose starting something new is the next best thing.  Below is a first sketch for a four-armed, four-eared, dinosaur-like space alien.

I was one of the participants of the pmG: Dare to Share promotion.  I purchased two Messiah Studio Pro licenses and I have been learning it ever since.  My reasoning for buying it probably only applies to me, but if you’re thinking about it I suppose it could help you decide.

• USB stick licensing.  Licenses are node-locked to usb-sticks instead of computers, allowing you to take the software with you on any computer that can run it.
• Compared to other capable animation software, it’s cheap.  It was even cheaper during the promotion.
• At $3495 a seat I won’t be able to afford my own professional license of 3DStudio Max for a while.  Any work I do in it is done with a student license or done at my intern position at CDI with their pro license.
• I would like to sell my work someday, and I own pro licenses of Silo and zBrush, so Messiah would complete the work-around workflow I’d need to take to avoid using Max.
• While I could (and have) use Blender, I do not like the new version, also the renderer and animation tools are still kinda limited.
• Thanks to FBX support, it works with Unity!

Messiah’s renderer is surprisingly good, so I may end up using it at work as well as home.

Having said all that, it is a difficult program to learn, though once you learn it, you can work very fast.  I had a problem setting up inverse kinematics that turned out to be a lot simpler to fix than I initially realized.  After figureing it out, I made a video specifically targeting that one particular hang-up new users are likely to come across. (edit: This video goes about it the wrong way.  Hit the P button on the lower right instead of doing the thing I’m doing…)