With a Purpose

There are too many times when my main goal in art is to do something that just looks cool. This would look great! That would really impress people! While cool looking pieces are fine and good, they lack something that pieces with substance behind them have.

I've recently been getting into Google Sketchup, which is a free 3d modeling program that is basic enough and intuitive enough for the 3d novice to pick up and feel comfortable with pretty much immediately, but powerful enough to be used in the production pipeline of many architectural/ACAD studios. As some of you may know, back in high school I wanted to be an architect. I didn't care what I was designing, be it bridges, buildings, apartments, classrooms, as long as I was designing something. Unfortunately, I didn't get very far, as I picked up Japanese and did it a bit better than I ever did architecture, but the desire to design something that is closer to being tangible than airships and angel wings hasn't disappeared yet.

While doing some research on tutorials for sketchup, I came across this link. For those who are too lazy to follow the link, this architectural firm has used sketchup in the past to create eco friendly single and multi-family green homes. How's that for doing things with a purpose, eh?

The way I'm seeing it now, I have something I'm passionate about. I can keep the fruits of that passions (hmm) to myself, or I can try to do something with it. Something meaningful.

Now, I may not be a great architect, or a renowned painter yet, but I should start somewhere, and sometime. So why not here and now? So Now I'm making a resolution. From now on, every piece I do is going to be for a specific purpose. No more, "Wow, that looks cool!" for the sake of looking cool. Everything I do is going to be to in the efforts of learning something, or the piece will be used for a specific purpose.

Does that mean that Nevergreen is on the outs? No, not quite. NG was originally conceived as a reason to learn how to model more complex scenes, learn color theory, shot composition and lighting. It evolved into the story that I want to tell, but it has an educational origin.

I want to help people. So I'm going to take what I love, and figure out how to help people with it. Or at the very least, I'm going to have a reason for my art. Art for the sake of art lacks substance, in my opinion.

I want mine to have more purpose.

More Updates

Its been about a month, and I haven't had a cigarette.

That's so weird.

There are times when I think i'd like one, but then, I don't.

I've been working out pretty regularly, doing good things for myself that have been long overdue, and getting into new things as well. I've gotten into digital sculpting (which really is an offshoot of 3D) and painting more. I went kayaking for the first time (thanks KS for the pix!) and I LOVED it.

Good things are happening, I can feel it.

Maja update / 3D Coat Magnifying Glass

Small update here, been painting (and now 3D sculpting) like a fiend now. I'm feeling better and better with the painting, as its feeling more like what I want it to feel like.

On the other hand, there's this one, a magnifying glass modeled in lightwave and detailed in 3d coat (a cheap alternative to the more expensive Zbrush or Mudbox), and while I feel this is amaturish at best, I think i'm getting the hang of it.

Maja

So, this was something that i've been working on, based on a photo of someone that's been on my mind for a while now.

I'm trying to capture that warmth that people have, and that bit of imperfection that so many cg artists miss. Of course, this isn't CG, but i'm also trying to focus on the correct highlights and shadows that appear with regular lighting.

I like how warm this one is, I purposely chose a warm canvas (the reddish brown background) instead of a cooler color like green or blue or something neutral like grey.

I like how all the tones are kinda the same flavor as the background. I'm a little worried about the hair, because hair is so hard to paint, but i'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Numb

Losing someone is one of the worst feelings that we have to experience. It's even worse when it's a conscious choice.
Due to things that i'm not going to explain here, I had to make that choice, and it'll always haunt me. It's haunting me right now, every moment of the day.

I have to figure out how to do this, or that choice will be in vain. I have to jump into things that I have to do. I have to make myself better.

Status Update: DAVE, Artrage and bills...

Its been a long time, and I'm at work, so I'll cut to the chase.

Here's where I stand in my pursuits to be a CG Rockstar akin to the glamor and prestige of Steve Jobs:

My recent application for Sallie Mae financial aid to go to the Digital Animation and Visual Effects (DAVE) school have been less than fruitful, to put it lightly, so it looks like I won't be attending anytime soon. This pretty much blows, because not only does it throw off my momentum, but it's been a major hit to my ego and self-esteem. I still feel like this is my future, and this is a sizable obstacle to overcome. Unfortunately, it's one that I haven't figured out how to address yet.

Because of all this, I'm trying to keep myself motivated by continuing to learn Lightwave, cg theory, color theory and related techniques... I still have so much to learn, and while self-study will only get me so far, it's still progress.

To improve my understanding in color theory, lighting, and composition, I'm taking a more traditional approach. A while ago, I purchased Artrage by Ambient Design and a new Wacom tablet. I'm trying my hand at painting, as it will force me to pay more attention to detail when it comes to lighting and color theory. I've impressed myself so far with what I have been able to achieve, but I'm not going to let that get to my head. I can always get better... Once I've completed, or at least made significant progress with a piece, I'll post it here, along with what I was trying to achieve or focus on, as well as the style and any other thoughts I may have.

In completely different news, but still relating to self-esteem and ego, crappy financial situations blow. In the past month, I've had to spend $750 on my car, an extra $400 on my phone/phone bill, run up my credit card, and dig for change. I'm not the most financially stable person, but I've usually been good about keeping things in check. Because of seemingly random unfortunate events, I've felt pretty much strapped, and not wanting to do anything, art related or not. But after some good counseling from priceless, irreplaceable loved ones, I think I'm on the road to mental recovery from the blow I took, and moving forward.

Slowly, but surely.

More to come.

Video Test

Two posts in one day?
You guys sure are lucky...


Video test for production diary:

Mobile blogging

Mobile blogging

So I figured out how to blog from my iPod touch. Sweet, eh? Now I can
do some running commentary on life on the go ( or at least when I can
find a wifi hotspot.) If only this worked with video as well.

Speaking of video, since I couldnt sleep last night, I took a friend's
advice and made a short 6 minute video production diary.
Unfortunately, I'm still trying to work the kinks out in posting it,
so expect if later on this week! Now off to find sone lunch, and get
some more work done.

Sent from my iPod

"Make your own look..."

That's the advice the advice that I hear most often. While trying to
set myself aside from all the other 3d artist our there, especially
those that specialize in cel shading, its mighty hard to find a way to
define style when everything always ends up looking like cg.

Cel shading, for those of you that don't know, when related to 3d art,
is the process of making a 3d model look like it was hand drawn
instead of looking like something more realistic or something out of
Toy Story. Many 3d applications have cel shade plugins, but without
either a lot of time, or intimate knowledge of of the plugins, the
results often are instantly recognizable as what they are, or just
plain mediocre. I don't want my work to fall into either of those
categories.

So, aside from rebuilding my primary assets (main character models and
objects that will get a lot of page space) I have to find an
economical way to keep quality high while defining my own style.

Through lots of trial and error with the lightwave texture node
editor, I think I have found a solution.

What's next is now finishing the rebuildng of my primary and secondary
assets, finish re-writing my outline and get started on my script.

Its a long, trying process, but it'll all be worth it in the end, if
not just satisfying for me.
Wish me luck.

Nevergreen: Karin redux v1

No hair yet, but using some new things i've learned to make her better.

Facebook Gave Me The Axe

And i'm not really sure why... But last night, when I tried to get online, I got this message:

 

Your account has been disabled by an administrator. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page here.

 

So, of course, I email the administrator, asking why it happened, and what I can do to fix my account. After some more digging, I found this:

"Facebook enforces limits on the site in order to prevent certain actions that can be considered abusive. Your account has been disabled for persistent and rapid use of a certain feature. Unfortunately, for security reasons, we will not be able to further explain these limits. "

Now the only rapid thing that I remember happening was my iPod touch trying to connect to facebook, so I'm being banned for using an apple product that is has the shakes?

"Facebook has limits in place to prevent abuse of our features and to protect users from potential spam."

That's well and good, we all hate spam, I hate spam. I even hate spam, the 'meat'! but again, what does this have to do with my ipod trying to connect?

"Unfortunately, Facebook cannot provide any specifics on the rate limits that we enforce. Please know, however, that the speed at which you are acting and the sheer number of actions you have made are both taken into account."

Um, ok... So you can't be specific about what I allegedly did, and you can't be specific on how many times I did it... but I did it fast and often.

After doing some other research, it appears that FB does a lot of things like this for a multitude of reasons. People with fake profiles, people with fake names, people claiming to be other people or organizations... Of course, i'm none of those...

As you can probably tell, i'm a bit confused by how this happened. Anyone that knows me knows that I'm not a spammer, not trying to fake anything.. But for some reason, the FB overlords decided that I was a threat to their clean, shiny social utopia of pirates, ninjas, zombies, snowball fights and superpokes.

Like I said, I sent an email to their customer support team, in  the hopes that this is just a machine error, and my status can be reinstated, but this event is very telling about FB. No warning, no 'hey, quit that or we'll kick you out!" to which I would reply, 'Quit what?' and this would have never happened.

What's sad is that FB is so much better than myspace, and I'd rather not go back there for my social fixes.

 

So, feel free to comment here if you want to get in touch with me, as I was kicked out of the cool people club for reasons unknown to me.

 

At least I still have fun with Rock Band.

I'm Such a Sucker for a Good Figure

Assassin's Creed, Ubisoft Montreal's newest blockbuster game came out on Wed. Unfortunately, I was broke until this morning, so I splurged a but and got the limited edition which comes in a tin and has a figure, short graphic novel and small artbook.

The reviews for this game have been very good, and it was highly anticipated. I can't wait to play it, but I have to wait until after dinner plans that I have with a friend.

In other news, I got a but of a response about my story from a couple of people, and they raised some good points on things that I have to flush out. To those of you who I sent it to and haven't responded, please do! I'd like to hear what you have to say!

In Other News:

Awww, someone photoshoped an adorable dog as a Colossus from Team Ico's Shadow of the Colossus!

Too funny!

Current Status: Exhausted and Anxious

Day 21 without a day off. Welcome to the holiday season in retail management, ladies and gentlemen.
After the opening of our new Plaza (see last post), and a fashions show for a (brand) new store to the United States Who.A.U, and the Thanksgiving parade this coming weekend, and Black friday next, I don't know how I pulled time together to do this.

I'm back in the saddle as far as Nevergreen goes. I was thinking a few days ago that I'm worried that I would forget the details of the story because I haven't had the chance to work on it at all. So last night, I wrote a detailed outline of the story from start to finish and descriptions of the characters and locations. I'm really proud that i've even got this far. Hopefully, this will get me to get my ass in gear and go forward with my story.

I sent out the draft to a few friends who know of the story, editors maybe, and i'm waiting to hear back from them on their thoughts about it.

It's Finally Done... Well, sorta...

 Today marked the culmination of efforts started over two years ago. The Stamford Mall, where I work in the marketing department), finally opened its new multi-million dollar Plaza addition.

I'm so proud to be here and part of this, as we all worked our asses off to get this in the news, get people here, and assist in this huge project. The new stores and restaurants are as follows:

• P.F. Chang's China Bistro
• Kona Grill
• California Pizza Kitchen
• Cosi
• Barnes and Noble (the largest one in CT, mind you)

Coming in the next couple of months are:

• The Capital Grille
• Mitchell's Fish Market
• H&M

This is a huge step for this mall, because for the longest time, we had only subway as our available restaurant, and nothing else to speak of. However, with these new restaurants and stores, we're now a force to be reckoned with to other malls in the area.

So please, if you're in the Stamford, CT area, stop by and check these places out. You won't regret it.

 

In other news, because of all this, I haven't had time to work on my comic. I have some changes to make to the evil city Seddus Rhodes (like making it look less penis-like), and I want to make the other city, Lumanor (wink), but I'm still trying to figure out the style I want to go with.

 

Peace out everyone!

 For pix, click here

If you're a religious person,

Now would be a good time to pray for me.

Maybe...

I think I can do this....

No Good Day Goes Un-FUBARed

There seems to be a new unfortunate trend going on in my life.
I've been trying my best to do something that will make me happy each day. So recently, I've turned to modeling and rendering. Unfortunately, each day has been punctuated with something shitty, for lack of a better word, happening. I'm trying to stay on the path of the self-improving, but it's getting harder and harder to stand up after being knocked down so many times. Whether it's something personal or business related, petty or deathly serious, nothing is easy to bounce back from.

I guess this is the true test of how strong I'll have to be.

Seddus Rhodes, by the way.
check it.

Hey Groove, Welcome Back!

So after much hiatus, I'm finally getting my groove back.
For many different reasons, at many different times, I couldn't bring myself to model anything. Pushing a poly was like pulling teeth, and I kinda just sat there, wishing I was as good as those in the field that I idolize for their incredible skills.

On Saturday morning, I had a conversation online with a peer who lives in Singapore and has taught me a lot over the past few years. He'll be teaching a CG class over there, and wanted to try his act on me a bit, covering different things. After his impromptu lesson, I was newly invigorated, and started modeling.
besides the picture to the right of this entry, I did some other cool stuff having to do with terrains and a major set for my story.

Once I can break out my laptop here at work, I'll transfer some pictures over to show.

It's been a while, and I'm glad I'm back.

Darkly Desiring More Dexter

I have to throw a shoutout out there.
Dear ShinyKaro, thank you for introducing me to one of the most vile, disturbed, grotesque, bone-chilling, blood-curdling, depraved and absolutely brilliant shows that I have seen in a long time.

Showtime's Dexter, the show about your friendly neighborhood serial killer, is my newest guilty pleasure. I don' t mean guilty pleasure as one would consider something like, I dunno, say Rock of Love (wink). I mean it in the sense that despite the fact that the protagonist is a serial killer, and we, the viewers, love watching him stalk his prey, dispose of them through his special brand of justice, don the mask of normalcy and slither his way through dangerous situations that might expose him for the monster that he is. We love it all. From the disturbingly gruesome way that the introduction is shot, to the unnerving way that Dexter throws up veil of false emotions and then butchers criminals, abusers, mafia and other undesirables that he feels deserve the business end of his power tools.

I just finished the first season, thanks to iTunes, and I don't think that I was able to breathe for a good minute and a half after it had finished. In the spirit of not spoiling anything, I won't go into any sort of detail. That being said, I have to thank the writers for veering away from the habit of many prime-time writers to keep the story going trans-season, while answering one question only to ask three more and keep people hooked.

I believe that the story is in the characters. That is to say, one story can end, but because the characters are so fantastically written, the writer can put them into another situation and they would entertain us just as well. That is not to say that the story that progressed during the first season wasn't great, it was! It was enthralling, actually. But I'm glad that the characters are dynamic and multi-layered enough that we don't have to have a static villain (aside from our hero, of course) that we have to contend with year after year.

I like to call that the Inspector-Gadget effect. For those of you who remember, we never saw Dr. Claw, the antagonist of that particular cartoon, and he was never apprehended. We knew that each time a villian came by, he was sent by Dr. Claw, or at least the good ol' Doc had something to do with it, but we also knew that he would -always- be there, and that was that. No greater push, longer and harder journey to put this evil bastard away for good. Nada. It's alright to have a foil, but not for the sake of being a foil. Dexter doesn't suffer this, thankfully.

I'm also glad that this show is on Showtime. Somehow, I don't think that NBC or ABC could hack it (yeah, I went there). Because of the fact that Dexter is on a premium channel, they can get away with showing a lot of things you wouldn't see on basic cable. I'm not a fan of gore for gore's sake, but for being a show about a serial killer, there is surprisingly little gore. We see Dex working the tools, and then disposing of the trash, if you will. Most of the gore that we do see is the work of the Ice-Truck Killer, Dexter's adversary and playmate of season 1.

As far as my thoughts on the finale of Season 1, I applaud the writers for being able to time up everything so neatly. Questions about the hows and whys of the season are addressed in a believable way. Who does what and where is clearly laid out for us to see. I really appreciate that, because again, so many shows try to put a band-aid onto questions that either they didn't have the time to properly answer.

One last thing that I love about the show was the ending to the last episode. We see Dexter and his sister walking back into their police station after doing their justice, but I believe there is a seamless transition between reality, and what Dexter sees in his head. His fellow policemen and Miami residents cheering him on for doing away with the killer. Pats on the back for him doing his dirty deed. A sick appreciation for Dexter's after-work activities. As the monologue cuts out, and Dexter smiles and walks towards the camera, the images freezes with his face blurred but in an extreme close up, and in that one single frame, he really looks like the serial killer that we know him to be.

Go Go Gadget New-Potential-Hit-Series!

Apparently, some people believe that lighting strikes often at the NBC offices. I'm not quite convinced yet, but I plan on driving down later with a kite and iron ring to prove that it can happen.

(The Bionic Women, Past and Present)

September 26 marked the first episode of NBC's 'reimagination' (more on this later) of 1976's "The Bionic Woman". In the new series, a 24 year-old Jaime Sommers, (played by Michelle Ryan), a young bartender, suffers a near-fatal car accident along with her college professor/secret agent boyfriend Will Anthros. Jaime only survives the crash because Will brings her to his place of employ for a quick tune up, saving her life, and simultaneously making her the most expensive bartender ever. After the initial shock and realization of what has happened to her, Jaime eventually understands what she has become, and starts way on a path to a more exciting life of technobabble, espionage and intrigue.

(Look ma, no legs.)

The series is co written by David Eick, of recent Battlestar Galactica fame. Interestingly enough, Eick's screen writing experience wasn't the only thing that he brought over from Galactica. Aaron Douglas, the loveable deck chief of questionable parentage in Galactica makes an appearance in the second episode. Katie Sackoff, (better known as Starbuck, to most) plays Sarah Corvus, the first Bionic Woman. That's right, I said first. Sommers comes into the game a little late. A Version 2.0 if you will. Obviously, this raises the question, "What happened to the first Bionic Woman that would warrant making a civilian into the second?". I'm glad you asked!

(Note: You can also tell that Sackoff is the bad one because of the cigarette and excessive use of eye-liner, if you couldn't tell before.)

Corvus does what Sackoff playes well. She goes bat-shit crazy, some people die and the token asian hand-to-hand combat instructor/operative/love interest played by Will Yun Lee (who, coincidently, plays many similar roles) puts a bullet in her head. Business as usual, right? Not for Corvus. Somehow, she's back, sans bullet-in-the-head, and she's working for the enemy as well as taking the time to antagonize our fair yet somewhat clueless heroine, Sommers. I must admit however, that the idea of one good and one bad bionic woman, while cliche at times (Star Trek and Knight Rider, I'm looking at you...) but I'm getting the feeling that Eick and Co are going to write this one in a more interesting way.

(Apparently facial hair is also a sign of evil...)

• Spock and Evil Spock

• Michael Knight and Evil Michael Knight
  

• The future for the Bionic Woman?
  

Reimagination is a funny word. Honestly, spellcheck doesn't even recognize it. (Interestingly enough, spellcheck doesn't recognize the word "spellcheck" either, so take that for what you will). Can you really Re-Imagine something? If the first imagination isn't yours, are you really re-imagining anything, or playing off someone else's work and creativity? It's kinda like regifting, now that I think about it. The only reason that I bring this up, is that Eick so far has been attached to reimagining two series now; the aforementioned Galactica, and now Bionic Woman. Eick and Ron Moore took a campy and at sometimes damned silly series, and made it relevant for the 21st century. They cut out the capes and robotic dogs (thanks guys) and added the interesting and at some times uncomfortable questions that no one ever likes having to ask themselves, as well as updated visuals, and revitalized a good amount of television's sci-fi scene. Can this be done with Bionic Woman? We'll have to wait and find out. But so far, it's on the right track to becoming a fan favorite, as well as another notch in NBC's belt along with Heroes, Chuck, a slew of Law and Order and of course, Deal or No Deal.

The Bionic woman airs Wednesday night's at 9PM EST. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some kite-flying to do.