http://stoyn.com/1530683/STOYN-ICE-CREAM

to use my marilyn monroe head for casting purposes… although ran into a couple of issues with the 3d printing process which was quite new to me, the casting result is actually pretty impressive! i’m quite amazed at how the casting brought out the eyelashes. a very cool idea.

http://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2011/06/23/creative-ice-cream/

bases there, lots of tweaking to dooooooooo. painted in all the roughs and planning bits though!

reminder to self: add frill trim under shirt

some diffuse only lowpoly stuff… maya/photoshop, still in mirror down the middle mode…

the light! it changes everything

charcoal study(study and a half?)

more… still placing stuff. still haven’t fixed clipping yet, that’ll come last.

30 sec

30 sec each

1-5 min each

1 min

15 min

20 min

wordpress is screwing up my formatting. oh well. have been doing a bunch of quick drawings (there are a lot more!) to get away from the innately ‘technical’ world of cg.

slowly slowly getting there. i’ve been spending my lunch hours working on lowpoly stuff. still need to merge face halves etc etc etc

sketchover

stuff to do: add more paint brushstrokes, highlights, refine, refine, refine, render out the alpha visor properly, stick the accessories on, attach super ghetto anim rig, add some sparks or something. i might add depth to the eye sockets. maybe. and do something about the spike on the back of his hood.

NEXT: darth plug sockets you in the FACE!!!

NEXT NEXT: koosh ball hair plug man. or maybe mohawk/dreads, as cid suggests.

edit: plugman has… a plug!

plugman also has lightning bolts sitting on his specularity layer(see top left), but a combination of my computer being a piece of shit and maya being a complete piece of shit led to some fucked up shit, so fuck this shit.

‘get out of my faaaaaaaace before i stick this in your eye’

the hair is quite terrible. i need to do something about that

add some crap like rounded hearts, flowers, paper cuts, origami crap, general shitcrap like bonsai trees or paper lanterns or something.

making hair process – handpaint hair in photoshop, convert to alpha layer, stick on planes. halfway there! clearly i haven’t optimised my texture pages yet.

also another inprogress crazyass hippy marilyn. this goes slowly. clearly there’s still a hell of a lot of work left to be done.

and… my only attempt at animation.

in your FACE, johann! in your FAAAAAAAAAAACEEEEEEEEEEE!

My mother had a collection of songs by Elton John, recorded by various other people who were sometimes better and sometimes worse than Elton John. At ten, at eleven, I pored over the CD cover insert, wondering about the stories that went along with each song, and why Wilson Phillips did a better job of singing Daniel than Elton ever did.

I hardly ever buy CDs, now. Gone’s the day when I used to fear tracking a greasy smear over a fold of glossy sleeve paper. Lost, long gone, dearly departed. The world at your fingertips. Too easy, like everything these days. If you don’t make a substantial effort to be entertaining or entertained, you end up really bored. Danger, danger. We’re so cool.

My friend, a neophyte record collector, just drove off to somewhere nowhere in BC to pick up 2,500 records, the sum total of a man’s life in music. Imagine that, trading the songs of a lifetime for a mere 200 dollars, a paltry amount, less than 10 cents a record — what drives a man to that? I wonder if the old fogey who sold them bought an iPod to replace the records you can’t even find catalogued on the internet — the internet, for chrissakes. Some of them date back to 1905. Think about it. That’s older than anyone I know. It gladdens my heart that there are still people who worship the outmoded, that there are people who journey hundreds of miles to collect a pile of records that some people happily sell for a dime.

Low junk, high art, a little bit of both. Perhaps the stories we all leave in marginalia — those are all we are, after we leave, and pass on.

Posthaste is a word that seems to have fallen out of fashion lately.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/caitlin_moran/article6878191.ece#

I  like telephones more than email, but only hold conversations with a very select group of close friends. Mostly dear people in foreign parts with whom playing email catch-up turns into a segue rally of ten thousand word disquisitions. Or those in my hyperfriends zone.

We spent an inordinate amount of time on the phone when I was young. Now we buy overpriced drinks, and sit around in bars bemoaning our lost youths.

here some random art crap be oh what larks and joy

marilyn monroe quick head sculpt (pure maya box model): not quite finished, obviously; shall patch it up once body’s done. it’s kind of nice to work with just pure polygonal modelling sometimes. i just eyeball this stuff to get a feeling for the face rather than rotoscoping. it’s all stylised anyway.

ugly man: quick zbrush doodle (couple hours)

but I am caught in the frigid beauty that spreads before me, all particles and polygons. A last tribute to a dying platform, the ephemeral dreams of a forsaken machine. Under heaven, slipping across hell, I stare down the last sullen triangle of light between the ravine walls. I hear it, an eerie sad song of the done.

The wolves are wailing. The dead come.

2007, November, rain.

A paving stone sat on the block up from me, vandal-slashed into the idiom ‘MEAN PEOPLE SUCK’. Which says it all, really. This is not a city with many problems. Or at least, this is a city that likes to either pretend it has problems, or glaze them over, and if you take a drive down Hastings you’ll see, immediately, what we all try very hard not to see. Here on Seymour, you have pretty little pavement platitudes, and just a block away you have human excreta filthing down the goddamn wall. We are talking shit on Robson-fucking-strasse, the Oxford Street Light of Vancouver. The most expensive street on a Canadian Monopoly board, the fifth highest for world retail rental rates (really? Bloor looks a hell of a lot fancier. and take it all with a pinch of salt, it’s no London/Tokyo). And it still smells like crap, half the time.

It’s amazing, actually, just how much of a problem Vancouver has with homelessness. I thought London was problematic until I came here. If London’s problem is violence, Vancouver’s is apathy. Apparently they’re shipping all the homeless people off to some remote frigid location in Northern BC, just so the flocks of Olympic vultures won’t realise Vancouver’s a  real cold place to be, and not just in winter. And then they’re shipping them back, because fixing a problem ain’t a problem if no-one’s around to see it.

Enough about that. I’ve had many a conversation with down-on-their-lucks in London. The ones here just tend to freak me out. Which begats a whole new world of guilt.

2009, September, sun.

That paving stone is gone. Mean people still suck. You don’t find a lot of those around here. What you do get is a certain strange apathy, which I can’t quite fathom. Or maybe it’s more like a blocked-off hope that someone will break down barriers. I can’t say I don’t have a certain sympathy for people who are, like myself, cautiously guarded. All things end in excess, however, and when I say that people here can be more cut-off and clique-locked than girls in an English public girls’ school, that’s one hell of a something.

My industry surrounds me with a lot of young-at-hearts, big friends with big souls who come from all over the world. Outside, and from others, I have the feeling that Vancouver is a lonely, frost-smeared city, that freezes you out before you get the chance to burn out.

Seriously, all Vancouverites (at least, the ones that pollute my Yaletown ghetto) seem to want is to be on a fucking boat, or more specifically to own a boat, or even more specifically (but gender non-specifically, mind), to marry someone who owns a goddamn bloody boat.

This is not to say that all Vancouverites are assholes, because generalising is generally fun, even if it isn’t strictly true, and because some of my best friends really are born/bred Vancouverites, which proves that maybe it’s not Robsonstrasse, or even Hastings, but I who am simply full of shit.

Someone I once knew, that I once thought myself closer-than-god to, yet who never was invited to read these words, and never will be, tellingly — someone once said something true; Vancouver as a place, as a doe-eyed force of sheer physical beauty, is one of the hardest places in the world to hate. Yeah, I was never one of Mother Nature’s children, but when I clamber up a mountain and gaze out over the islands glinting in the bay, it’s hard not to feel like maybe there’s a lot more to this world than this transient humanity.

Vancouver has this little-big-city vibe, and big scenery, and big nature, and big hearts, if you know where to find them. It’s weird. It’s either the most accepting or the most unaccepting of cities, depending on whom you’ve come to know. It’s a melting-pot or a hoarhole, whichever you fall into.

But if you’re lucky you find, lurking amongst the chill concrete, the warmth of day, breaking through the endless skyscrapers, warm and welcoming souls, good words, good friends.  And you will keep these hearts forever.

I’ve been lucky. I’ve been lucky all my life. Two years on, I love it here, really. I do. Enough to throw aside my fear of bureaucracy and take the plunge towards permanent residency. The year of twenty-nine smells, finally, like home.

I bought one of these, so you get one of these:

I call this song, uh, snowballing. as you can tell, I had no idea where I was going in the middle section. SoundCloud’s embedded widget plays at 128k, so if you want to hear the 192k version, click the download icon.
variant here: recorded with the ‘clarity’ setting

(recorded on a full and resonant cedar top classical guitar, very slight volume boost and reverb from mini vox DA5 amp. I might turn down the reverb next time.)

My take? The Snowball’s pretty reasonable for 130 cadbucks, although it loses quite a lot of nuance, but what do you expect? I’m too cheap to spend 500 bucks on a proper setup, and this is mostly for practice purposes anyway, so.

some other test crap:

recuerdos de la alhambra (francisco tarrega), second half

Apparently I have a psychological problem when it comes to playing first sections.

The microphone has three settings, the first being the fullest, second being my best for clarity (but softest), third being a mix of the others. I recorded the classical pieces on setting #1 without amplification. Talk about depth overkill; next time I’m setting it back to #2.

I kind of like the way the Snowball looks, although I wouldn’t class it as portable, seeing as it’s a fairly hefty 4 inch ball. At half a kilo, certainly sturdy enough to withstand repeated bouts of cat-poking.

It is nice and simple and mostly pretty damn good.

EDIT: fuck it, I returned it, planning to borrow swanky condenser microphone from good friend K. FOSTER BEST PERSON IN UNIVERSE.

because the snowball will never sound like this:

(sloppy but everyone likes this one (recorded by my eminent photo/videographer/all-round artstar ryan m)

I recommend you click the thumbnails if you’re curious.

Behold, the endless dilemma of nipples. I opted for none this time around, possibly due to the number of people making annoyingly unimaginative comments over my shoulder when they sprouted yet extant. Pfah! Plebeian sentiment should never fetter artistic truth; I shall reinstate them, when my eyes no longer bleed.

I dig current workflow trends (popularised by Epic?) towards [super simple base model] > [zbrush/mudbox highpoly mesh] >  [decimate with decimation master or meshlab] > [retopo to medres ingame model]. Far more creative freedom/saves a fair amount of time — then again, it’s all context-dependent. Sometimes you just can’t beat purpose-building a tidy little quad base.

Hark the day we throw point clouds into engines and laugh.

nb: my computer is a pile of shit and can’t handle any division levels past 5 without dying horribly.

More than a mack textbook, it is a memoir, a study of the ins and outs of the social condition. The man who wrote it wrote also for the New York Times. Make of that what you will.

The book’s prevailing mantra is: Attraction is not a choice, and you and I and we can have everyone via hamfisted palmistry, spoon bending and ESP.

It’s not too hard to see why people buy into the mystique. We pretend to be a collection of on/off switches, unanalogue, discrete.

What a beautiful conceit, that you can reduce seduction into a set of techniques that will guarantee you entry into anyone in the world. Are we waves and tremors, or sticks and holes? There is nothing absolute about being human, about neocortical impulses that feed our hearts to head.

There is nothing human in the objectification of an adversary; the gaudy prizes of bars and clubs are just ticks on a list, 8s, 9s, 10s, 11s. The more you play the game,  the more you realise the game means nothing. Strauss has no small dose of pity and revulsion for the creepers trapped in their own webs, not least himself. These are some of the unhappiest men you’ll meet.

Isn’t it strange, that certain truisms apply to all fields? Those who blindly follow preset routes rarely achieve greatness; he who only learns by rote never grasps the whole.

Seduction, one supposes, is all very well. Then comes a point where one thinks hard and long of love, in the time of gonorrhoea.

Not much has changed since we sat in school and wondered why some lead, and others follow. We make our way through life and find the game never changes; we want what we are denied.

To those who believe we can bypass the random variance of the human heart, note this and note it well: in the end, the only woman who stole Strauss’s heart was the one he could not snare with strings of theory. He played the game. She played him better.

Along Burrard after dinner, I watched a girl pose for a man, silhouetted by the splash of fountain spray. He said something that made her laugh; in the binary light of the camera, his smile seemed real. He blushed, or the red focus stung his skin. I didn’t know.

It’s for all of us to turn things over and around. The oldest friend comes out with the newest things; maybe we’re too fast to fix an image in our heads. Now I understand Cubism as never before; I see Picasso struggling, presented with the problem of presenting all sides all at once.

Irrational people do rational things, rational people do irrational things. All people are unknown quantities, now and forever.

Sitting in the semi-dark, bathed in the soft penumbra of the screen, I close the game and shut my eyes. I chase the awkward beauty that only exists when we race toward a goal, unscripted, unfettered, unaware.

You fill it in, then.

Today I picked up The Scar (China Mi[e]ville) (here’s your obligatory wikipedia link you lazy people).

The clerk looked at it, then announced he had it lying around at home.

‘like it?’ (I say, while signing off my credit)

*beat*

‘I never finished it.’

‘…oh.’ (now contemplating my signature for $11.42)

‘well, you know, it’s well-written, I just have this thing about weird names. The names were weird. I guess I’m kind of weird about fantasy like that.’

‘I swing my sword, teehee’

‘…anyway, you might like it, if you don’t mind weird names.’

Unreasonable consonant strings (R’rhhzthahjzks swing your sword GO!!) make me throw books back on shelves, but The Scar seems acceptable. No swords yet, which either floats your boat or does not. It’s well-written, which is cause enough to celebrate. In a world reduced to lisping mishmashes of three-letter acronyms, I grasp at poetry like water.

Ashley Wood did the cover. I wouldn’t have guessed, although it’s an exercise in understated elegance, thereby avoiding my current and exceedingly superficial code of book cover rejection

=

10 breasts? [increment variable r by 1]

20 got swords and big oily muscles? [ditto]

30 pirates [ditto ditto]

40 space pirates [etc]

50 is twilight? [increment variable r by ∞]

60 if r > 0, terminate with excessive intolerance

Ѿ

Cyrillic looks rude.

And since you are all so concerned re: my exclusive consumption of meat animals, here’s my new health slogan:

switching to an ALL-CARB diet in preparation for the coming apocalypse of WORLD FOOD SHORTAGE better STORE FATS NOW