17 hour Powercut

Jesus H Christ it's been an intense 17 hours.... I normally try to keep swearing to a minimum in the 1st paragraph of my blogs, but it is warranted in this case. yesterday started a bit weird with 8-10 inches of snow falling in less than a few hours...odder still when it had been 25 degrees C the day before! About 9pm last night we had a massive power surge, while my new pc was behind no less than 2 industrial level power surge protectors and were fine, my wife's were not..... Suddenly her PC 'No Worky' so I dropped what I was doing to try and work out the problem (i.e. what was fried) and see if I could replace it with bits from an old single core to get her up and running. The reason for this is rather simple..if I did not them my wife's moaning on about it would stop me from working and make me want to kill her inside of 20 mins lol :)

So there I am with two PC's in bits in my work room with her trying to hand me parts as I asked for them when BANG...power cut!! So I'm sitting there in a small room completely in the dark surrounded by 2 PC's in a state of total disassemble with no torch...no candles a hand...no light. As both our kids are terrified of the dark we had a bit of a time limit and had to make zero noise as if they had woken up....we were sort of in trouble as the only door out of my work room was blocked by computer cases.

BBC link to the new about the epic powercut that hit 30,000 Homes.

You know those times if you're a PC builder that you say 'Hey I could put a pc together in the dark!!'? Well that's what I had to do...after moving the cases out of the way, wife hunted (and found!) a tiny tea light candle. I then sat trying to put the dam thing together in the dark so we had enough room to get out of the tiny work room lol. Gospel truth and no word of a lie. I would not recommend it to anyone... [{latest edit}: Wife just switched on the pc I built in candle light and guess what...a miracle it works...*awesomeness powerup +100* lol]

All electric was down until about 6.30pm tonight...so cue a day with very bored kids with no TV, no games no hot meals, no hot drinks...and no coffee... The lack of coffee game me a caffeine headache from hell that is only just subsiding after 6 back to back strong coffees lol.

As I said.....an intense 17 hours.....

Matte Doodle: 'The Church of the Holy Chasm'

A quick doodle I did at 3am this morning. This is intended as a static matte using 3d elements and more traditional matte painting techniques. The shot would show a group of people walking towards the temple in searhc of what lies at the bottom of the chasm... thats if I ever finished it...which I probably wont.

Also originally if it had not have been 3am when I started this I was going to add a more futuristic cathedral / temple.... but as I had the Durham cathedral model knocking about for MOD302 it seemed a shame not to use it.

Mudbox Hub: CLOSED

Mudbox Hub is now closed after 5 years.

As of tonight I have closed the forum I started back in 2008 Mudbox Hub. I had handed its day to day running over to Cris from 3D-palace.com but Cris had neither the time or mudbox experience to keep it a vibrant place (as he was too busy with his own business understandably). As such it had been on a downhill slide for a while and was dying that slow death that forums do when they cease to be as active.

So rather than see it die a horribly slow death, I have killed it tonight, it now forwards to mudboxLIVE.com where there is over 46 Hours of my videos and DVD's for free with no adverts or forums to run or sidetrack you. As these days most digital sculptors use or can use more than one app I feel a dedicated forum is no longer needed and can be in some cases overly divisive between artists.

As Mudbox 2013 has just been announced it also gives it a clean start with no external forum interference. (This also saves me about 10 gigs of server space lol.)

Mudbox: Voice operated

"What if you never had to remember hotkeys"

"What if something actually did as you told it to?"

"What if you could get rid of the entire interface for an app?"

You know every now and again I have an urge to do something crazy while waiting on a render or such like. Occasionally I come up with a pretty nice idea such as 'Waynes Vector Displacement shader' (which was the 1st for mental ray), or MudWalker (which spawned a host of clones) or things I never got around to releasing such as ReDucto my own uniqiue polygon reduction algorythm .

youtube link in case other one is blocked in your country

I also come up with some crap no one see's and is of no use to anyone but me.... so which is this idea? I'll let you decide. What I will say is yes this video is real and I am operating mudbox by voice control alone. Its very easy to do (I'm suprised no one has done it up till now to be honest), and is intended to augment my usual sculpting workflow so I can maximise screen space and get rid of all the menus when working or lecturing. That is its only purpose.... plus it can be expanded to other apps.

As Mudbox 2013's feature set was announced today I thought it seemed as good a time as any to show this. Even more so as this only took about an hour to get running and working 99.9% from initial idea. So it could be something you as an artist find nothing more than a 'toy' or maybe you can see how it frees up things to concentrate on the sculpting and texturing. But in the words of the Oracle from the matrix films "You'll just have to make up your own damn mind".

What you can't hear as you can only hear it over my headphone's, is on mudbox start up you hear a certain voice saying 'what is thy bidding my master?' lol.

Disaster ....

First off I have to say in all honesty that this last few days have been not exactly fantastic. But as with anything , you can gaurentee when things are busiest and going far too well (all be it with an impending deadline) shit will go wrong somehow. Its known as 'paddy's law' in these parts... 'if something can go wrong...it will'. There is also 'Wayne's ammended version' which goes "If something can go wrong it will...if it can't, then it will still find a way to fuck you over right royally'.

I was banging onwards with the texturing stage of the cathedral complex (complex in both name and nature) when in the spaceof 24 hours 1st my main PC went down...then my laptop went down. The PC was due to the CPU dying, the laptop...weel, thats any buggers guess. (To be honest I'm not even thinking about getting that fixed till the cathedral is done).

This leaves only my son's laptop I bought back in 2009 and little more than a calculator on modern terms and certainly never in a milion years capable of loading the cathedral complex max file. Then there is my wifes pc which I dare not touch on pain of death as each time I do something screws up, so best bet is to leave her to it lol.

So PC wise I'm sort of screwed until a new pc arrives so I can finish the cathedral model and scene's. Now luckily in a moment of madness I had bought an ipad the day before, while I can't do meaningful 3d on it, it does mean I could get in touch with Mike Seymour over at FXPHD and say 'shits gonna be late'. Also Mike was nice enough to forward some payment long before due to ease things buying a new PC (as suprise suprise...I don't budget for a new pc every week or laptop repairs lol. )

Mike's an absolute diamond for that and means that I just have to wait for the thing to be delivered. Of course there will be the usual 2-3 days to reset things up then I'm good to go again. now this isn't my scheduled 'upgrade' this year, just a mild one to get this model and its scenes done and out the door. So being to all intents and purposes 'offline' is driving me crazy, although oddly enough when I am away working on site somewere it never does if there is no internet in the hotel. So yep thre may be a short delay till the next FXPHD class but then its all systems go and 'ahead warp factor 10 Mr Sulu'.

Yes some files havebeen lost but I do have some backups so its not as bad as it could have been thank whatever passes for a god in this universe.

Sculpted Liquids in Mudbox

This is just a Mudbox direct screen capture.....it can do magical stuff when you know what your doing with it.

It seems I can show these images now that I did about 3 months back...two from about 8 varations done for a client of liquids sculpted for a drink manufacturer. The 1st image is a direct screen capture of the sculpt in Mudbox...yes a screen capture....really. The second shows a final render done in 3D Max using mental ray with a HDRI created by hand painting in mudbox.

The final render (3D Max and mental Ray) using a HDRI hand painted in Mudbox

The liquids had to match precisely the concept from the art dept with no room for any mistakes or fudges. Got to be the 1st time you've seen a sculpted liquid from me ;)

As Monty Python used to say: “...and now for something completely different!”

"Adoramus Vertexium" soundtrack link

The last week I’ve been getting back into something else that predates my 3D Career, I’ve started writing and arranging my own music again. It’s been amazing coming back to things and noticing the massive change in music software it the last 10 years or so! Apps that were in version 1 and to be honest a bit crap are now fully featured DAW’s with a feature set I could only have dreamt of back then. I’m still finding my feet and trying to get used to all these software changes, plus I’m treating it in two ways, firstly as a way to relax away from 3d and secondly to write the soundtracks for shorts I have in mind.

These two are dark ambient choral pieces intended as part of the soundtrack for a short film idea I have and to be honest probably not the ideal things to use to learn new music software as is sort of pushed my poor laptop and the software way too hard with so many VST's and fx layers routed in somewhat unique ways. The 2^nd is unfinished as the file managed to corrupt before it was done (which is a shame as I liked the final version far better).

"The Holy F*ck" (Requiem Mix 2): Soundtrack link

But not everything will be dark choral thingies lol.... I used to write in many different styles of music...I recorded and wrote songs I wanted to listen to that I couldn’t find. That’s my rule as it’s the ultimate selfish act to me...I write for me and what I want to hear and no one else.

On the 3D side my main machine upped and died yesterday so I am reduced to my laptop for the foreseeable future until I either fix or replace the main machine. I also now only have the main tower of the model of Durham cathedral complex left to UV map. I had a day off yesterday due to being ill from working too many hours to be frank. But I’ve pencilled in a bit of down time for once this is done and finished. Then its prepping for the Anomaly event in Vancouver and catching up on stuff.