ReDucto and MudWalker X Have landed!

More Details can be found here: http://psychocore.com/index2.html

I don't make my apps and plug-ins available very often, but when I do people do seem to rather like them.  Back in early 2011 I stopped making everything available, lack of time to make them available and quash any remaining bugs that I could personally live with (but others would not) meant that everything stopped.  I pulled all remaining releases after the splash the initial version of MudWalker had made back in the day, and the even bigger splash the vector displacement shader for mental ray made.  As I explained back then it got to the stage where I was spending all my time answering tech support emails for what were free things I'd put out.  I write these things for me and I release things as either I have superseded them in my pipeline with another version or simply as a gift.  But in truth it's a side effect of making things for me that I personally need use of.  Nothing more.

Now as I did not get into art to be a tech support guy and want to remain being in art for art, releasing these means I cannot in all good conscience sell them.  The way I see it if your selling an app or plug-in you have to be prepared to act as tech support and give up a large chunk of your life.  Hence both MudWalker X and ReDucto are free to everyone with one small stipulation...no emails begging for tech support (unless you're a large firm), no emails or tweets begging for features to be added...nothing...nada...ziltch.  Any emails will get deleted unless you're a huge firm and prepared to pay for any changes or tech support.

ReDucto's 3d parts kit workflow is unique... there is currently nothing that does this even as remotely as stable or as easily (let alone fast...let's not forget that!).  The main ReDucto polygon reduction algorithm is unique and something I came up with myself years ago. no other app has this algorithm as I own it, I came up with it, I made it.  It gives superb results that are far and away better than everyone else's version of the simple quadratic collapse algorithm used by 90% of the industry.

There is so much more that's its impossible to cover in a single blog post.  back when MudWalker 1st landed years back it was the very 1st of its kind that PC users could actually use... It made a big splash and saw as a result a shit load of clones.  I still find it ironic that it had more app support in its 1st week than anything similar had in years.  This release dumps a lot of the old stuff and concentrates on newer features. (although I had made it easy to people to activate or deactivate the old features if they want them.)

It contains its own super fast polygon reduction algorithm that is totally different and totally separate from ReDucto, and probably the one feature I use more than anything the ability to jump all meshes in a scene to their highest or lowest subD level via a simple hot key.  The extras I'm sticking in with both MudWalker X and ReDucto are worth a look alone.    But its free and you can't argue with that.

They are both released via by own development banner 'Psycho Core'. Now Psycho Core is a software firm that is rather unique. It does not sell you anything, it does not want your money or your loyalty...it wants nothing and hopefully gives everything in return.  Downloads for both will be made available later this week once the help files and vids are done.   If you meet me at any point you can buy me a beer....  or hire me whichever is harder lol

Back Home

I had a great time over in Vancouver and apart from no one being able to find the adapter for the Cintiq (which sort of put a downer on any serious live sculpting for my 6 hour session..shame as I was really rareing to go) everything went fine.  Some of those there near the end got a small preview of something I have been working on over on the software side of things that the rest of you will see some time this week.  There were a host of excellent speakers, some of who I missed due to trying to track down some tablets for a headache due to the bloody hotel only having 2 sachets of coffee in each room per day! (I have that before breakfast lol).  So cue on killer caffeine headache for a lot of us lol.

About 5 or 10 mins before my Lecture

I met a lot of great people I'd not met before this trip and had a excellent time, all be it that I spent most of my free time holed up in my hotel room working on 'something'.  In fact all but the last day the extent of Vancouver I saw was MacDonald's and  various star bucks on Robson street.

The journey back home was a nightmare as on the plane form Calgary to London I was stuck next to no less than 6 screaming babies.  So sleep on plane = zero. Also my new phone went arse up and I had to try something I'd never tried before and knew sod all about...rooting my phone in the cafe in Heathrow terminal 5 while hardly able to stand after nearly 30 hours awake at that point.  By some miracle I managed it... although last plane was late and I ended up seriously zombiefied by the time I got back home.

Still...it was worth it.

The Day Shit Went Badly Wrong

you may detect more than  a wee bit of stress in my blog today.  Just thank your lucky stars your not in the same room as me running around like a headless chicken after a day when things have went from fine to 'absolute shit storm'.  As you'll have guessed if you have read previous blog posts I've got to pop over to Vancouver for 4 days or so to lecture at Anomaly (http://anomaly.cgmovement.com/).  I am due to leave the house about 6.30am on Thursday morning.  it is now 6.36pm on Tuesday so I have tonight and tomorrow to have everything ready before I walk out the door.

..and to think it was all going so well...   

I had  what I was going to cover all sorted and files ready for final round up  onto my external travel drives, I had my clothes all ready to iron and pack, nice lists made of every damn thing I need to take. 

Then today happened.  let me list just some of what has went wrong since I got up this morning:

A - 2 T drive with all files on goes boom and is unrecoverable (looks to be fried by dodgy power supply)

B- I end up going all the way to Durham to get money changed with the wrong damn card.... was so tired after long hours putting apps back into formatted and repaired laptop that I picked wrong one up)

C - Have had to Lend my wife Kat's big ext drive...if that blows up I may as well emigrate to Siberia!

D- Its going to be another 'cutting it way to fine' pack and sort out of files...which I was trying to avoid.

E-Oh and having to copy /transfer terabytes of data over to make enough room on my smaller travelling ext drives for all the files I need! 

So now I have to copy so many files its ridiculous over to my bigger external drives from the smaller ones I was using to store old projects and videos I've recorded to make space.  I've also had to delete my own personal HD copies of all the QuickStart videos and every DVD I've ever recorded.  This is going to take well into the early hours to make enough space to ram as much of my files as I can onto them. So while my lecture is easy to re-sort out the files for, the 6 hour sculpting demo is sort of in the lap of whatever passes for gods in this dimension of ours.  Somewhere in all this I have to find time to do my final warm up sculpts as once I am in Vancouver I won't  have sculpted for 3 days (Thursday, Friday and till 6pm when the sculpting bit starts on Saturday).

My dad always says that its times like this when the shit is hitting several fans at once..that sort the men from the boys.  So I'll manage as I always do, yes probably a bit higher on the stress scale than usual, but I'll manage because that's what I do.  I'm an artist, I make art and no bloody stupid wall of stress is going to stop that. Although 1st thing I intend to do in Vancouver once unpacked etc on Wednesday afternoon is head out somewhere for a drinkies that night...I'll deserve it.  So if you live round the Robson street area of Vancouver on Wednesday night, do not be surprised to see a slightly jolly fat English bloke wandering round smiling. :)

Anomaly: Zero to Complete Still in 60 mins

I normally leave people wondering what I'm going to do for my lectures, often I just give the vaguest of hints in advance.  I'm breaking it this time   I'm going to recreate this image from the top down on 60 mins from start to end. 

 I'll be doing it for my lecture at Anomaly on Saturday 28th April in Vancouver. My mateDanny John Jules has give me permission to use the bike model I made for his upcoming  film 'Bucky'. The model fitted the scene perfectly and added a somewhat dark overtone to a otherwise cheerful scene.   (The image is entitled 'Missing'.... )

 This is my 'rough' version to tweak placements / ideas etc.   After my lecture I'll be sculpting and demoing from 6pm till just before midnight.  So for those going I'll see you there.

Anomaly :: Vancouver 28th April

Its time for some Anomaly pimpage as I promised them I would. :)

The image they used of mine must be 4Yr old and makes me shudder to look at it lol

I'll be at Anomaly in Vancouver on the Sat 28th April (next weekend to you and me). The other artists lecturing are easily worth the price of admission on their own....each. So if you in the Vancouver area it's well worth a pop over. I'll be lecturing on 3D digital environment stuff and then doing a 6 hour demo afterwards on the main floor (....that's gonna be interesting to do as not exactly a quiet environment to work in.) I'll be in Vancouver between the 26th and 30th so there for a few days should any peeps I know what to catch up.

If you're a 2D person then you'll be in heaven, if you're a 3d guys as well then it'll be bliss. I'm going to try and make a couple of the lectures by some of the others myself. That's if I can fit them in around the 6 hour of demos I'm doing , the inevitable jetlag and providing the rooms aren't full of paying people (as once the tickets are sold...that's it no more.)

I'm not even going to try and give you a big sell about what each person does as chances are you already know...and if you don't know then it's about time you learned about them;)

Here's the list of artists lecturing and demoing:

Andrew Domachowski

Charles Guan

Chris Bourassa

Craig Mullins

Daniel Dociu

Daryl Mandryk

Jason Stokes

Jelmer Boskma

Jon Schindehette (Wizards of the coast)

Luke Wakeford (Digital Domain)

Matthew Barrett

Mihai Anghelescu (Electronic Arts)

Mikko Kinnunen, (microsoft studios)

Paul Richards

Steven Chen

Terryl Whitlatch

Thomas Scholes

Tim Mack

Vinod Rams

Xin Wang (Blizzard)

Sunday Warm-Up 2

Sargent Tarkels...not many people sculpt him now do they? lol

I do all sorts of sculpts just for me that never ever see the light of day. I suppose in this case it could be classfied as 'fan art' sort of loosely as its based on the concept sketch for Sargent Tarkels...the 'other' gungan in episode one of star wars. As Terryl Whitlach is also a lecturer at Anomaly in a couple of weeks time in Vancouver, so when I saw her post the concept for this on her facebook page, it seemed the ideal thing to do as a warm up sculpt.

I have changed a few minor things here and there, I played around with the idea that the older a gungan got the longer and more droopy his snout would get....why...well why not? Plus its not as if everyone and his dog has done a version of this unlike just about every other star wars creature lol.

Now normally I dont post stuff based on other artists work or thing from films / comics I may sculpt as wamr ups because as a rule I try to make sure to ask for permission and suddenly then it gets all serious and stops being a fun warm up sculpt. (Thus negating the whole idea of a fun warm up)

If I had time I'd clean this up a fair old bit as its more than a tad rough to my eyes ..... but as a warm up...it'll do.

If you want to find out or details of the line up of lectures for Anomaly 2012 then visit the link below. I'll be doing a 1 hour lecture and demo on a certain type of photoreal environment and then a 6 hour demo on the creature / sculpting side the same day. (Where you can come and have a chat, ask questions, tell me how much you hate my accent etc...although all assasinations attepts must be from 11-11.30pm only I am told LOL :) )

For more information on Anomaly 2012 Click Here

Warming back up for creatures

Its been quite a while since I did any creatures, so with the cathedral shots out of the way its time for a bit of playtime and back to a few creatures.... so doing a few warm up sculpts to get back into the groove over the next week or two.

Cathedral : DONE!!

Finally it's done! There's a polycount in the tens of millions and brought not one but 2 PC's to their knees and me to the edge of insanity over the last 2 weeks of it. I've had dying machines to contend with, epic powercuts, both kids at home for 2 months due to crazy stuff by the local education authority who seem to see a simple move of schools as worthy of international debate...but I digress. The bottom line is its done.

Although modelling, texturing, lighting and rendering out the shots for both the Durham cathedral interior from last year and the exterior this year have been fun, I'd a little glad to be able to move onto something organic for a while. The above shot is a style frame from the actual shot done as part of the MOD302 class that's just wound up after 10 weeks spread over 3 months. Things can and do change before final composite although that could take quite a while before I see it. (The stuff from MOD 301 finished last October has only just came into my hands ..and there are still a few shots not rendered out and composited yet.) I'm sort of hoping I'm not the last dude to have it rendered out as be sort of a bitch if the guy who created it does not get to put it on a reel till after everyone else lol.

EDIT: Here's a quick reel of some of the shots I have got a hold of from MOD301 so far.

So no more Norman architecture for a while for Wayney boy! Its been full on 18 hours minimum a day the last few weeks and for most of this year in fact. So in one way its nice to have some more 'me' time and time for the wife and kids.

Its back to organics for a while and prepping for Anomaly in Vancouver for my lecture and demo at the end of this month. I can promise something special as you do not go to what could be called the 3d sculpting capital of the world unprepared ;) Not only is there the lecture but also 6 hours where I'll be demoing and available for questions and practical stuff as well.

I've not made an antique kids bike before to original specs...groovy.

Also I just did a quick logo for Danny John Jules film 'Bucky'. Very fast turnaround on this pone as a favour to Danny. I'd urge you to donate if you can as I'm probably one of the few people to have even a rough overview of what it's about (Danny has been purposely keeping it very secret). I can say it's going to be damn good.... I normally don't pimp other peoples stuff in my blog, but :

A - I count Danny as a mate

B - Its a very cool idea and story line

C - If I didn't he might get the thumbscrews out again...lol

So here is the LINK

So it's back to organics for me for a while so next week or so I'll be getting back up to speed after a year of mostly environment stuff. Expect monsters, expect creatures as it's been a bloody age since I did any. So no more banging on about the cathedral unless its to show you animated comped shots ;) ...mainly as of right now...my books are empty so back to freelance work searching for me.

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.