A Test animation (done only to show the blend shapes /morph targets in action and nothing else)




..and a turntable of the cross I did shown in the last post. Oh and you may want to head over to www.FilterFoundry.com as theres another shed load of hours of videos of mine up now brining it up to about 8 hours of in depth mudbox tutorials for total beginners. You have to join (for free) but hey your getting the equiv of 1-2 dvd's worth of tuts for nothing! These videos effectivly replace my Wave 1 DVD (as filter foundry paid me enough to make sure that they could be put them out for free for you).

Death, parts and animated lions

A good friend of my family died last week that I'd known since I was a small child, while its a very sad story I'll hold off on the details out of respect for everyone who is still greiving. Suffice it to say that Hilda helped me when my life was at its lowest back when I was homeless and was a really amazing woman. She was in her 80's when she died, but she probably had more vitality than most 16 year olds!

As she was cremated today and wouldn't be getting a headstone , I thought I'd make her a virtual one as I'm a big beliver that you give back to people with what skills you have.

The videos are still coming on Filter Foundry (in fact that reminds me I still have the rest to upload lol, I must start them away once this is done), and I trust your enjoying them. I have been asked to do some more so I'll definately try to when I have time, a bit more advanced this time, and maybe on software other than mudbox and othe than sculpting software for a change.

Also I had a quick mess around with a single 2k diffuse and normal map for a building parts kit (to stick in my models folder and be used to create anyone of a number of buildings and to be dragged out when needed), ignore the more obvious problems as this was only a way to warm up and fill an hour or two. The 'Mad in the Med' TV series starring Danny John-Jules that I've been working on the CGI for has been put back a month, so I'll give you a heads up on that one when the time comes. ( There's a full animated lion in there myself and Rob Angol who I brought in to handle the body rig did. I aslo recommended Sparkle media to handle the editing on the series.)

So next up will be a TV series that's already started on Sky that I can't name until just before the episode I worked on airs. If you have kept an eye on new TV series though you may have narrowed down the list a bit lol. This is something gory and photoreal I did.

As I type I'm just comping an anaimtion 'for me' with an old-ish model and its looking pretty nice so far.

New Site design live for www.DashDotSlash.net

Well this is it, no turning back now, chances are that if your reading this there's a very good chance that you got here via DashDotSlash.net (my main 'work' and portfolio sites) new redesign. The old design needed replacing as it had become less about the art and more about selling you stuff. I suppose I knew the time had came for a big change when I stuck the art t-shirts on the front of my site (as a joke by the way nothing more), alas people took it all a wee bit too seriously and more importantly some had got so caught up with looking at stuff to buy that they totally bypassed its entire reason to exist....the art.

Now that's not good, in fact as my sons favourite TV show (Charlie and Lola's Lola character) would say 'it's very extremely not at all good'. So something had to be done ...and sharpish

I had planned on rolling this new design out a bit sooner but alas I got caught up on models for 2 different TV shows, the teaching videos I was asked to do for FilterFoundry.com and various other stuff for Project 2813 games. Alas there are only so many hours in the day and sometimes you have to prioritise a bit. I should be able to show stuff and outline about the TV shows in about a month once the second one has been broadcast.

On a side note I've been doing a bit more programming (Yes I know I said I was going to stop as it simply takes up no time for very little financial return, but this was a paid gig and I try not to turn down decent money lol). More of that once it's out as its for a non Autodesk company.

Also I knocked up in my dinner hour from programming the aforementioned 'thing' a new Mudbox plug-in called MudTidy. Now I warn you it's not going to rock your world, as it's a utility plug-in that creates in the same directory as your Mudbox scene file a set of folders for everything from maps, or reference images to FBX files to Maya and 3Dmax and Softimage folders etc. Basically it's to help keep things tidy and organised so you don't lose valuable assets at any stage. It was knocked out in about 40 mins and I may add a few things to it as I have time. You can get it for Mudbox 2011 (both vanilla and subscription advantage pack versions) for 64 bit only on PC HERE.

I stopped supporting 32 bit versions of Mudbox a while back as to be blunt using a 32 bit version of Mudbox is like putting a Skoda engine in a Ferrari lol. Plus every version I support, its yet another version of the SDK to have on my machine, and that's without getting into Mac and Linux versions. I may well do compiles for both those OS's at some point, but like all things it depends vastly on time.

Test Post

This is a test post as I've decided to move my hard coded blog on my site www.DashDotSlash.net to a one pulled from this data.