Okay. At last, I’m in.
ZBrush. Man, I’ve lusted after this program for years. It’s a 3D modeling package, but one aimed at people more accustomed to traditional modeling tools. Artards, in other words. Sadly, it’s like $800.
Naw, don’t worry, I’m not hitting you guys up for money. They offer a 45 day trial. The plan is, I download it, I make as many models as I can in 45 days, I upload them to TurboSquid (sort of like Zazzle for 3D models), and if that account ever reaches a high enough total to buy, I buy. If it never reaches $800, then I’m probably not all that good at it anyway.
So, here I go. I think I can remember a dim and distant time when learning new stuff was fun. Can you?
Oh, yeah. ExpressoBold takes the dick for René Angélil, Celine Dion’s husband. I hemmed and hawed about that pick, since I didn’t really know René Angélil from Adam. But then it occurred to me I don’t really know Celine Dion from Eve, so what’s the diff? Congrats, ExpressoBold — is that a second win? So, up Friday Dead Pool ROUND 80.
January 18, 2016 — 9:32 pm
Comments: 22
Gosh, is that the time?
Sorry, sorry…I’ve had my nose in tutorials all evening and I lost track of the time. Blender again — the free, Open Source 3D modeling and animation package.
I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, but I have promised myself I’ll slog through some tutorials this year and brush up on some of the tools I’ve used since forever. Sometimes, you learn one little trick and it opens whole worlds of possibilities.
Alas, I’m a long way from giving Mister Disney a run for his money.
Remember – here, tomorrow, six sharp Weasel Blog Time. NEW DEAD POOL!
February 8, 2013 — 12:05 am
Comments: 16
A good idea
Hm. So. I bought Dear Esther last night, which is an Indie game.
Actually, I would dispute calling it a game. You don’t really interact with stuff. You wander around a surreal landscape at will while a narrator (who is presumably you) randomly declaims fragments of a story. That’s potentially a cool ride, but it’s not a game.
I “finished” it tonight — that is, I reached the end scenario, though I haven’t seen all the content. If you watch the trailer at the link, you’ll pretty much have the whole experience, right there.
Dear Esther started life in 2007 at the University of Portsmouth as a free mod, using the Source game engine (Half Life 2). They decided to develop a commercial version, which was released on February 14 of this year. They cleverly charged a pittance (well, £7), and — much to their surprise — made their investment back in six hours.
So. Well. It was kind of like watching many indie films (something I did a lot of in my yoot). It was pretty to look at. Evocative. But after a while, you figured out that nothing was going to happen, nothing was going to be resolved, and they weren’t really ever going to tell you anything. If you like that kind of movie, you’ll love this.
Anyhow, I do hope they keep developing off-beat stuff like this. I think it could be a spectacular experience, with a bit less hippie and a bit more…meat.
February 22, 2012 — 10:57 pm
Comments: 11
Aw, adorable stoat baby
My new all-singing, all-dancing, 64-bit butt kicker graphic computer has allowed me to revisit all kinds of funness. Like Second Life.
I opened an account at Second Life four years ago (long-time readers almost certainly will not remember Monkeyface McShavedperson). But my old computer and my busy life meant I didn’t spend much time at it.
So, take two. New computer, no life. Until I am clever enough to build my own avatar, I had to buy one. Closest I could get to a stoat was this here albino ferret. Close but not quite right.
Fortunately, I was able to upload some graphics that were a little more…me. Here’s my game face.
I’ve already made one girl scream. Yay!
Anyhow, that’s the signal characteristic of Second Life — users can make things. There’s a simple 3D builder program and scripting language built in, and you can upload images and textures (for a small fee). It’s lead to a thriving online economy in virtual objects. A sort of Market of Weirdness.
Of course, this also makes SL laggy and hinky. You have to stand in one place for a while before you’ve downloaded all the custom objects and textures and your surroundings settle down a little.
The real appeal? I take a sneaking pleasure overhearing conversations, especially between users who have voice enabled. It’s like the old days when the phone lines would go fuckup and you could listen to a mystery conversation between strangers miles away. I’m not proud of this.
Also, people seem to love to say “Stooooateeeee.” I am proud of this.
Also, it’s in the back of my mind I might some day make my living crafting really good furry porn.
March 2, 2011 — 12:09 am
Comments: 22
Pixar, here I come!
So, Nina asked me what I could do with all this modeling stuff. Well, Miss Smarty, I can make a shiny disembodied gray chicken head float around and chew gum. NOW don’t you feel silly for asking?
Actually, the alert viewer will observe that he’s not really chewing. His bottom jaw has become dislocated and is flying around randomly inside his skull. Darn you, learning curve! Darn you to heck!
Have a good weekend, y’all.
February 18, 2011 — 10:57 pm
Comments: 47
Short attention span tutorials
Here’s how my mother used to convey information to me: “…it was Wednesday — I know it was Wednesday, because I was wearing my flat shoes with the buckle — and I was in town buying some Milk of Magnesia from the drugstore. You know, that place hasn’t been the same since Bud died. Heart’s gone right out of his wife. Anyhow, who comes in but Helen from the bank. I thought she looked a bit peaked…” This could go on for another fifteen, twenty minutes. There was NO speeding the process up.
Here’s me conveying the same information: “I bumped into the bank manager. You’re overdrawn.”
See, this is why I hate slogging through tutorials. They teach you stuff they way my mother does, by telling a pointless little narrative.
One of the early Blender tutorials shows you how to build and animate a gingerbread man. Along the way, you learn a little about the interface, a little about the modeler, a little about the materials editor, a little about the animator, and on and on. These are all completely separate, self-contained parts of the program. And they’re each hella complicated. (Oh, don’t even get me started on video tutorials, which inevitably waste precious seconds of my life with, “hello, my name is Tom Fuknutz, and today I’m going to walk you through the steps necessary to do some boring shit. This plastic doohickey is a mouse…”)
Soon, memories of my sainted mother come flooding back, my head explodes and I quit the tutorial process completely. At that point, I have no idea what most of the buttons do.
Me, I want a bullet list of broad concepts. Then I want somebody to walk me through every menu and button and write down what each and every one of them does. Even if I don’t yet have the background to understand what the explanations mean — though this kind of approach is especially helpful when you’re already familiar with some other, similar program. Kind of an Appendix A on the whole program. (I will say, Blender tooltips are better than most).
At one point, I started a project to put together tutorials on stuff I know for those who are similarly patience-challenged. I registered a domain for it and everything. Then I lost interest.
Ba-dum-bump.
February 17, 2011 — 9:51 pm
Comments: 13
MOAR FREE TOY!
Oh. My. God. This is so turbly, turbly fun to play with.
Pixologic, the people behind the astonishing but pricey Zbrush, offer a free tool called Sculptris (download link is at the bottom of the first post).
Fire it up, and there’s a big gray ball in the middle of the screen. You use your mouse to poke it and pull it and crease it and smooth it until it looks the way you want it to. Then you can output a mesh for use in other programs.
It takes about two seconds to learn the interface (start with D for draw, X to toggle whether you’re poking or pulling, [ and ] to make your brushes bigger or smaller, and Alt-LeftMouse to rotate your viewpoint).
Even if there’s not an artistic bone in your body, I bet you’ll enjoy mashing on this big ol’ digital ball of Play Doh. G’wan, it’s free!
Thanks to gogman for the recommendation. Sorry for all the artardalation this week. When I’ve got new toys, there’s NO getting anything sensible out of me.
February 16, 2011 — 11:06 pm
Comments: 10
Some little girls learned to cross-stitch
Me, I was murder on a Heathkit.
That’s the pen to my original old Wacom graphics tablet, which has been back and forth across the Atlantic many times, was chewed to bits by a teething kitten and finally heaved a sigh and stopped responding a couple of months ago. I have a newer, spiffier tablet for my desktop machine upstairs, but it’s been a pain in the ass not having a graphical wotsit to go with my laptop.
Turns out, a replacement pen is more expensive than buying a whole new rig on eBay, so I decided to try to Frankenstein this one back together.
See those two little wires? Yeah, the ones in the circle with the arrow pointing to them, Einstein. They lead from the coil in the tip back to the circuit board, along a hard piece of plastic. So every time the innards shifted in the outards, it crushed those poor little buggers until they finally broke.
Just a spoonful of solder, and I’m back in business.
Speaking of graphics, meet my new BFF. No, not Hillary — Jason Seiler (pronounced “syler”), the guy who drew this. I sent him a fan letter, and he wrote back and said “thanks” — so there you go!
I saw his illustration for this Weekly Standard piece and had to Google it. Turns out, I’ve seen (and lusted after) his stuff before.
Seriously, take a few minutes and browse through his main web site. He’s got some amazing work in there (at least hit the entertainment and political galleries).
Dude kicks multiple kinds of ass, including a couple of kinds of ass I didn’t even know existed.
March 2, 2010 — 11:23 pm
Comments: 18
The stealth fighter that almost torpedoed a weasel
The research and engineering company I work for really didn’t need Xtreme image processing technology to do boring old science. Computers that could do graphics cost gigantic bucks in the ’80s and, really, the ink-and-vellum we’d used for a hundred and twiddly-two years would do what needed doing just fine. The purpose of all that expensive computer graphics tech was marketing. It was worth a few hundred thousand corporate bucks for pie charts that made prospective clients go, “holy farging shift, what consummate geeks!”
So Weasel got excellent toys to play with.
We started with a turnkey business graphics system. Then, in 1987, when Photoshop was just a gleam in Thomas Knoll‘s eye, they bought me (me! Mine! Mine, I tell you!) a digital image processing system. Um, a thingie that did Photoshoppy stuff.
I had worked with photos for years before that, but even I have trouble remembering now what life was like before Photoshop. It was hard, slow and expensive to alter a photo in any way, and even the most skillful job usually looked like shit. People took for granted the accuracy of photos, because that was the correct thing to do.
All that changed with digital image processing, and I had a blast giving people their first taste of it. My workstation was a standard stop on the company tour. Typically, I would take a snapshot of the man standing in front of me and merrily erase his mustache, give him a third eye and make his ears the size of dinnerplates, in real time. Oh, to see the sweet innocence fade from a middle-aged businessman’s eye!
Another cool thing we could do, because we did all our film processing in-house, was create nifty graphics and produce slides (remember slides?) while a meeting was still in progress. My favorite was the time we captured a picture of the client’s corporate offices from the back page of his annual report, and I used my P’shoppical skills to set the building on fire. I’m told several old guys in rumpled suits leapt up and dashed for the phones when that slide came up. w00t!
So this one time, shortly after we bought the image processor, we were in talks with Lockheed and the salesdude wanted me to make him a nice title slide beforehand. I was given a photo of a plane that was just crap. TOTALLY blurry and out of focus. I couldn’t believe it; it was the shittiest photo I’d ever been given to work with.
Scandalized, I set about cleaning it up. I mean, it was pretty easy to make out what the thing looked like under the blur, if you were a highly trained professional artard like what I am. And so, using my mad illustration skillz, I basically did a light, semi-transparent drawing on top of the photo. It was coming along pretty good, too — downright photorealistic-looking — when my boss walked in and shrieked like he was a little girl and I just dropped a frog down her blouse.
Yeah, see, the F-117 Nighthawk was still highly classified in 1987, and that blurry, deliberately fucked-up photo was the only one that had been officially released — and then only to Lockheed’s technical partners. Who knew? Not this weasel, for sheasel.
So, back in the days when photos never lied, what were my chances of explaining to the nice men from the FBI or the CIA or the Secret Service or whoever how I came by a nice, clean photo of their sooper-secret stealth dingus?
July 1, 2008 — 11:28 am
Comments: 31
My kung fu is strong
Long time readers may recall that I observe the Birthday Fortnight (working my way up year by year to the Month of Birthday). My actual birthday falls somewhere in the first two weeks of May. In the interests of amoniminty, that is all I shall say. As a first of the birthday tributes, Uncle B bought me a drawing program called Manga Studio 3.
Not to worry, I’m not about to start drawing weasels in teeny tiny sailor suits with eyes the size of dinner plates. It’s just a drawing program that is specially designed for black and white line work, à la comix. It does things like calculate vanishing points and make speed lines and comic panels.
It’s kick-ass fun to play with. If any of you still harbor that old, old desire to be a comic book artist, there’s a 30-day free trial. I can’t work out the difference between the $50 version (which I got) and the $300 version, BUT IF THE MANUFACTURER SENT ME A COPY I’D BE HAPPY TO TEST DRIVE IT AND THEN FLOG THE SHIT OUT OF IT RIGHT HERE ON THIS BLOG.
That’s going to work one of these days. I just know it.
May 5, 2008 — 11:05 am
Comments: 35