Hermit crabs etc...

Hey all, many of you know that I have two new pets. Unfortunately I lost one of them. I'm sad for my little hermit crab, he wasnt with me long. The other one seems okay though, here's a picture of us at the beach!


In other news, I'm working on a generic character rig. The school's been using other rigs off the internet, but it's high time we had our own customized for our purposes. Also, since there's plenty of cartoony rigs out there, we wanted something a little more normal. That means that it's not all that interesting, but it'll work for all kinds of situations (and genders), especially when a guy with a huge jaw or wearing tighty-whitey's is not all that appropriate to the scene. Here's the concept - thanks to Craig Scheuermann.

A quick render

We're busy rendering away, here's a quick composite that I put together. Chris Henderson will be making up the final shake template and we'll mess with Depth of Field later, but I just had to see what things were looking like all put together. Enjoy the HD720 render. Pretty Sweet!

The end is near

Hey all, my last quarter has begun and it looks to be as busy as ever. I'm taking two electives and Thesis, in addition to trying to finish Inside the Box, and find a job. So far I'm very excited about my intro to programming for visual effects class. I know nothing about Renderman or TCL, so hopefully I'll pick up enough to be a good foundation if I ever want to learn more in the future. However, I've heard that Pixar is going to be replacing Renderman and TCL soon, so I may be a bit late to the party. I'm way ahead on the MEL portion of that class, but my Professor is helping me find new ways to be challenged. My naturalistic 3D character animation class should be alright as well. We're doing some motion capture, so I hope to get a handle on our Vicon system and the IQ software. I also hope to pick up the ole' animation skills and dust them off a bit. Thesis is ongoing, but I've made some significant progress in the past day or two. With any luck, I'll have an updated website soon that'll have JTDriggingTools available for download.

In other news, I have some new pets! Ashley gave me two hermit crabs for Christmas! They live in a little habitat next to my computer. I also have a Chia Garfield to take care of, so I have my hands full. Until next time...