3ds Max, Day One
So I spent the past 8-ish hours experimenting with both Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max. After tinkering around with both, I have come to favor 3ds Max more. I feel that Maya is better suited for animation, but to each their own of course.
This is really just a small piece of work done on my first day of using 3D modeling. I spent about 3 hours creating the 3D work (though it would take probably take a skilled person 30 minutes tops) and another 3 in Photoshop. Not exactly super-excited about the finished product, but it’s a good benchmark to start at. Here’s to my future projects, cheers.
Shared: Kelly Kin
Last night, I discovered that a friend of mine, Kelly Kin, is an amazing digital artist who specializes in a lot of 3D modeling and animation. She showed me a plethora of her works, all of which were very interesting and appealing to me. Most people don’t understand, but a lot of work goes into what Kelly does. It was just very fascinating to get a glimpse of how much blood and sweat goes into her work. Here are two of her works, each of which took months to complete. The first is a 30-second short animation titled “The Moon and the Well” and the second is a 3D demo featuring dynamic shading, textures, reflections, refractions, and hair scattering. I also want to mention that the second work actually isn’t final and may be completed in the next months ahead.
I am very inspired by the work she does. I have always loved graphic design, but I have always been limited by the software that I use, that being only Photoshop. As a result, I lack practically any skill in 3D art. Kelly suggested that I should try it out if ever given the chance. Thankfully as students, we are able to use Autodesk modeling software for free. I now have Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max installed. Both are pretty great, but I am starting to favor 3ds max more, as I’m not really committed to animation as Kelly is. Hopefully I can use these tools to better myself as a designer and find ways to merge these skills with programming.
Design Mania
For the past day I’ve been taking the time redesign my website. It’s the first full-fledged layout redesign I’ve done in almost two years. The source code I used was from the Boldly theme generously offered by Site5. I’m glad I found it, as I was contemplating paying for a premium theme and saving time. I adjusted every last bit of source code and tweaked every image to my liking and I have to say, I’m quite proud of myself. They layout is far more stable, up to date, and performs significantly better than the previous theme. And do you see that big, beautiful Nivo slider on the front page? Awesome! It’s quite safe to say that layout well be here for a long time. Hopefully.
On another note, I forgot mention here that the TAMU Epic Movement website I’ve been working on is finally complete. We delivered it to them shortly after Christmas. Unfortunately, the site is a bit slow at the moment since we’re all still enjoying winter break, but it should start to pile up once the spring semester starts. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you should! See what Epic Movement is all about and what I’ve been getting myself involved with these days. Order a shirt while you’re at it, will ya?
Alright, enough with the shameless advertising. Moving on to other things, School starts in less than two weeks. I find this hard to believe, time seems to be flying almost effortlessly and I’m not to ecstatic about it. I leave for Anthology in Dallas in exactly one week, so my time here alone running out. Darn, just when I was just starting to enjoy my peaceful time alone. Might as well continue to study more Korean and brush up on Calculus a bit while I still have the chance.
Desktop overview: May 9, 2011
I have two final exams tomorrow. Like any other student, I’m stressed out about them. But alas, I simply know what I know. Hopefully it’ll be enough. I should be sleeping soon, but I did a little bit of spring cleaning on my desktop and took a snapshot for archiving purposes. Goodnight.
Primary: Desktop
Theme: Windows 7 Aero (No glass color)
Wallpaper: Portal 2 70′s Style by Tristan Reidford
Desktop Items:
- Recycle Bin
- Dropbox Folder
- HTC Home Widget
Taskbar Programs:
Desktop overview: April 1, 2011
Primary: Virtual Machine
OS: Ubuntu 10.10Theme: GAIA Sprout by lassekongo83
Wallpaper: heaven on earth by jocosity
Desktop Items:
- Computer
- Home Folder
- Windows Share (direct access to files on Host OS)
Taskbar Programs:
- Force Close
- Terminal
- Google Chrome
- Pandora One Desktop
As of recently I’ve begun to start using a virtual machine to code C++ in a Linux environment. It’s exciting, but frustrating at the same time. Probably more frustrating to be honest. I’ve been a dedicated Windows power user since day one, which explains my complete lack of Linux knowledge. I’m not really used to all of the sudo, chmod, repository lingo just yet, but it’s great to learn. The Ubuntu virtual machine I’m using is powered by VirtualBox and it’s pretty darn stable and feature-rich. As far as system resources go, the ratio between host (Windows) and guest (Ubuntu) is 6:2 for CPU cores and 10:6 for GB of RAM. I might be giving Ubuntu more resources than it needs, but Windows can’t use it all anyways, so it doesn’t matter. I hope to be learning more in the coming months. Soon, I’ll probably be using a little bit of wget magic just like Zuckerberg did in The Social Network.
Gotta break out emacs and modify that perl script, son.