2020 Check In, Sort Of

 It's been a while hasn't it?  Ha! For the two people and the egg McMuffin reading this, I hope 2020 hasn't been too rough on you. It's almost over, kind of, probably ... /crossesFingers. Been trying to fit in personal artsy projects lately because I'm now cross eyed from staring at code. And this sketch was going well until I showed an Aussie friend and the word "gobby" got totally ruined. 😐

 





I've Defected to Redshift!

It's official.  I've made the switch to Redshift.  And now, zero watermarks (which were surprisingly discreet to begin with)  /doesALittleDance





Redshift is Annoyingly Awesome


 
Original was 2132x1200 and it finished way too fast =.=.  Sorcery!

You know when you're skeptical about something that others just won't shut up about and then you finally cave in only to end up getting irritated with yourself for not trying it sooner because that thing turned out to be freaking awesome?  Yep! Happened to me!  I sat there feeling confused at the speed, annoyed at the quality and guilty because it was so easy to set up. Sheer witchcraft!

Small Bathroom W.I.P Part 1

It's been a pretty long time since I've blogged!  And to be quite honest, 3D has taken kind of a backseat (I wonder what gave that away?). Anyways, I'm getting back into it!

Test renders! This is what I've got so far.  And I have to say, I'm having a love hate relationship with the GI prototype.  While it's great in settings with a lot of direct light and creates more natural looking lighting with less fuss, it starts requiring a significant boost to sampling to smooth out scenes with heavy indirect lighting.

Still some grain :(
 
I was a little suspicious of the mila shaders, especially with the new look dev Hypershade window constantly crashing Maya but after becoming more familiar with them (and no longer using the look dev feature), I'm annoyed that I didn't jump on these sooner. 

The Maya Toolbelt

Did you open Maya for the first time, took one look at the sea of icons and thought "O.K, which colorful icons are the modeling tools and what sequence of these buttons do I click to make my robot unicorn?". Well guess what? Michael McKinley made and is continuing to make a collection of videos on Youtube called The Maya Toolbelt to help relieve the fear and confusion.  Each video is dedicated to explaining an individual tool!

Michael goes through not only the tool's purpose but also the options associated with it. Check out this one of the "Insert Edge Loop Tool". I'll admit, I was making my life harder by manually doing what a couple of those options did /cry. I think its a great idea to have a reference library for Maya's many, many tools, so kudos on this!  He's aiming to release one every week and he's also open to suggestions so if you have any tool you'd like to see covered, drop him a line, subscribe and stay tuned!