June sketches 04

A few more sketches. June is drawing to a close, and I feel really good about all the sketching I've done. It's been good learning, though I'm wanting to spend some more time in Maya soon.

I was sitting through an awards ceremony, and I felt inspired to reproduce the backs of people's heads.

This is obviously some guy running down a road wearing a suit (from my imagination). The hands are a bit funny; not sure I've ever seen someone run like that.

And finally a fire hydrant that I was sketching, got bored with, and decided to light on fire (the lighting on fire was in my imagination).

And in case you haven't visited my Facebook page yet, you might be interested to know that there's a couple of "facebook exclusive" images there. Oooh. But not to worry, all the major stuff will be posted here (and there).

Later,
Stuart

June sketches 03

Continuing on with more sketches... it's pretty fun to sketch while watching TV or whatever, a good habit to get into I suppose (the sketching, not the TV... or computer-streaming-foreign-television). Anyway.

I can freely admit that this is not my foot. It is a representation of my foot, which may or may not have accurate proportions. Don't judge my foot based on this sketch.

 This is some kind of plant I conceived. I'd be interested to hear what a botonist would classify this as. "Just plain wrong" in all likelihood. At least it has stamen. Stamen. Which is an anagram of T' seman. Yeah, that didn't work.

And finally, a portrait. This was a nice-looking young Ugandan guy; I apologize to him for not doing his likeness justice.

It's interesting how the scanner reads in the values... it picks up a slightly different feel than on paper.

Thanks for viewing.
Later,
Stuart

June sketches 02

I'm a little behind on my sketching, I missed yesterday (and today) due to various celebrations. Of three siblings, there's three graduations (university and high school) and I just got back from a wedding rehearsal (cousin-in-law)... so I have excuses. But I'll double up on some days so I catch up.
Here's a couple recentish ones.

 From a photograph I took in Uganda

This one started out as car from my imagination, and it ended up in a Cars style... nothing on Pixar obviously, but I thought it was a bit more fun than a boring ol' regular car.

I still need very approximately 17 "likes" on facebook (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Biocinematics/208080205900018) in order to secure my coveted facebook.com/biocinematics so I'm hoping you can help me out :)

Getting closer to finishing my acrylic painting at art lessons... only two more to go, unfortunately. Then I'm on my own again with respect to IRL artwork (IRL = in real life... haha) until September.

Later,
Stuart

"Social" networking

So... after a three year absence from facebook, I bit the bullet, and Biocinematics now has an official facebook page. I also signed up for twitter (@Biocinematics). Am I a fan of facebook? Pretty much no. Am I a fan of Twitter? Not really. Heck, I don't even have a cellphone. So why bother with these things?

Well, partly because even though I have serious reservations with constant "connectedness", it is kinda fun. And part of it is because even though I don't have a personal facebook page, most people do, and many people find it easier to follow a twitter feed than a real blog... so why not use other (more popular) media to share things? I still very much plan on using this blog as the main location for all major updates and project progress. However, it may be handy to share shorter bits of info or links using twitter, or to have a different kind of community with facebook.

And probably the biggest part of it is that if I plan on using the internet for work (especially freelancing), networking, distribution, and "self-promotion" may play a big role, so keeping up to date with social media trends is part of my education, as strange as it may sound.

Regardless of all this introspection, it'll be fun to figure out how each of these formats plays a role both in my personal projects and in my masters degree, which is rapidly approaching. Wait, that sounded like more introspection.


Like me! Follow me! Subscribe, retweet, share! Click all those buttons that validate my existence! Make sure I spend all my time updating statuses and cross-linking everything I've ever done! Lest I realize that it's more important to work on projects!

Okay, I'm hoping this will be the last "misc" post for a while. Once June is over, I'm hoping to start another short project; although I'll be wrapped up in finding housing, packing, moving, getting immunized against cadaver germs, I'm still planning on getting some good chunks of Maya time in.

Oh yeah, and Cinema 4D (a homolog of Maya) is part of the BMC curriculum (notice the difference between BMC [Biomedical Communications] and BCM [Biocinematics]), so I want to get a trial and gain familiarity with the program this summer too. And Zbrush. And lots more drawing...

Two more weeks of work; my current real job, that is!

Later,
Stuart

Mobile version

Blogger just informed me that I can use a new mobile version of this blog for people that view the interwebs on their cellular telephones. What a future we live in! I suppose that's why we have an upswing in cellphone size trends, so they can fit the internet in there too.

All that to say, if you visit biocinematics.blogspot.com on your iDroid device, you'll get a slightly less pretty and substantially more functional format.

Go Canucks!

Later,
Stuart

June sketches 01

Alright, so I managed to get around to scanning all the sketches I've done in the past ~6 months... and here are four from June, as I'm continuing on with my personal challenge to do at least one sketch (or sculpt, see below, please don't see below). So far so good (please don't see below). Actually, this first sketch was done late May, but I'll throw it in, because I think it's not a bad hand study.

And oh my goodness, could this be the sketch that the below sculpt was based on? It hardly seems possible.

And here's old Bogart himself. Apparently there was a girl's night on, watching Casablanca, and I happened to be in the room. I missed most of the plot, but that's okay.

Yeah, for the observant folks in the crowd, those last two were done on the same day. I swear, I've been doing (at least) one every day... and here's the last one for now... it seems to make my wife smile... me, I just looked on the internets and this thing seemed to be everywhere.

"LOL!!"

Later,
Stuart

The horror, the horror

Okay, I'm getting sick of that hockey post below... argh. In case you're not following the interNHL, the team that's supposed to be winning the Stanley Cup is currently choking a bit. So enough of that. I've been faithfully sketching and doodling, and I'll probably post some scans pretty soon cause I'll get sick of looking at this post.

Seriously, it's hideous. It's embarrassing. It's just plain awful. And the only reason I'm posting it is a) to update the blog b) to prove I'm sketching and "sculpting" daily c) to show you that ZBrush is REALLY hard to get the hang of. Seriously (I said that already), the navigation is SO unintuitive and hair-tearingly irritating that the only reason I'm not dumping it right now is because I've seen some of the superbly gorgeous and inspiring work artists have done with this program. So I'm assuming that with hard work and perserverance, it gets easier. I might even grow to *gasp* appreciate the controls.
... and d) It's nice to look back and see how much progress you've made. Here's hoping I get to.

Later,
Stuart

Whooooooo!

2 wins away from the Stanley Cup! Whooo! Whatta game! Anyway, you're probably not interested in all that... and I really have nothing else to say. 4 days into my June challenge and I've finished 4 sketches. I'll probably post a few of the better ones (a couple of them I'm not too happy with) pretty soon.

I've also downloaded a 30 day trial of ZBrush (pronounced zed-brush in Canada I believe) which I've only played around with a bit. The interface is very different from what I'm familiar with so it'll be quite the learning curve. No matter, I think I've decided that there are essentially 4 programs that will be most worth my energy to "master"... Maya, Photoshop, After Effects (or Nuke) and ZBrush. These seem to be industry standards and each cover a different aspect of a CG pipeline. Of course it's easy to say I'll just master these incredibly huge programs, but sometimes I get overwhelmed with the number of software packages out there. Of course I often get overwhelmed with how huge each of these packages is too... but I think I started out talking about hockey. Baby steps, right?

Later,
Stuart

PS Yeah, one of these times I'll post a picture. Anyone clicked on a +1 button yet? Also, if you haven't voted on the poll yet, I'm gonna take it down soon... doesn't matter if you're family or friends or a complete stranger, just poke one of the buttons.

PPS Later

+1?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you may or may not have heard of google's "facebook killer" (safe bet; the guess, not the "facebook killer" bet). I'm going to go out on another limb and say that this isn't a facebook killer. So what's the deal with this and why do all of these posts have a +1 button? What happens if I click that button? (If you don't see a +1 button anywhere, it means your computer is probably infected with a virus... either that or try going to the main Biocinematics page... or wait a few weeks for the feature to get rolled out in your area).

The deal is that this is Google's new way of trying to get people to "like" things; typically search results, but also other things like posts (c.f. the bottom of this post). It's not a bad idea, because it could be helpful to give feedback on good sites that are returned from a given search. If someone searches for "science animation" and something other than biocinematics comes up, it might be good to hit a +1 on that site if it's really relevant to science animation. Then your friends and contacts can see that you thought that site was cool and to "check it out" (not my words).

So... part of it is a "social networking" thing, and part of it is improving search results and ranking *cough*. If you don't have a google profile, it looks like you can't hit that +1 button, BUT, I believe you can create a google profile and make your "+1s" private if you so choose, which would probably make me more free with my +1 dolings out.

So why'd I even write a post on this new fangled e-button pushings? Partly cause I didn't feel like scanning my last sketch and posting it, but I still felt like posting something... and partly cause I want YOU (a few phalanges aimed in your general direction) to click on the +1 buttons on the posts you think are hip and/or rad and/or helpful.

Whaaaat? That was just all self-promotion? Sell-out!

Not so, not so. If you take note, I didn't tell you hit the "Share to Twitter", "Mail this", "Blog this", "Share to Facebook", or "Share to Google Buzz" buttons...

I ran out of things to say just now.


"No no, it's spelled Raymond Luxury-yacht, but it's pronounced Throat-wobbler Mangrove"


Later,
Stuart

June Challenge

I've decided to do a June challenge, not from a maya site, just a personal challenge. I'm going to valiantly attempt to do a sketch-a-day. A drawing or a digital sculpt will constitute a sketch, so that's how I'm going to tackle it. "Hoi hoi," you might be saying, "shouldn't you be drawing every day anyway?" to which I have only one thing to say... "Ni!" Which, you might know from your programming class, is from the Python language.

So, in case you weren't counting, that's a total of 31 pieces of creative outflowings. No, 30 days hath September, April, June, and November. June hasn't had 31 days since Julius Augustus. Look it up.

Later,
Stuart