Time to Start Updating Again

Well, it's certainly been a while since the last update. Blogger recorded that my last post was on October 8, 2007, and today is February 21, 2008, so it's been... a little over 4 months. Geeze... Some of you have asked (or screamed at) me to update, and since I need to update the blog links to the right, here I am. =P

A lot has happened over the last four months... ended a semester of school, went through vacation, started another semester of school, bought a new computer, bought new peripherals, played, slept, and ate. The new computer is great (more details below if you're interested), and it's heck of a lot easier to work (and play...) now. The downside is that I blew most of what I saved for the last two years or so, but the upside is that my computer seems to be faster than the systems at school (handling models and rendering scenes in Maya, to be specific). =D

So now onto updates on art related stuff. I've been meaning to retexture zTrex (textured it once but I didn't like it) and upload some renders for those who wanted to see, and I still haven't gotten around to it. =P I'm sure I will soon enough, but for now I'll present a render to advertise my weight lift test animation (huh?):

I will be doing a weight lift animation using the Moom rig. It will undoubtedly be really short, but I think I have an idea that'll make it fun to watch should I pull it off well. I had a certain look in mind but spent a few hours trying to figure out how to do it in Maya. Basically, I wanted the look of those Apple commercials in which characters interact in a completely blank world, save for the shadow. The issue for me was in figuring out how to get real time shadows to appear on a completely white background... and I solved it. What appears above may be deceptively simple, but it took some googling and tweaking to get the look above. Excluding the text, nothing was made/retouched in Photoshop. For anyone up to the challenge, I would like to see how you would approach this. There may be a simpler way to do it than the way I did it, but I would like to know if any of you know a better way to get this look in Maya. Until then, I'm content with it. =)

Well, that's it for now. I will try to be more frequent in my updates. Thanks to all of you sticking around. =)

*For those interested: I bought the computer customized at AVA Direct. It's great if you have the know-how and time to build your own system because you could save big bucks, but if you don't have either, AVA Direct's a great choice (just check out their reviews on ResellerRatings). I probably paid about $200-300 more than I would've had I built it myself, but for the 3 year warranty and prompt customer support they give you, it may be well worth it (they make sure there are no hardware conflicts, rigorously test your configuration for stability, and gave me a free game upon my request =P ). I spent less than $2000, but these are the specs for my new system:
- Intel Q6600 (SLACR G0 stepping) overclocked to 2.7Ghz.
- eVGA Superclocked GeForce 8800GT
- G.Skill 4GB (2x2) of RAM
- ASUS P5K-E motherboard
- Western Digital 150GB Raptor (booting drive)
- Western Digital 750GB Caviar SE 16 (storage/backup)
- Windows Vista Home Premium Edition x64
Computer is very fast and responsive. Because my OS is 64-bit, it makes use of all 4GB of RAM and because it's Vista, it makes use of all four cores to render. =)

**Non-active blog links have been removed.