Blogging, Who has the Time???

Sorry to the two people other than me who have bookmarked this blog. It has been a year and a half since I updated this blog. Way too much work has been done since then to post here. So, a couple of highlights and shout-outs:

First, Tower 37 released online a few weeks ago to viral viewership. If you haven't seen it, now's your chance: You Tube Link.

Also keep your eyes peeled for Caldera, Bitfilms' next amazing short directed by Evan Viera, co-written by the talented Viera-Bishop team and produced by the debonaire Chris Perry.

Closed my 3rd year of grad school last month: here are a few color script images from my thesis, LEAP:













And a couple of recent sketches I liked:























File under things I built while you were asleep, here are some much anticipated pics of Peapod, the family runabout, here without her mast and rudder, which are still in the workshop.

























That's all for today. I promise to be a better blogger. My new job and easier commute allow me more time for drawing. Hopefully I will have a completed color script done this summer for LEAP.

I am your father Skywalker

Halloween, another excuse to build coolness. Plus I ate a ton of resese peanut butter cups! :) Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

Check out the authentic Tatooine energy farmer utility belt, all the best T16 pilots are wearing them.

Recover Deleted 1Tb WD My Book World

I know it has been a while since I posted and this might come off as a bit of a non-sequitor, but I feel like I just won the lottery. Earlier this week I accidentally deleted a folder share on my WD My Book World Edition (white light.) That folder had pretty much every piece of data I've ever created in the world and I hadn't yet backed it up. (You, go back-up now!) If it's too late, This entry might just save your life like it did mine.

Just so you know, I tried a week's worth of recovery applications in both XP and Linux with the drive hard-wired to my mobo and networked before I found the solution.

The 1Tb WD My Book World is an NAS drive. It basically has a small on board controller and a miniature Linux build that serves the file sharing system. If you are reading this you are probably in a panic, but don't skip ahead, this stuff is important to know. The drive has 4 partitions, two are RAIDed EXT3 partitions, this is where the file server lives along with the Linux share as a third Partition. These partitions come up anywhere between 100 Mb and 2 Gb. The file store is in the 928 Gb fourth partition. That partition is XFS. This is important, and why the manual says it is not possible to recover deleted files. Basically the drive is just not configured for undelete. Do not despair.

If you accidentally deleted a file share on your WD My Book and you haven't been able to recover anything that seems even slightly logical, try this:

Warning: You are going to void the warranty of your drive if you follow my directions. If you don't want to void your warranty, use one of the data recovery services listed on WD's website. That will run you anywhere form $300 - $2700 to recover your files.

Disconnect your drive. You should have done this in a panic already, in fact if you haven't and you have been messing around on the drive too much, some or all of your data may already be corrupt.

Now remove the drive from the white case. Be gentle, a strategically applied screwdriver along the front corner seams, gently twisted is sufficient for opening the drive. You are going to plug this directly into your motherboard. The drive is a SATA drive, you might need a cable, Radio Shack sells them for 9 bucks. Plug the drive into your motherboard, there are tutorials for this all over the net if you don't know how to do this.

In Windows, you want to make sure you can see the drive and it's partitions. You won't see it in My Computer, but you should see it in Administrator Tools>Computer Management>Disk Manager. It will show up as a group of unnamed partitions totaling 931.51 GB for the 1Tb version. At this point, don't mess around.

Windows can't access EXT2/3 file systems by default so a helpful utility to install on your main C: drive is FS-Driver. Find it at www.fs-driver.org. This will give you shell level access to the ext3 file sytem. The data you are recovering is in an XFS file system, but it is good to be able to access these partitions.

The only other tool you will need is Raise Data Recovery for XFS. Make sure you get the XFS version. This is not free, but you can test it for free and do your scan, but not save any file over 64K. The program only costs 30 euros, so it is well worth it, because it works perfectly. SysDev Laboratories, the Ukrainian outfit that makes Raise Data Recovery estimates that their software can recover 99% of the lost data in XFS file system and 80% of the directory naming. This is important, because what are you going to do with a pile of files named lostfile_xxxxxxx.ext. That's what some recovery aps recover. Raise gets everything. So if a folder was recently rewritten, it might change the directory name to something like inode1234567 but for the most part, I found everything else intact.

At first, I wasn't sure I had gotten everything. So be sure to check every folder Raise spits out. My stuff was really far down the list and two inode1234546 directories deep, but it was all intact with the correct names.

Now, if you haven't, register your software and save the important files to another HD and back it up. The reassemble your WD my book and plug it in and start over.

All I can say is thanks Raise Data Recovery. I hope this post helps someone who, like me, was stupid twice; once for not backing up and once for deleting without checking.

School work and animation news.

Summer vacation from The Academy is finally here, I feel like I can relax a bit and get back to wasting time on the internet. Here are a few shots of some end of term work.



This is a lion muscle study modeled in Maya and finished in ZBrush.


This is a male torso muscle study, also modeled in Maya and finished in ZBrush.


Finally, the Tesla Roadster model. NURBS built in Maya rendered with approximation in Mental Ray.




I will set up a separate post for my hand-painted textures and lump them all together.

On another note. I have started work on another short animation with Bitfilms. Some of you already know that the last film, Incident at Tower 37, is getting some very nice attention on the festival circuit. You can follow along at Chris Perry's blog, Crumbs. If you are interested in seeing the film, there is a festival show schedule here.

Things I built before you woke up this morning

Actually, I built this last night. I should say Xander and I built it. He was instrumental in cutting the bungs, sanding and capping the roof. We had a good time and he got to stay up till after 10. The resulting birdhouse, suitably constructed to house chickadees, wrens, titmice or downy woodpeckers, will be auctioned off to benefit Hartsbrook school.

I expect we will be building more of these in the near future. since it was such a quick and rewarding project.

Cakes (for fun)

Lately I have been making a lot of cakes, each one slightly more elaborate than the last.
I started simply enough with decorative animal cakes.

Things began to heat up with the cake of the pyramids.

The big deal cake of the year was the marzipan dissection frog cake for a biology teacher friend's birthday.

Around here, the hero animal is the hedgehog. I don't have an explanation of this but it resulted in this life size hedgehog cake for Juliette's birthday.

Jeepers. I didn't think it had been a whole season since I put anything in this blog. Well here goes: I just started semester 3 of my MFA so I will have some more work soon. Here are a few images from last semester:

These are some of the sculptures from my figure modeling class. No new 3D or animation stuff this round. I needed to get a few graduate studies courses out of the way first. Actually I lied, here is some 3D stuff. The concept here was to create a vocabulary journal for a post-colonial studies class. My treatment of the project was to create a pseudo-game that used images of other games and toys to represent the meanings of the words. The game box was designed in illustrator and game pieces or cards were printed images of 3D models I made in Maya and textured in Photoshop or Fireworks. I printed all the parts out and glued them to various cardboard bits for the final project.

Boat Progress and SIGGRAPH

Here are some images of the boat in progress. The bottom is on and we are doing the rails in these images.

I have decided to glass all of the seams just to add longevity to the hull, plus my joints aren't perfect.


Big news, I will be going to SIGGRAPH in LA next week and will post a ton of info from the conference here, when I get back.
Happy Boating

Post Script:
Here are a few WIP still shots from my latest Anim project.

Boat Building Underway.

We have begun the boat. You can see the finished boat image (what we are trying to acomplish) in the previous post. The first picture is Xander, Jules and Dad lofting her lines.




I've skipped a bit here but mostly just me swearing and remaking parts. We've got the basics tacked together. There are some distinct spatial difficulties to be encountered here, such as cutting the transom frames and translating the marks of a 2d drawing onto a 3d object, cutting and assembling the parts and realizing you have made two identical parts rather than mirror images as the actual boat would require. We have had to go back and re-make several pieces. But most of the difficult parts are done. Now what's left are the thwarts or seats as those unfamiliar with skiff-building lingo may know them as. The mast and boom might be a little tricky as well. So far we have put about 10 hours into it and expect about 20 more, before we paint and rig it.

"There is nothing so worth while as simply messing about in boats" (I'm sure I have miss quoted that phrase from Wind in the Willows)

For those who are interested here are some tech specs:
LOA = 12'
LAW = 11'
WO = 5'

Materials:
Essentially this has become a lumberyard skiff, since I don't live near a marine supply so gunwales are 1/4 mahogany ply, bottom and Transom is 3/8 pine ply, frames are pine and the thwarts will be red cedar. There is a smattering of white oak such as the stem and the keel.


I will continue to update this post as we go. We are so totally stoked by the progress and expect to see in in the water by the end of July.

nCloth and PFX, What to do with a magnolia, Boats

In the world of 3D modeling, animation etc., I made a discovery recently that I thought I should share. You can use Maya's Paint effects in conjunction with Maya's nCloth. I used it in this example to build a rude hammock. I built the geometry for the hammock as a polygon plane and turned it into an nCloth object. Once I had the evaluation behaving the way a hammock should, I made it live to add the PFX brush fiber>rope.



I see this new found marriage as a really cheap way to illustrate earthquakes and fiery lava flows with sparks, things of that nature, but it would be a good way to show living tissues with bronchioles or other nasty inner space visions too.

On a personal note, I cut down a beautiful Star Magnolia or Northern Magnolia today, shown below after flowering. It died of unknown causes over the course of a few years. I was really sad to see it go and I am mystified by its passing, so if anyone knows why a 60 year old Magnolia might up and die, please pass it along.



My son Xander and I have begun work on our father/son expedition boat, most likely to be named the Dawn Treader. She is a plywood sailing skiff and I will be posting a photographic log of our progress beginning with the next post. In that vein I have decided to add a new blog link section see Kick Ass Boat Blogs for more info.

Here is the boat we are building:

I screened the film "24 hours on craigslist" last night. I had really high hopes for this film and wish I could say it lived up to them, but it doesn't. As a huge craigslist advocate, it pains me to warn you away from the film.

And that's the Cold Hard Blog!

Chumby and Bug Art

Right, What the hell is a Chumby?

A few days ago I attended a fantastic and inspiring lecture on Bug Art. This could have gone anywhere since I, myself have created a load of sculptural and 2d art based on insects and once heard a story about a guy who pulled the wings off of thousands of beetles and pasted them inside of a box the end of which was to potrait some kind of beautiful artistic vision, I didn't get it. The Bug Art refered to in the lecture was a completely different sort art, one that I feel is extremely topical and worth exploring on many levels and with many of todays vast and imperfect digital tools.

Here is an abstract in the Author's own words:

An Argument for Bug Art

"For as long as artists have worked with computer-based tools, artists have had to contend with bugs. Typically these bugs are considered problems: when a piece of software doesn’t work as expected, there is a general rush to fix it. In this talk I will introduce Bug Art, a movement suggesting that these so-called broken pieces of code should be explored as novel and valuable art-making technologies before being hastily fixed and lost forever." (Perry & Sax 2008)

I don't want to spoil the mystery so that is all I will say but if you have any "bug" art you would like to share, Send it to me and I'll post it here, or send me a link and I will put the link in the 'Cool Ass Links to Hot Bug Art' section.

Next topic:
If you haven't seen it already, What are you waiting for? Of course I'm talking about Flight of the Conchords. The bad boys from NZ rocking it up on the big apple's grandest stages. OK here is a small taste if you live in a cave, which you obviously don't because you are reading the most obscure and pointless blog on the blogosphere.



Finally Chumby: A Whatsit full of widgets.

This info came from Wired magazine:
"The Chumby is a small, inexpensive, leather-clad Wi-Fi Internet appliance with a hackable operating system that has become a popular device with software and hardware hackers. "The key part of the Chumby's appeal is that it's an embedded-hardware device that's open," says Linux programmer Andrew Walton, a Chumby software hacker who moderates his own Chumby-hacking forum. "Everyone's used to open source software, but with open source hardware it's a whole new game. When you combine them both, Chumby hackers can literally do anything they want." The Chumby can deliver whatever channels of Internet-based content a user wants, and also comes with Adobe's Flash, enabling developers to construct their own widgets."(Gardiner, Bryan)

I can't decide if this piece of harware has any value in the home or not. Sure it delivers any web content you could think up to your bedside but c'mon do I really need to get the WWW delivered to my alarm clock? If you own a Chumby, please explain the value of one to me. Thanks. Find out more...

On a final note if you are running Maya 2008 and hate the view cube as I do, good news. I wrote a script that adds the former view compass functionality to a shelf, so you are always only 1 click away from switching from an orthographic to a persp view again. Download it here.

MFA Bound

I have taken the plunge. After a 13 year long pursuit of a BA, I have thrown in with the Academy of Art for an MFA in Animation-3D Modeling.

If you know me and thought I didn't have much time on my hands before, I still don't.

Neat website: The best of Craigslist

No, I'm not kidding. It seems, if you have a grudge against another human being, Craigslist is the place to vent your fury.

Note of interest:

The Five College Student Film Festival will be held on Friday,
February 29th at 7pm in Stoddard
Hall Auditorium at Smith College.

In other news, my professional life changed drastically when
my company outfitted me with a
3D Boxx 8400 Special Edition.
(16 cores running like antelopes and as much RAM as a
64bit machine can eat) Anyone need anything rendered ; )

Welcome to the cold hard blog

There I've done it. I said I wouldn't, but I went and started a blog. I don't know what will come of this. You might find some valuable info here soon. I will try to stick to 3D info, Maya tutorials etc. I will probably throw up some images occasionally too. If you have a blog and it is really awesome and has something to do with 3D graphics, FX or animation. Let me know. If you have a question and every other person told you it can't be done, what makes you think I can answer it? Post it anyway so I can feel stupid too.

Here is a picture of some recent 3D work.