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.