Back in Action

Still need to get everything solved on my wordpress/website version. Not doing great at the moment, but it should be up in a few weeks. For now I am going to start posting a lot of stuff up over the next few days.

Just got word that my first PS2/PSP game for the Indian Market is gold. Good news indeed.

Tons of stuff happenin' here's the breakdown of what's cool:

3D: Silo/zBrush/Cinema4D.

Been spending time with a bunch of wildly different apps. Maya/Photoshop is still my Excalibur and Aegis, but I am starting to actually like modeling in Silo more, when it's time worry about cuts, edge loops and just make a fricken model it's so nice. Now I might have to dig into Modo because they do seem fairly similar, with the obvious exception of just how much more robust Modo. That said, I like the focus of Silo, I like that it knows what it's good at, it doesn't think it's an animation tool, it's not a renderer. You show up, you model, and it works great, DONE.

Now zBrush is still a bit of a mindfuck for me. It does everything, differently. zBrush is what happens when you turn the established paradigm on it's ear and what you left with is really something uncanny. Mudbox is what happens when you take that alien technology and try and adapt back to everything else. zBrush was clearly stolen from aliens. zBrush the modeling package is amazing, and I am kind of holding back waiting for 4.0 before I really dig in and start using it for finished work. But for now I understand Z-Spheres and a lot of the guts of so much better, I am getting used to sub objects and all of the other zaniness contained inside. I think once you have a Maya/Max/XSI/Mirai/Modo/Silo/Blender/Wings/etc./etc. background you expect your topology to stay nice and to work around it. ZBrush just kind of says, hey don't like it, more poly's you reto later, which can be pretty cool. Plus they have this new decimation feature which only further cements my feeling about the program. It took the team of scientists at Roswell New Mexico 50 years to figure out what they found in the desert. It's here. It's zBrush.

And in all of my other noodling, I started digging into Cinema. While most 3D apps were migrating from 100k work stations to increasingly powerful 2k Windows boxes and Distributed Linux render farms, the Mac just kept falling farther and farther behind. Despite some comparitively well executed and well supported apps in the 90's Electric Image and others it just seemed like things kind of fell behind. Cinema started it's life as a Ray Tracer for the Amiga. Each successive iteration though seemed to unleash something new, well executed and interesting. Now I am looking R11 and thinking to myself, why don't more apps work like this?

So let me break it down for you. Cinema I can safely say has one of the sexiest render and material systems I have seen. Yes you can probably still do more with Maya and Mental, but I am willing to wager that without half as much time and brain exploding you can just get better results with Cinema. I have been bouncing some models back and forth between Cinema and Maya and Cinema feels much faster, it's feel much more no-nonsense when it comes to results and in terms of AA and Color and lighting effects they just seem to feel nicer. I now know why there is all the commotion coming from the Motion-Graphics kids about this app. It's the dog's bullocks when it comes to rendering sexy output on the quick.

Next post: Art, I promise