Wow, it's cold out. And other irrelevant blog titles

It's the last day of term 2, and I'm excited and sad at the same time. I've finished the last assignment and updated my progress reel, which is this:

In retrospect I think the music is a tad obnoxious, but I have changes to make to it anyways like finessing the intro and properly rendering out all my assignments; but I can do that over the break. I also feel that ol' Betsy here is dying on me, it's official, my DVD drive crapped out, and she's approaching the end of her upgradability. She shall be missed when the time comes, tho I may keep her as a render mule. I feel as if my mind has been all over the place lately and slowly lamenting into insanity... of sorts. So many side projects for one, it's hard to stay focused, especially now when I really should. For example, I started messing around with SDKs for the first time, predominantly Half Life 2 Source and my personally beloved Orbiter. The former I've made more progress with writing and creating my own addon, but so much work left to do. In my nostalgic geekiness, I'm trying to create some nuclear-esque rockets from the Buck Rogers universe; being one of the coolest retro concepts ever! This photo shows my first attempt/test of different parameters and model importing.
That pathetic shadow on the landing pad of the Brighton Beach moonbase is telltale of success, believe it or not, because at first I was skeptical if I could even get that much to work. Ideally, come soon, I should be able to have a fully functionary nuclear rocketship that would behave ideally like that of Buck Rogers' Maelstrom Rider; complete with cockpit and animated controls. As far as the Source engine goes, I'm still learning the (sometimes) frustrating inner workings of the tools it comes with, but will hopefully be able to update my progress with that. The Julio project is partially slowed down due to some technical and personal issues, but should be back up at full force come the new year; Evidentally I still have many lessons to learn in rigging.

The latest of assignment nears completion and I'm feeling somewhat comfortable with it's progress. I have learned from many of the mistakes from the last assignment and thoroughly analyzed the process on this one from a new perspective. Here's a more updated version with an incomplete first pass splining; the latter half needs much work and looks extremely floaty, whilst the first half simply needs more polish. With this term almost over, I really look forward to next term.

My other project is progressing the animation blocking phase, this is a recent shader test and roughly blocked run cycle, just to see how things deform and what still needs tweaking, animation aside. As well, here is a vfx shot that I wanted to try to see if it was possible; it wasa great learning experience and generally a lot of fun, if not challenging.