Tributaries

14°C, +

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Linseed: After a too-long interval,  the Sub-cutanious picture is back underway. I have sought out pictures and other images inbetween times so the idea is clearer in my mind. The skin has a decent body layer in oil, but there’s not much I can do while it’s still quite liquid. There is a high proportion of oil which means the surface is getting quite slippery. It needs( obviously) a day to dry off a bit if those veins are to look right. In the past it can be tricky to work on if it’s too dry since the next layer doesn’t want to adhere to it.

It’s a zebra officer

10°C

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Zebra :: crossings are a place that cars stop at so that people can cross life-threatenting roads. The cars stop when they can see a person standing waiting to get across. Most of them do it in response to a law that insists. Some don’t and I’ve ranted about this practice in the past, but today was quite astonishing. The car was all stripey, but not black & white like a zebra- more that police car way. The police driver wasn’t in a hurry to either get anywhere, nor in a hurry to stop.

 

Astonishing.

Unison

12°C, sun then rain

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Strike: that closed many schools, not ours though. It looks like a dispite that has valid points on both sides if reporting is to be believed. On the strikers hand- they are angry that in effect the promise that they will bea able to retire at 60 years if they have worked long enough is being withdrawn. On the other- as many parts of industry are rasing their retirement age to 70, there seems to be some resentment that the puplic sector is sustainting an early age in an era where people are living much longer. Private sector workers have even included that they, in effect produce the wealth that public sector workers earn through taxes.

Our school is barely affected by this action.

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Orange night: interesting evening; quite a stormy day, heavy rain and strong-ish winds but all is still now. Out with the dogs the sky is like a roof. Or at least like a ceiling, a very high one like a Cathederal. Clouds are clearly visible- lit up by sodium streetlights. There are dark lanes up there, where the clouds overlay the surrounding farmland. Then there are islands of light in the cloudbase, one above Burntwood town, another Whittington and Sutton Coldfield is there in the inverted map in the clouds.

Action- look down.

Rain @ 11°C

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Flash: Drawn a bloke’s head and animated some short movie-clips- one looking down, the other to look up.

the idea is to play the clips when the mouse rolls over defined areas of the stage. It should look as if the head is following the mouse. It’s possible to use actionshcript to make the head follow the mouse, but that doesn’t give controll over sub-animations as it moves.

If I can get this wqorking, then I can make the sub-animations in Poser. How neat would it be to have a poser character oin on-screen presentations. Eventually, I want to phase out PowerPoint in favour of Flash.

 

Wait! I never use Powerpoint anyway.

Hats off to that!

14°C <- for real!

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Exams: there are too many, everyone admits it, but maybe some change is on the horizon.

It’s not cold enough to wear a hat.

Spring has arrived

11°C, sun then rain.

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Turpentine: Didn’t bother posting yesterday’s picture- today’s shows some progress. Possible, I suppose because of the thought gone into it since. This is the last bit of turps underpainting, tomorrow? -linseed.

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Trackbacks: Now disabled here. It seems to be used by web-bots as a form of advertising; sneaky, sinister and now suspended. Deleted about twenty, which have appeared here at the rate of about 3 each hour over the last day. they link back to strange, badly designed websites full of almost unreadable text. I never knew what the idea was behind trackbacks anyway.

Blue Veins II

10°C, back to shirt weather. Rain–.

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turpentine: Added another layer of underpainting, just to add body ready for linseed. It doesn’t look and better so there will be no picture today. I’m adjusting the lighting in the picture so the right skin areas are clearly lit up.

 

Far Cry: openedn the saved level, but the trees have disappeared. It looks like a scripting error so I’m looking up Lua ( the scripting language) to see what’s wrong. In the meantime, Far Cry maps have seom excellent community made aps to try out for ideas. I really want to put one of my own models in the game though.

Sub-cutanious veins

5.6°C, bright .

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Weather might break tomorrow. It could be the end of this European dry-icy airmass we’ve had all winter.

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Turpentine: I did something different on this one. I painted in the under-sketches for the figure while the ground was still wet in places. What a fast way to start a picture, the blue effect in the top half wasn’t intentional- but I rather like it anyway. Like many of my drawings, things happen in phasess of low self-control that can be exploited later. Those features develop into something that wouldn’t have otherwise been done. That blue has melted upwards through the overpainted skin tone ( Ti white & raw sienna). Maybe I can build some shadow over there, perhaps from ahir of a hat. Several possibilities.

 

The issue that is planned goes like this: sub-cutanious veins are sometimes visible through that kind of milky translucent skin. The route I’m ging down with this picture is to create a young healthy face that has noticable veining. How it is forced to the surface by bone & muscle as well as the sub-surface scattering light effect is centrall. It shouldn’t be ugly though.

Chi-ha

6 to 2°C, cold NE wind

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Far Cry level now has some vegetation! Nevermind the fault with the ground texture, now I can place objects and am formulating a kind of plot for the mission. Trees bend in the breeze- and there’s a setting to make them flex more in the wind- this shows up on screen. not only that- there is a brush tool for "painting" various trees and other things onto the landscape. This is neat, shame we can’t have this in a 3D application like 3Ds max.

Sandboxing

6°C.light grey.

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Sandbox turns out to be a very capable and relatively easy to use game editor. The interface is remarkably 3dsMax-like. Here is a basic landscape and begun texturing it so far. Heightmap editor has excellent tools to work with rather like Sitni-sati Dreamscape 2. The height brush is especially neat- since it works in the perspective viewport (which incidentally is fully textured with an animated saea surface). Beat that!

It’s built in programming language is LUA– which I’m reliably told -is easy and light.

Make sure, if you get into this that youhave the most recent sandbox manual- the one supplied in the box is terrible.

In short- it’s a fully fledged 3d app, sold as a level editor but cost me only £5.99. It would be good enough to use at school, in some kind of after-school club except for  one thing: the game is rather violent.