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Just put the finishing touches on one of the major props for my thesis, the SwitchComb! I might remove the noise on the handle though. Even though it looks neat it may add a realism that I’m not looking for. I found a really good tutorial on getting better metal shaders by using a fresnel Index of Refraction to gauge reflection instead of a straight ahead reflectivity curve. Check it out at http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/2007/10/making-better-metal-with-miamaterial.html. The Octopus I had actually made back when I made the balloon dog, just slipped up on throwing it up here.

Also made some progress on the skin shader for my directed study class. I added a texture to the arm and tried it out on a head mesh available for free from the Gnomon website by Alex Alvarez. Once smoothed it kind of looks like Goro from Mortal Kombat, haha. There are a lot of nice zbrush alphas available on there too, and this nice rock tutorial I used back when I was a level designer for HalfLife 2 mods, which is still useful for creating scenes.

The other piece of news is the creation of facial controls and blend shapes for the Zombie! About time! This was the part of the class I was most looking forward to. Parent space switching was pretty awesome too, though it was more about keeping the hands attached to different parts of the body and now I wonder how it can be used in conjunction with props. Next is hooking up the blend shapes and phonemes to the nurb controls.

That bottom version of the zombie has a green variant of the subsurface scattering material from the texture and lighting directed study class.

Hope everybody had a great thanksgiving, I know I did. Thank you to Ohio for all the Christmas Ale! Swoosh!

PS: http://www.freemayavideotutorials.com/??? How did I not know about this?

FRUIT BOWLLLLLL. Work in progress, need to texture the bananas, plums and cherries. Apple and pear already have textures and specularity maps, and the grapes have a subsurface scattering shader I’ve been tweaking with a scatter map on the front.

Part of my thesis project consists of animating a few balloon animals, and one of the guidlines of my project approval was that I found a way for the balloon animals to be animated realistically by exhibiting realistic lift and drag.