FAIL.

My computer is a pain in the arse! I've woken up today in a sprightly mood getting straight down to business and back into Maya. I have been continuing with the next stage of experimentation, which is lighting, only to find that when I render the scene with lights and any complexity added to them, my stone-age computer just flat out FAILS.

So now, unfortunately I'm at a bit of blockade until I get back to university where they have iron-age computers; better, but not great.

Moped Update

I've been bowling all day, literally 20 games. And I won incase you're interested. However that does mean I've done no work all day. So, feeling guilty, I have just spent an hour or so experimenting with materials in maya for my moped model. It's coming together nicely seeing as I havn't been using the software for a week yet.

The material editor isn't as easy on the eye's as Max's, on the other hand it has some features that I really like such as Projection Mapping for bitmaps. It makes mapping bitmaps onto simple surfaces very quick and effective, I used it for the lights and license plate.

NURBS!

Over the past 3 or 4 days I have been getting to grips with Maya for the first time. I've got to admit, finding where to start was the hardest part as the interface is huge. But now that I know what I'm doing, it just seems to be a much fancier version of Max.

Of course with maya comes NURBS modelling, so I thought I would give it a shot. NURBS are beautiful. They are so easy to manipulate and have so many ways of doing so. I have modelled a very basic moped, just so I can learn how to use them. I will be adding to the model as much as I can as I learn more about this type of modelling and get better.

Here it so far (I still don't quite know how to get full wireframe on NURBS, so there is just the outlines):

And incase you're wondering, NURBS means Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline. The 'B' is for Basis.

Goodbye Switchtake!

As is seemingly tradition, I have yet another new blog for yet another new year, this one however I will be sticking to.

The fact is I have outgrown tagging myself as 'EhGoonieGooGoo' or 'Switchtake'. Obviously they remain, however my blog is not the place for them. I have imported all of the posts from the previous Switchtake Blog, the ones from EhGoonieGooGoo really aren't worth saving.

So what can you expect with the new blog? Well I no longer live by the "I just don't have enough time to keep it updated!" system.. So regular updates are about all I can promise to you many (few) readers.

Also I realise just how bare the gap from June to September is, and numerous factors have their part to play. Mainly not having a computer.