A tiki in a classic "Man in the Moon' crescent. I've never seen another. Could this be the first?
In spite of the hanging wires and irregular seams the image is completely computer-generated. The lighting approximates 'Rembrandt portrait lighting' and the fill is accomplished with a white off camerabounce card thanks to the radiosity of the Maxwell Renderer.
Hello Joe its good to see digital artform return from the grave. Nosiness has overcome good sense and I have to ask you - what happened? There you were turning out great entries, increasingly dominated by attractive girls, you seemed to have forgotten about your Maxwell renderer plans. Then one day all the nipples disappeared and suddenly you were gone. Were you in prison? Was it something to do with the nipples?
lol
The nipples, and the Maxwell, are both back on track.
http://www.digitalartform.com/archives/2009/03/nothing_is_real.html
[non-pasties version with better skin tone here]
http://www.digitalartform.com/assets/Apnea_Knives_nsfw_v06.jpg
It's a combination of things.
One thing is the blog 'broke.' I don't know why. I don't know much about CSS or blogs, but I was sick of purging spam from the comments and trackbacks so I let it stay broken while I considered better anti-spam options. That's why it jumped from some ancient version of Movable Type to the latest version in one jump. I finally upgraded it. (Not that hard after all)
Another thing is my employment went through a lot of changes. Sometimes I was working and too busy to blog. Sometimes I was out of work and too busy looking for work to blog.
Another thing was I needed to take some time and try to get better at photography. I've done so much CG lighting in my life that I thought real lighting would be easy. But unless the CG is Maxwell or Mental Ray or something similar, the differences are actually handicaps in the real world. In Maya, for example, I almost never let the lights fall off 'inverse square' - it's inconvenient. In real photography the 'depth of light' is an oft-used tool. In plain vanilla Maya you have to add a second light for fill light. In real photography you often bounce the key light off an off-camera white card.
Finally - and this means no disrespect to anyone who reads this - this blog really is my 'notebook.' It largely follows what I'm doing at the moment. For example - the recent post on how to solo a layer in Photoshop may seem very basic, but I just learned it a month earlier. My wife, who has been doing Photoshop for years, didn't know it. We both had been laboriously switching eyeballs on and off without the alt-key. So I figured it was worth a mention. On the other hand, some of my posts are complex enough that I myself forget the details, and use this blog as a place to keep the information so I can refresh my own memory if I need to. Hue falloff in Maya lights would be an example: http://www.digitalartform.com/archives/2005/08/hue_falloff_in.html or my most MySpace-hotlinked image, the Wave-generating MEL script: http://www.digitalartform.com/archives/2005/07/wave_generating_1.html
True story: This blog was started because I was tired of explaining to wave after wave of people under my employ in CG departments how to deal with pre- and non-premultiplied alpha compositing. More and more people know a lot of this stuff now.
In the 80's and early 90's at certain places sticky UV camera projection (or simple non-sticky camera projection for 3D matte paintings) was a state secret. Today I see example after example of it on vimeo and youtube created by precocious high school students.
Ok, you want the real story?
I was in Tijuana with three fetish models this whole time and only just now came up for air.
:D
Also, here is something interesting:
Most people don't see these posts on the front page. They Google them up out of obscurity - they catch them in 'the long tail,' as they say.
So even 'dead,' this site was getting a good 1500 visits a day.
Yes I started on that long tail with some maya related search and hung around. I find your blog strangely compulsive and often use it to avoid getting on with my own work. Its more than the sum of its parts.
Thank you very much, and I'm glad you found this page again after yesterday.
I had a hard time finding it, myself, until I figured out that when I restarted the blog, I switched from an underscore _ URL naming convention to a hyphen - one, and managed to create two parallel universe blogs: one that you see if you arrive through old Google-indexed pages, and one you see if you navigate through the blog itself.
And one version has new comments and updates, and the other has old comments.
I guess I should switch to the old convention again before I make too many more new pages.