production chick

Came across a gun totting chick concept made for the PSP game Afterburner: Black Falcon. Obvious use of the the Charlie's Angels theme.

You can see more images HERE.

Use of a stock photo for reference is apparent, a common production shortcut.

new head profile

I squished the profile width wise. While building the side ortho it became very apparent the side head profile was way too wide. When I flattened the face, I should have also narrowed the entire head profile.

Final Fantasy VII

A friend recently pointed out the Final Fantasy VII cinematics on youtube. Square Soft seem to outdo themselves each release. Has a real Star Wars feel to it that I find appealing. Also has a strong romantic element to it that gives it an asian soap opera flair to it that might not be so palatable in the West. Part of the reason why IMO, the Final Fantasy franchise is not as big a hit here in North America. The following is just a few of the dozens of FMVs on Youtube. I've embedded the first one. I've also found an interesting but really short development video for FF VIII

The Attack of the Bahamut:

The Epilogue at the end: HERE

Fall of Bahamut: HERE

Battle with Gabranth: HERE

Intro: HERE

Narrow Escape: HERE

Final Fantasy VIII making of: HERE

nude orthos

side profile

Started the side profile. In the top image, I've line up the horizontal measurements and added the hair, yet I feel the side profile silhouette doesn't match the front view, too hawkish.

In the middle image I've flattened the face a little, reduced the slope of the forehead, softened the brow, reduced the size of the nose, reshaped the lips, pulled back the chin, packed a little more meat under the jaw and added another bang to her hair.

The bottom image is the finished head.

REFERENCE: suckerfish drop down menus

I spent the entire weekend losing sleep over the drop down menus for this blog. One can easily create drop downs using the 'select' html tag which produces a standard microsoft drop down widget. However, the actual look of the drop down is not controlled by the web browser, but by the OS, hence it's editable attributes are limited. One can use a java script to alter it's looks and behaviour, but that is just way too much overhead.

A few years back someone wrote a standards compliant drop down menu that doesn't rely on java and is entirely in css and dhtml. It's called the suckerfish drop down because their example page was about, um... suckerfish. These menus are built around html unordered lists. Since then, they've cleaned the code up in a version called 'son of suckerfish' and now have a more functional version called 'grandson of suckerfish' or 'sons of suckerfish' which adds additional functionality such as keyboard support.

Son of suckerfish tutorial: HERE

I came across an example suckerfish drop down written by John Labriola.

John Labriola suckerfish demo: HERE

I cut and pasted his sample code into my blog. It worked!

Here's where it got messy. I went in and mucked around trying get rid of the borders. What a mistake! Everything got broken. If I could get it working in IE, then Firefox didn't work and vice versa. To make a long story short, it wrecked an entire weekend. Finally I stripped everything out and pasted the orginal code back in.

To complicate matters, IE, is not standards compliant and on top of that, it's buggy. I encountered 2 problems with the suckerfish menus on IE. First, the menus don't work at all because of a mouse hover problem specific to IE. The remedy is a javascript patch job and the use of IE specific conditionals so that the script doesn't get in the way of the other browser types such as Firfox, Opera, Safari and to a lesser degree Netscape. These conditional statements were developed by Microsoft specifically for IE and are considered css hacks.

Second, when working, the drop downs get stuck and do not refresh on the mouse out event.

IE7 suckerfish fix: HERE

All in all a weekend in hell.

Tokyo Memories

I found these images on danny choo's site. An interesting otaku page.


The girl seems unperturbed by the fact that there is an Imperial Stormtrooper relaxing over a bowl of ramen next to her as if it were an everyday occurrence in Tokyo... or maybe it is... a vision of our distant future. Such absurdity.

On our trip, Nick and I would hang out at these small mom and pop soba-ya (noodle shop specializing in soba) at the end of each day. You put a few yen in the coin machine on the right, make a selection, out pops a ticket at the bottom, hand ticket to the guy behind the counter and in a few minutes you're enjoying a hot bowl of kitsune soba and an ice bottle of Kirin Malt. Typical Japanese inefficient efficiency. We'd lounge around pretending to be local bosozuko (thugs), but looking and dressing like the turistas that we really were. Such absurdity.


Just another 9-5 day. I don't look like I hate my job do I?... naaaah

TRANSFORMATION

A classic werewolf tale. By day a college co-ed at the prestigious St. Cuthbert's Catholic Seminary, by night a man-thing that hangs out at seedy gay/lesbian bars, likes to masturbate in public washrooms and excels at doing calculus in it's head. It's transformation involves growing chest, leg and arm hairs, thickened musculature and vocal chords and loss of hair on the head. This is beginning to sound more like a case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, ego versus id, or just an extreme case of split personality disorder.

REFERENCE: FRAG-12 fin stabilized shotgun shell

This thing looks like it came out of a Shirow comic.

An exciting new family of 12-gauge (12ga.) shotgun rounds on the U.S. military horizon to go with the AA12 Shotgun, and it's called the FRAG-12. There are three members of the FRAG-12 munition family: the FRAG-12 High Explosive (HE), FRAG-12 High Explosive Fragmenting Antipersonnel (HEFA, or HE-FA), and FRAG-12 High Explosive Armor-Piercing (HEAP, or HE-AP). This unique and exciting shotgun ammunition has been designed and developed by the Experimental Cartridge Company, Ltd. and Action Manufacturing Inc.

My Fav Commercial

Thought I'd try embedding a youtube vid. It just gets funnier every time I watch it. Ahh, those funny Asian people.

REFERENCE: M-32 MULTIPLE GRENADE LAUNCHER

6 shot 40mm grenade launcher, the M-32 is a modified Milkor MGL-140. It can put all 6 rounds on target in under 3 seconds, and can fire "normal" M433 40mm grenades or specialty rounds. Specialty rounds include HELLHOUND rounds with twice the lethal radius of the M433, which will breach doors and kill anything behind them; DRACO thermobaric rounds; and even HUNTIR rounds with cameras in them that descend on a parachute and send back video.

REFERENCE: HK 416

The Heckler and Koch 416. The AR15 chassis has become the de facto system for most western armies. However it's has major flaws, the biggest being problems with it's direct gas impingement system which requires constant cleaning and lubrication to prevent jamming. H&K rebuilt the Colt M4 carbine from scratch improving everything from it's gas system to more accurate and robust sights. Basically an M4 on steroids. The M4 fires using a system that redirects gas from the expended round to eject it and reload another. The 416 uses a gas-operated piston that physically pushes the bolt back to eject the round and load another. Carbon buildup from the M4's gas system has plagued the rifle for years, resulting in some close calls with Soldiers in combat whose rifles jammed at critical moments.
H&K claims the 416 now has the rugged dependability that was once the sole domain of the AK47. The 416 can be submerged in water and buried in sand and still fire reliably and even upside down. Water on most other weapons would cause the barrel to explode from the temperature differential, but the 416 is able to dissipate it's hot gases away from the barrel and reciever.

The 416 is currently deployed with Delta operators in Iraq, but due to political reasons is not being adopted by the rest of the Armed services.

REFERENCE: WALTHER OSP .22

On the topic of guns, the KRISS in the previous post reminded me a lot of the Walther OSP (Olympic Sharpshooters Pistol), another unconventional looking gun. While i don't care for the handle, I find the barrel and trigger grouping very appealing. I recently saw Tommy Lee Jones (the Riddler) wielding a chrome plated OSP in Batman 3: Batman Forever.

REFERENCE: TDI's KRISS SUBMACHINE GUN

Found some pics of the awesome KRISS submachine gun from TDI Inc. There has not been an evolutionary change like this in the submachine gun since the vintage WW2 M1A1 Thompson, 50 years ago. Firing the .45 APC round, the Thompson kicked like a mule and suffered from terrible muzzle rise. Since then submachine guns like the UZI and the MP5 have fired the smaller, less lethal 9mm parabellum. The KRISS has returned to the .45 round with very little recoil using it's patented Super V technology. Essentially, the recoil is deflected downwards mechanically. I've added a pic of the FN P90, a much older design for comparative purposes. The new aesthetic of gun design.

OLD OLD HEAD

Was digging through my archive recently and came across these pics of a child's head I started to model almost 10 years ago in Maya 1.0 when patch modelling was rather sketchy. Unfortunately my hard drive died soon after and all I have are these two low rez pics. Oh well.

Work related stuff

Was asked to put together a quick slide for the marketing boys upstairs. Autodesk is putting on a demo for some deep pocket institutional investors like Merill Lynch.

Smaller Eyes, Narrow Head

Revised the characters face, actually a hack of my original. I must have been on qualoids when I sketched that initial man looking thing cuz it looked pretty good at the time. Hopefully this one actually looks better... lol... ahem.

Reduced the size of the eyes and narrowed the head even more, the eyes are now considerably smaller than the original perspective sketch. I suspect that when modeled in 3D, the larger than life eyes will look even more pronounced than the 2D sketch. Nevertheless, the eyes are still abnormally large anthropomorphically. I also fixed the nose up around the bridge and widened the nostrils, fixed the hair and softened the jaw.

GEARS OF WAR CONCEPT ART

Here's a neat link to the concept art for Gears of War. Much of this art comes with the game but it's nice to see the artist posting decent digital images. While Gears is considered a landmark game on many levels, the only concepts that really appeal to me are the sniper rifle ans some of the vehicular design.

GEARS OF WAR CONCEPT ART

ORTHO

Scanned an old front and back view from way back. I have the side view too which I will post later.

As far as names go, I'm thinking of some kind of new age name as opposed to a traditional one. Just as Gwyneth Paltrow named her daughter Apple or other recognizable ones like Puffy or Blossom. Again it would better match her non-conformist personality.