Dorking around in Maya today
I should be working on the Climate Change exhibit today, but after discussing a role-playing game concept with my buddy Erik, I got all inspired to work on a concept piece instead. This is the ancestral home of the Chay-Nee People of the Apocalypse.
Modeled in Silo3D, textured and rendered in Maya, tweaked in Photoshop.
It’s been suggested that I include the text of this character concept so here ya go!
Kierie
She is a slight girl in her early twenties. Some Caucasian and Asian mixed with Pacific Islander and South American Native. Above average intelligence and an almost spooky way with animals – they trust her. Extremely lithe and physically fit but not very big, she sprint and jump out of harms way instead of bashing through it.
She comes from a bunker in the desert where her stratospherically wealthy ancestors, the Chay-Nee, stockpiled goods and renewable technologies against what they knew was coming. She doesn’t know this, but while they were not the architects of the apocalypse, they share a large amount of the blame for it.
The roof of this bunker has been open to the sky for the past 100 years since the automatic systems kicked on and let the People out. Until this “Awakening” moment, the People had been fed and housed by an automatic system of hydroponics and hidden vats of genetically modified growing muscle tissue. One year after the roof opened, all the systems shut down, throwing the People into a long period of chaos and then finally tribalism. They use the remnants of technology of the past in shamanistic ritual and have a meme of a “final use of technology” that will be used at the end of times.
She is armed. All of the People are hunters and farmers. Her weapons of choice are two short machete’s that she wear on the outside of each thigh.
While out hunting, a band of nomadic raiders found her hunting party. Seven of the People against thirty raiders, they killed the raiders and hung their carcasses in a circle around their camp. That night, while they slept, a thundering wind and bright lights came from the darkness. Everyone was killed but Kierie. She awakes in a strange forest, completely alone and has been wandering and hunting for two months – trying to find her way back to the Bunker.
Kierie
She is a slight girl in her early twenties. Some Caucasian and Asian mixed with Pacific Islander and South American Native. Above average intelligence and an almost spooky way with animals – they trust her. Extremely lithe and physically fit but not very big, she sprints and jumps out of harms way instead of bashing through it.
She comes from a bunker in the desert where her stratospherically wealthy ancestors, the Chay-Nee, stockpiled goods and renewable technologies against what they knew was coming. She doesn’t know this, but while they were not the architects of the apocalypse, they share a large amount of the blame for it.
The roof of this bunker has been open to the sky for the past 100 years since the automatic systems kicked on and let the People out. Until this “Awakening” moment, the People had been fed and housed by an automatic system of hydroponics and hidden vats of genetically modified growing muscle tissue. One year after the roof opened, all the systems shut down, throwing the People into a long period of chaos and then finally tribalism. They use the remnants of technology of the past in shamanistic ritual and have a meme of a “final use of technology” that will be used at the end of times.
She is armed. All of the People are hunters and farmers. Her weapons of choice are two short machete’s that she wear on the outside of each thigh.
While out hunting, a band of nomadic raiders found her hunting party. Seven of the People against thirty raiders, they killed the raiders and hung their carcasses in a circle around their camp. That night, while they slept, a thundering wind and bright lights came from the darkness. Everyone was killed but Kierie. She awakes in a strange forest, completely alone and has been wandering and hunting for two months – trying to find her way back to the Bunker.
Repo Men
Not a remake of the trippy 80’s cult film. Looks like a good ride film,… Jude Law as a muscleboy? Really?
A Paleontologists take on the critters of Pandora
Darren Naish, Tetrapod PHD fires off a really interesting scientists view of the creatures of the planet Pandora from James Cameron’s Avatar.
DayBreakers
Kenna and I went to see Daybreakers last night on a whim. If 70mm over-the-top blood explosions are your bag, this is the movie for you.
Directed by another Hollywood brother team, Michael and Peter Spierig, I got the feeling they watched Zombieland and the last Rambo movie a bunch of times before they shot this. I’m still unsure of whether they were attempting true horror or just going for the gross-out. Tons of “gotcha” moments where a bat flies by or something jumps out at you. So many, in fact, that by the ending bat fly-by with shriek, I didn’t even jump.
The makeup and creature VFX was done by Weta Workshop and was excellent but the post compositing of some of the outdoors shots and explosions by Postmodern in Sydney, AU looked pretty bad.
So unless you’re looking for in-your-face spatter on the big screen, you can probably wait for the DVD.
Microblogging as Crack
My buddy Erik has a witty and thought-provoking blog post about the drug-like phenomenon of microblogging.
I’m posting it on Twitter and Tumblr… 
Helpful things to know…
Two very helpful pieces of info that I learned in the past 24 hours:
- Western Digital drives are preformatted with NTFS. In order to install them on an Airport Extreme, you must first reformat them so they are writable by your mac clients. Use Journaled (Extended).
- A side note: Time Machine actually WILL work on the airport shared drive.
- In Autodesk Maya, if you want to load an image sequence, you need to insure that it’s naming convention follows this rule: [filename].####.[extension]
- If you use a standard naming convention like [filename]_####.[extension], it will pretend to work but give errors like:
//"Warning: Texture file /Volumes/AQCC/video/act04Tiff/act04_00000.tif doesn't exist, node file1 //
-
- This is arcane knowledge that took me hours to figure out. Use it wisely.
- An appropriate filename example would be: “act04.0003.tif“
Avatar Designers Interview
A really excellent interview with several of the concept designers for James Cameron’s new Avatar. Super cool to see that Wayne Barlowe was on the team!
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