First off, for the aspiring visual effects artist there was a great live podcast of geekza this week featuring Teague ‘Fig’ Chrystie (of Zoic) and Ryan Wieber (of Stargate Digital) which you can check out the recording of at Geekza.com. Yours truly was in the chat room, as was upcoming guest speaker Nate Caauwe (TBA), and good times was had by all. This is a really interesting episode i highly recommend you guys go check it out; it contains all sorts of goodies about getting into the industry, vfx, payment, freelance work and so on.



Secondly, sorry about the lack of posting for a while, i’ve been working hard on new and upcoming projects. If you happen to be at Universal Studios in Hollywood in the coming days, you might just stumble upon my Rain Over Water animation. I’ve got some guest speakers lined up for the site which should be really interesting, and a surprise guest tutorialist (yes, that is a word) with something you guys will definitely like.



Myself i’ve been working on a new site which will hopefully launch in a couple of months that you guys will be hearing all about, and also working on some really cool 3D stuff. I’m still thinking of ways i can turn some of this stuff into tutorials, but mostly i’m holding back at the moment because i’d rather make sure i’ve covered all the ground i can before i dive in and try and tell you guys how to do it.

And now for the java version. My personal favourite (since i’ve worked so hard on the damned thing to get it where it is). Unfortunately, it’s quickly becoming apparent that this will be unviable for my future plans (or at least, what i’d planned it for). Which is a shame since it’s got great potential, especially to build upon. So check it out, you’ll need java installed, but apart from that it’ll load slow the first time as the initial openGL libs are downloaded. Subsequent loads should be faster, and you can follow the on-screen instructions for how to use.


As you can see, this is a lot more versatile and dynamic, so it’s pretty unfortunate i’ll probably not be able to employ it in what it was originally designed for. Although, it actually has a hand in the process of creating the quicktime version, so it’s always going to be useful. Anyway, check them out and tell me your thoughts - which is better; did it work; did it not work; did it blow up your computer, etc.

Hello party people. Today i’m releasing a look into two sides of one coin that i’ve been working hard on for a while now. First up, we’re taking a look at a quicktime virtual reality of part of the Firefly model i’m working on that you guys can check out. You’ll need the quicktime plugin installed to view this, so click on the image and let me know what you think. You can click and drag to rotate around.


This isn’t as dynamic as the Java version, but it’s a lot more portable since the Java requires getting non-standard openGL libraries to your computer on the fly which is tricky, and it’s also fairly clunky. Unfortunately the QTVR approach is limited and this particular VR only lets you pan horizontally - i could have rendered out some more pictures for vertical pan, but not on this occasion. Anyways, let me know what you think of it. I’ll probably be employing this in a new site i’m working on which i’ve been hinting about for a few months now.

The TFn LCCV6 results are online and available for downloading and voting. For those who don’t know, every so often at theforce.net a choreography competition is held and this year’s competition has just past the hand-in stage and into the voting stage, so check it out. Personally, my favourites lie with Ryan Wieber/Brandon Flyte’s entry and Whiteley’s.