It’s been a long time coming but a post is here!

I’ve been extremely lax in posting as of late, lots happening both personal and work releated .. kind of .. I guess.

But I’m trying to sort all that out, feeling a bit of a rush of excitement and inspiration and i’m starting to find my feet in life again and it feels good.

My x-box died, epic fail, so thankfully I have managed to afford to sort myself out with a new one and it arrived this morning with a spangly copy of Mass Effect 2 in tow! I really am looking forward to sinking my teeth into it and i’m pretty glad I dont have to worry about copying it to my HDD due to having a shit disc drive. The curses of a 4 year old console I support.

I’m especially slacking on the Blender side of things, lack of inspiration and TF2 being the main problem, I totted up that I have put around 140 hours into that game in around 2 years, it doesnt sound like a lot but it looks like a lot and certainly feels like time I could have spent better elsewhere. But then if i’m enjoying myself then why not ?

Still loving my iPhone, the versatility of it an pure ease of use make using it a dream, i’m constantly worried about it running out of battery of the battery just falling over but damn im getting some awesome use out of it. I’ve never been on facebook so much!

Been working on this for a few nights.

Been making it to hopefully go forward as my addition to the community wallpaper being put together, and I’m not sure if I should make it 3D or not ….

I think I should probably go ask… but in the mean time I might play some TF2, so very .. very addicted

A few weeks of slacking and its amazingly difficult to get back on track and motivated to start working again.

I blame the good food and way too much general slacking, but tonight has been a good one and I have managed to fit in a few hours of blender while watching the now fall outside.

And I would like to present tim 2.0!

I haven’t done a great deal to his actual body other than give it a bit of a new texture and smooth it out some, the new shield and the new sword however are completely … well… new!

Pretty happy with how it has come out and I can feel the excitement coming back about building and making things again which is always positive. There is however always that little thing in the back of your head that says … “I should be killing things in TF2 right now”

Which I think is what I’m gonna do

Huzzah!

To say i’m enjoying getting into this 3D lark would be an understatement…

This is the testing intro for what I hope to be a full re-rendition of November Rain by Guns’n'Roses but with goblins!

I will be amazed if I ever finish it but hey …. stranger things have happened!

Also I finished Dragon Age .. I keep meaning to write about it but I don’t think I can do its justice to how much I fucking enjoyed that game, want more plz!

I have been working on this for a few days now.

But after numerous failures at sorting out the rigging and a problem with the weight painting its finally at a usable state!

He is a fully working rig at the moment, without getting into vector morphing for the mouth. I guess that’s the next thing but I’m trying not to go at it too hard.

I think I will work on that another day, it should work fine as I have left plenty of vectors to play with around the mouth, just hoping it works OK!

Things I want him to be able to do is :

• Talk
• Move
• Ears to wiggle
• Jaw to move

That probably covers it but it certainly needs some refinement, but considering the stuff I was doing a little over a month ago I’m pleased with my progress!

Oh and I certainly want to refine the texture… *shudder*

Well impressed with this :

Probably took me around 2 hours or so, which to be honest considering how long I’ve actually been doing this for I’m pretty pleased with.

It’s really the first high rez model I have ever done and I’m happy with how it has come out, I need to mess with some settings for the background and continue to tweak the reflection and lighting but all in all, well chuffed!

Tonight was mess around with particles night .. would have been much more productive if I could have found an up to date candle tutorial but oh well!

Quite happy with the evenings work, even if I did loose 30 minutes worth of sword creation bah oh well, one for another night!

This took chuffing ages to render ..

Quite please how it came out despite the walking animation being completely “floaty”

I’ve actually been getting on quite well with the ol Blender learning.

While I know my work methods might not be very good and I’m probably not doing loads of things right but it seems to be working .

I just finished up doing this :

I think once I am happy with the character I can go ahead and see how he looks animated, bit worried however as the character is so basic that he’s going to suffer from dodgy bends and things.

We shall see however, I’m pretty excited to see him with his sword and swinging it about

I hate not being productive…. I hate watching TV, unless it makes me laugh … I don’t even really enjoy watching films again unless they make me laugh or appeal to my inner geek.

Whenever I spend an evening and generally waste it I feel really shit, like I have done exactly that and wasted an evening of a short life I will never get back. I’m constantly trying to learn new things, be it HTML, Programming, Photoshop, Japanese to name a few but I always start and never really get anywhere.

Recently I have really got stuck in to learning blender. Blender is a freeware 3D app that is pretty damn powerful, it has a built in game engine and is completely community ran, if you search around you can find some impressive bits of work done with it.

As I’m sure I may have mentioned, my attention span is atrocious. But I seem to be sticking at Blender.

I find that I can stick some music on and sit down for a couple of hours and really work at something. Tonight was a bit of a large step in the right direction for me as I finally got my head around UV Mapping (skinning /texture). I have so many ideas and being able to do this has put me one step closer to my goal, so in all its glory meet TIM!

OK so its a start