I wanted to make something a bit more “edgy”. At least in the sense of style. The girl is something I had in mind for a while. She’s a bit punk with some goth undertones. The bat she holds is carved with runes that hold some kind of power.

The beast coming in the window is a large (and expensive) model that rendered great. I really like the scene and can only imagine what the rest of this situation would look like if animated.

It took me a couple days and a whole weekend to put it all together. The girl and the room taking the longest. The girls shirt, skirt and jacket were all re-textured. The room had a good amount of re-texturing too like the bed sheet and the added posters. The lights took a good two days to work on. Each test render taking 30mins plus.

In the end I think it came out pretty nice.

There is no postwork here (editing) this is a straight render from Poser (minus cropping and logo).

Full Size Version

I was inspired by the recent Secret World CG intro and had wanted to see how realistic I could get with Poser.

It took about 4 days to put together. The hardest part was the lighting, but that seems to be a constant issue with me. Even still I think it came out rather cool.

There is no postwork here (editing) this is a straight render from Poser (minus cropping and logo). If I ever do get the chance to make an online comic with this program I hope this shows the kind of quality that could be achieved.

Full Size Version

Here is an image I worked on over the last 5 days done in Poser. This is a straight render with no postwork. I just wanted to test out an idea of how a group of teen witches would look. I also played around with Depth of Field. There are 8 lights in the scene and it took about 3 hours to render.

I think it turned out pretty good. I know I worked on it for a long time. You’ll notice the girl on the left is the same as the one from the top of this site (in different clothes). She’s becoming a favorite of mine as far as Poser characters go.

Full Size Version

Due to a little unexpected transaction I was able to finally get an HD LCD TV. This is a 40″ 1080p Sony Bravia. It’s a beautiful screen and when playing SD content it is exactly the same size as my old 32″ Sony (with the black bars on the sides).

Don’t get too jealous though (if at all). HD content is really thin right now. My DVDs and TV shows look pretty crappy. Like over-compressed JPGs. My 2 Blu-ray movies are not enough. Also HD is hit or miss. Some looks great… some looks grainy. I think it’s due to filters or compression type. With older movies you can actually see the film grain. Luckily there is a sharpness setting on the TV. Then there is the fact that not all HD content is 1080p. A lot of it is 720p, which is not bad looking but it’s not taking full advantage of the TV’s native resolution.

Right now I’m enjoying my PS3 and XBox 360 games. All XBox 360 games that I have and seen are 1080p but the PS3 is hit or miss. Many PS3 games are only 720p (shame on Sony). Luckily my more favorite games on the PS3 like GTA 4 and Midnight Club (both Rockstar games) are 1080p. I’ve also been playing a lot of Fable 2 on the XBox 360.

At some point (when I’m not dirt broke) I want to get the wire to connect my computer to this screen. Playing my PC games on there would be really sweet. My computer already plays games at 1920×1200 with full settings thanks to my SLI video cards. So 1080p will be no problem.

Anyway… back to work… (poor)

~gp~

Yet another year has passed by. This blog has become more of a recap of the year past than an un-to-date log.

In the last several months a couple things have happen. More notable is my “sell-out” obsession with Poser, my father going to the hospital for gallbladder surgery, WotLK (WoW) taking over my life and then burning out on it and reading several vampire books. On the creative front, WirePop is still trucking along. I’ve added a couple new titles over the year and some old friend left the site. I still have yet to start a new comic of my own. Not for lack of trying.

So what is there to look forward to this year? Well, this new site design should show that I’m up for something new. It’s a lot different than my usual style. I still would like to start a new comic, but coming up with a story I like has just not happened yet. I would love to make a story with the girl that now dons this site.

There are a lot of good games coming out this year. Aion is on the top of my list as you can probably tell from my last post. There are also a couple good movies like the new Star Trek film too.

So let’s see if THIS year I actually start a project of some entertaining value… If not, I’ll see you year in 2010. XP

~gp~

Here is a video I made of Aion: The Tower of Eternity. For those that don’t know it is a Korean MMO that will be released to the NA/EU market this year. The video is a visual glance of the first several level as an Elyos Mage on the Korean game client. Be sure to check it out in high quiality.

~gp

I’ve spent the last several weeks playing with 3D and here is one of the results. I get so absorbed in 3D that I don’t realize the time passing. I suppose that’s a good thing.

This is an image of a Blood Elf character I play in WoW. It was just for fun. I think it’s pretty decent, but the hair is a little, meh. Hair is really hard to do in 3D. I tried several ideas, but this was the easiest to deal with. Texturing hair it is a whole battle in itself.

This was modeled in Lightwave and textured/rendered in Softimage XSI. I really love the Mental Ray renderer, especially with SSS.

I added this image to the gallery page.

I have also been working on the character I posted last year. She has clothes now! ;P

~gp~

Well I had my amazing Mac Pro for a year now and it seemed it was time to go back to the PC world. Okay, well there were several reasons for this. I didn’t just wake up and decide to blow tons of money on a new machine. That said, though, I wanted to build a great gaming computer and still be able to do all the graphic work that I do.

For the geeks out there this is what my new machine contains (pictures below).

- 3.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
- 2 Gigs DDR3 1333 MHz Corsair Ram
- XFX 790i Ultra Nvidia Motherboard
- 2x XFX 8800 GTS Alpha Dog Edition XXX (G92) w/ 512 MB DDR3 Ram (SLI)
- Samsung 24 inch Widescreen (16:10) LCD (1920×1200)
- Windows Vista Ultimate (32-Bit)
- 750Watt PC Power & Cooling PSU
- Zalman 9500 CPU Cooler
- Microsoft Wireless (Bluetooth) Entertainment Desktop 7000 Keyboard / Mouse

GEEKGASM!

This should keep me going for a while.

2007 is over already? Where was I? Talk about going by fast. I feel like I haven’t accomplished anything. I’ve mostly jumped around from project idea to project idea, 3d program to 3d program, MMO to MMO and quietly managed WirePop. I haven’t really done anything new.

I think I’m in a creative slump and don’t even know it yet. It used to be that I had ideas for stories and projects that I couldn’t wait to get out there. Now every idea I come up with feels like it’s been done before. I go from one day thinking of something cute and fun to the next day thinking about something dark and gritty. I have a folder on my computer full of random story ideas and yet none seem to really do it for me.

Right now I’m still on my 3d animation kick, but the truth is all I’ve done so far is jump around playing with many 3d apps trying to pick one I like to move forward with. I think the fact is that I’ve falling so out of the loop that even Lightwave, my old go-to 3d app, feels foreign to me. I’m almost starting from scratch. On top of that when I was at the top of my 3d game I was mostly good at modeling. I have little experience in the actual animation department.

Not to long ago I bought a digital training kit on character animation in Softimage. I think I should start the year by sitting down and actually going through the lessons.

As for a story… I don’t know when that will come to me.

I’d like to actually get somewhere this year. Especially somewhere towards 3d animation. When January 09 hits I hope to look back at this and not wonder where the year went again.

~gp~

So I’m still toying with the idea of getting back into 3D animation. While going through my old files and moving them to the new hard drive I found some really old 3D work of mine from back in 1998. Wow, was is horrible. I wonder if I kept at it instead of stopping to pursue my web career where would I be now?

Right now I’m trying to figure out what exactly I want to do. Just stating that I want to do character animation is not enough. I’m still not even sure what 3D program I want to use. Chances are, right now, that it will be Lightwave. Mostly because I know how to model in it fairly well. They also just recently released the Universal Binary version. So that should run nice on my Intel Mac. Of course I need $400 to get the upgrade, but that’s better then $1000s for, say, Maya.

I’ve been looking around the net for some inspiration. Something that I like and I feel that I could potentially actually do. So far all I found was this animation. It was done in Japan on Animation Master. I’m not sure how I feel about the cel-shaded look. But it does lend itself to the style. The point, though, is that the animation isn’t really hard. No running, jumping or battle scenes. Just a lot of talking. That begs the question, though, what kind of story could you do like that? Would anyone really care to watch it?

Of course beyond that there is also the whole thing of music, sound effects and voice overs. It’s a lot of work and I sometimes wonder “do I really want to do this?”. Thing is, I can’t stop thinking about it. So I guess I’ll just see where it goes.