Where have I been this year???

Well...

Life just seems to get busier and busier. I've spent the year doing music mostly. Tapping into my love for guitar. I've been learning online at the following sites.

http://www.riffninja.com
http://www.guitarjamz.com
http://guitarzoom.com

Here's a couple of tracks I've put down over the last few weeks. Just demo quality. Learning about home studio recording while I'm at it ;)

PT785-S Pan and Tilt System + Arduino

I bought one of these a little while ago and finally got around to testing it with an arduino. This system isn't accurate enough for real-time repeatable motion control photography IMO. I'm planning on using it for capuring sphereical longitude/latitude HDRI's.

You can find the product here:
servocity.com/html/pt785-s_pan___tilt_system.html

mia_materal_x maya linear workflow

So I have been doing a bit of research on Maya's "off the shelf" colour management tools. Things have come a long way in the last two versions of maya in this area.

One nice find is that there is now the ability to load display luts in maya's render view window. This makes mental ray fit nicely into our colour pipeline at RSP pretty much out of the box! Of course we are manly a 3delight/Mantra house. But occasionally Mental Ray can be of use too.

Here is a render of a Moom character using the mia_passes_x material. This image is in sRGB colour space to look right in the browser, but maya can output the raw linear image as well for use in composoting packages such as nuke. This image has two Area Lights (Quadratic Falloff) and FG switched on for some secondary bounce lighting.

Sub-Surface Scattering

Some renders of a dragon head I did for a lighting class I taught recently. I was thinking about doing a 3D print of this head, not sure if I would need to make it into seperate parts to maximise the resolution of the print?

2012 Show Reel

I'm mostly a lighter these days but I have been know take on

the role of a generalist from time to time :)

Tonight's Hack Session!

You can read about it here! 

My First PCB Design (Part 1)

I've been playing around with a rotary encoder I bought from sparkfun.The pins wouldn't fit in a breadboard and I got sick of spaghetti wires everywhere.

So I asked my local hacker space about PCB etching. I decided to give Iron On Transparency Sheets a go. But I got half way through buying the bit's I needed and then came across this site. I'd already done some Eagle Cad Tutorials to create my circuit for the Iron On sheets. So I looked at how cheap I could do a PCB run with the design I already had. It turns out Very Cheap! About $14 AUS for 10 pcs including shipping. I literally can't make them myself for that much so I thought why not give it ago!?

This is my first design.

The boards should arrive in a couple of days. I'll do another post when they arrive.

Here's a link to Part 2 of this post.

AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE NOW! visit my ImMojo Store