Summer Update

So, I'm back from LA - I had a really good time and got the opportunity to go in to Disney Interactive Worlds which was very cool and pretty much how I imagined it to be; concept art and storyboards on the wall, loads of toys around people's work area and, yes, a Breakfast bar equipped with cereal and Starbucks coffee machines.  I was fortunate enough to sit in on some informal meetings between the staff as well as meeting the people I mentioned in a previous post that I'd been communicating via email with.  The best part was finally being in a working environment and getting a feel for the atmosphere.

Disneyland was another highlight, in particular the renewed Star Tours ride is absolutely fantastic; I got the Darth Vader - Boonta Eve - Coruscant combination which seems like one of the better ones.  I was fortunate that I went from 2pm to 10pm because it gave me the opportunity to see Disneyland's new World of Colors show and the fireworks above the Disney castle.  As well as that, I went up to Mammoth camping, saw a cheesy fourth of July parade and the fireworks at night, went on board the USS Iowa, saw some great sights from Griffith Observatory and ate some good burgers from In-N-Out and Five Guys.

So far this Summer I've completed three tutorial series': MAXScript 101, MAXScript Fundamentals 1 and MAXScript Fundamentals 2: MAXScript for the Masses and I'm just about to start MAXScript Advanced: Enter the Matrix.  The reason behind this overkill in learning MAXScript is that I want to push myself to the point where I can create rollouts, dialog boxes and macros which aid me when rigging; having the ability to rig is really good but you won't always have time to do all the repetitive tasks such as naming joints or creating and aligning every single controller object and this is where scripting comes in to play.  Hopefully I'll also have time to go over Paul Neale's Intermediate Rigging series which looks very good.

When I went down to GCU's open evening I was handed a flyer which had artwork on it created by previous students, one student that featured prominently was Lara Bendoris who created the excellent short film TIGERLILY as her masters dissertation, I emailed her to inquire about the course from a students point of view and she kindly replied and told me a bit about each semester, so now I know a little bit more of what to expect when I get down there.

Besides rigging I'm also casually looking in to modelling, so I downloaded some reference images of Hogarth from Iron Giant and had a shot at modelling his head, I probably spent about a day and a bit getting to where I am now, modelling around the eyes is quite annoying...  This is what I've got so far:

Until next time,
   -Harry